skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I did independent IT consulting, I had a client with a home in Florida and an office in Pennsylvania. He purchased a very nice high-def Polycom unit for both locations so he could work from his office in Florida. It was a nice setup that would make any remote worker jealous, with all the pan/tilt/zoom you could dream of and quality that was out of this world.

My first visit was to solve a problem with the conferencing system. He could see his office, but couldn't hear them. The problem ended up being an input issue on his TV, not the Polycom itself, but in the process, I discovered something horrifying. Both his unit and the one in PA were configured to auto-accept incoming IP calls. He regularly kept the television turned off at his home office, so if someone connected to his Polycom, the only evidence would be the lights.

A quick inspection of the network revealed that there was no firewall. His PC connected to a VPN, but the Polycom was open on the internet. When I asked him how he was protected from a random person connecting to his Polycom, he said "No one else knows the IP address." As if it were some kind of password. I accidentally laughed out loud in one of those awkward moments where you immediately realize that laughing was the inappropriate response. I explained that attackers constantly scan IP ranges just looking for devices to exploit.

He, of course, had me disable the auto-answer feature immediately, but wouldn't go the extra step of setting up a firewall between his office and PA. I was flatly appalled that a Polycom integrator would install a unit on an internet facing IP with auto-answer turned on.
"the 'we can always steal it' must be at the back of all negotiations."

With all due respect, this is a big and mostly incorrect leap. If intellectual theft happens in Hollywood, it's typically an exception and not, as you're implying, a general rule. It certainly isn't something studio execs keep in the back of their minds as part of the development process. That's outlandish.

Most studios are extremely frightened of litigation over this very topic. So much so, that when I worked at a TV studio buying scripts, I was not even allowed to open any unsolicited material sent my way. If someone sent me a package, and I didn't recognize the return address, I sent it off to legal, to be returned unopened. About 99% of the scripts and ideas I was pitched came about in meetings with agencies and/or producers, who were also bringing the same material to all of my competitors.

The behaviors you're ascribing to studios seem to be occurring at the producer level. There's a high variance of ethical and professional conduct among production companies and producers, in as much as they're not public companies like the big studios and networks are. They don't have a set rulebook. Most of the more established producers are unlikely to steal material, because it's a terrible long-term business strategy (a producer's reputation is his meal ticket). That said, are there some shady folks on the fringes of the business? Yes. Anyone who says otherwise is being willfully naive. But the idea that people at studios actually calculate theft into their buying or development strategies is patently absurd.

"What stops the other studio from farming out the 'high concept' to someone else to write an also ran."

Three things stopped me from doing that, and stopped my peers from doing that:

1) Personal and professional integrity.

2) Relationships and reputation. (Hollywood is an extremely relationship-driven business. As a development executive, I was worth approximately nothing; what made me relevant to my employers was my network of writers, agents, and producers I could bring to bear for projects. Burning any of these people would have been career suicide).

3) Fear of litigation.

In that order.
True that, sorry for being blind.

Nonetheless, people upvoting my comment probably shows that many people missed that.
That's why I phrased it exactly like that. :)

I would imagine (yes, I'm speculating) that the control panel uses a standard OS interface to enumerate audio devices, and when the internal microphone drops off the list in the dialog, that reflects the fact the OS isn't offering it anymore. So an app asking the OS to enumerate audio devices would not find the internal microphone.

It's always possible that there's a lower-level hack to get around that, but then that's always been a concern.

By the way, I forgot to mention that when I turn my input level down to zero, the little blue bars stop showing any signal. The blog post is about 10.6 (Snow Leopard), as mentioned below the Control Panel snapshot. Maybe this is all fixed in 10.7 (Lion)?
They are tied together because of fundraising. American universities raise a lot of funds through alumni donations. Sports programs provide a mechanism for alumni to continue to feel connected to their alma mater, which increases the likelihood of alumni donations.
Yes, true. The urge to get user validation was too much.. besides, I can always email the list again in a few weeks to let them know of fixes and enhancements. Like a 'we listened to you and here's what we did... ' email
No.

Government is force. Airlines, like most businesses, are subject to market forces. If Delta said "we have to search the data on your computer before you can fly", you can choose not to fly. Someone would have a strong incentive to provide a mode of travel that did not involve laptop searches.

I didn't say "no government". I said "small government". There's a difference. You need the force of government to protect property rights, and to enforce contracts, for example.
Great suggestion! Will do today..
The data at my college shows that students who get an A or B in a math class have a very high probability of passing the next math class. Students who get a C in a math class have a much lower probability of passing the next math class.

I think that at some level an A or B indicates something related to knowledge and capabilities. My personal experience is that tests are an effective method of determining who should proceed and who should not. It's not fair to other students and teachers if a student takes Calc II without knowing Calc I. Some mechanism is needed to weed out those who shouldn't move on.

Lectures do work. They have been working for hundreds of years. This isn't an appeal to tradition. This is a statement about evidence that they work. Lectures work so effectively that people want to put them online so anyone can watch them.

But guess what happens with students in online classes? My anecdotal experience is that they won't watch the lectures. They won't sit through a 20 minute lecture on how to solve quadratic equations. (Except a core group of good students.) The passing rate of students in online math courses at my college is lower than for the face-to-face courses.
Agreed, I would also urge the author to look for more accredited sources to fuel his infosec paranoia than GQ magazine. David Kusher certainly earned his pay that month.
Isn't this a Google version of Hive, which was open sourced by Facebook and provides an SQL style syntax to Hadoop. Queries aren't quick, it just allows offline data crunching to be coded quickly with out users having to code lots of map reduce. Cool concept but dont expect to see the online part of web apps powered by this.
What happened to "No taxation without representation"?

This would skew the government even more towards rewarding the rich - increasing the size of the government-as-a-service market is a step in the wrong direction.
Excellent idea!

Consider adding a separate sign-on for politicians promising them a campaign funds dashboard, real-time tracking of most profitable causes, political profile tuner, etc

Limit sign-ons to .gov email addresses, restricting early stage use to elected officials and representatives only.
But that's throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The wealthiest countries in the world have large governments and don't have these problems. Just outlaw lobbying(bribing) of officials. Outlaw political campaign advertising. Better yet, as I mention above, allow the people to better represent themselves using technology. There are a thousand ways to apply the brakes -- killing the engine is maybe not the best.
Bollocks. Democracy is, literally, "rule by the people"; you can twist the definition of "people", but once you do, they stop being "people" in other contexts too, and you really don't want to go there, if you really care about your fellow man (if you don't, you can pick your preferred system that favours your preferred type of assholes: with the right blood, with the right money, with the right degrees, with the right veneral disease, whatever).

The real problem is that the Greek concept of Democracy was implemented at the town level (their "cities" were really villages in the modern sense), and it has struggled to scale ever since. It's not surprising that the best "democracies" tend to be the smallest in terms of population.

A literal democracy would have everyone being able to vote on any law at any level, which is clearly impractical; unfortunately, once you introduce human intermediaries / aggregators (i.e. your "representatives"), the dynamics change massively, so you introduce corrections, which further sway the dynamics, and on and on...
Glad you didn't gave up. Best of luck with this one.
More on ePub Author
Are you the Droid we're looking for?
How could I forget?!
My take on Apple iBooks Author 1.0 and openness
No, he wouldn't. Because "his" characters are owned by a studio, and those characters would never have seen the light of day if they were obviously derived.

And that's the tragedy of copyright gone bad. Ideas build on ideas. Great ideas are born from people who "stand on the shoulders of giants," but the IP industry is cutting off our giants at the knees.
Yeah, but that has already assumed negative connotations; you cannot use it for tongue-in-cheek jokes.
Is Oral Sex to Blame for the Surge in Cancer of the Mouth and Throat?
Fantastic. If the anti-SOPA message managed to spread far enough that even people silly enough to yell at a farming association heard it, then it's worked.

I don't think it pays to be choosy about who can be on your side when you're trying to influence politics. A "freetard"'s vote counts for exactly the same as an august reporter from The Register.
To be fair, those people are on stage in front of a live audience. Even very personable people can freeze up when under pressure like that.
Do I need a Business Attorney in Chicago?
A business attorney in Chicago operates in the most competitive city in the entire state of Illinois. In fact, a business lawyer in Chicago operates in the most competitive market for lawyers in the entire Midwest.
State of the web: Flash vs HTML5
Wow. Bribery at its most sickening.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Dodd

In office for 36 years, the first thing he does when he goes private is to lobby for a law nobody wants on behalf of his new employer. What happened to Obama's promise to stop this?
Without further investigation, I pose a potentially naive question:

What evidence is there that this behaviour of the internal mic is the same when the Audio preferences pane is not open?

Could it be that the mic is automatically made 'live' when system preferences or that particular pref pane is opened?
VCs would happily invest in low risk, high-return investments -- that is in fact what they are looking for.

But wherever there is truly low risk, multiple funding sources will compete, and returns will be driven lower. Companies that fit the profile you describe will generally use debt financing, which is not available to venture startups.
Newer MacBooks don't have a separate microphone hole anymore; the mic is now located under the left speaker grille. You'd either have to tape over the whole thing (it's a pretty big grille), or open up the machine to cover/detach the mic specifically.
Hate to be "that guy", but there's a typo: "Note: Your opinion is important for us to ignore. If you must recieve a reply, donate $500 and try again."
The world is not a zero-sum game - you don't necessarily give corporations more power if you reduce the size of government. That power could be distributed to citizens. And removing the ability of corporations to influence laws can make them less powerful, not more.
Group settings can diminish expressions of intelligence
Try IPython from your browser
Websockets zeromq proxying
Regarding voting I highly recommend the brilliant 1970 comedy The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer. It raises interesting questions about how people would react to being about to vote for everything. Here's a brief summary of it stolen from http://www.crispinhull.com.au/2011/06/25/you-cant-vote-for-e...

>Rimmer poses as a true democrat, insisting that the people should always have their way, hence the consultation on important matters – such as any new tax – with the public at large.

>Whenever a question arose for determination a red light and loud buzzer would come on and not go off until the household had voted on whatever question appeared on the television screen.

>But Rimmer was a meglomaniacal schemer. He made more and more issues matters for referendum questions. After a while the population got thoroughly fed of having their lives incessantly disrupted. So he posed a final referendum question – that all future questions should be decided by him. The masses voted Yes
I've looked it over again and you're right. The majority of that came from premium accounts.

This still does not help MU if the signup originally came after a user visited a page with illegal content, and signed up to be able to get that content or to partake in sharing illegal content and get bounties on it....

Which would all be easy to check by taking a small sample of the logs and seeing what's what.

Though it does help MU if it can be shown those were all legitimate users.

Aside from that, the indictment is still very damning on other points. Even if the revenue was mostly legit, the primary driver to that revenue and the way MU conducted itself looks to be questionable at best.
A literal democracy would have everyone being able to vote on any law at any level, which is clearly impractical

It used to be impractical due to obvious infrastructure reasons. But with the internet, is it still?

And I'm not sure that there always needs to be an "ignorant majority". If people are closely involved with any aspect of lawmaking, they'll feel more responsible for being educated about political issues.

Most "politically ignorant" people I know are that because they feel voting is hardly worth the time, because it only contributes indirectly and abstractly to decision processes (and politicians say one thing and do another...). I think an important responsibility of a democracy is to educate people in critical thinking and make sure they are not "ignorant".
Lobbyists are a necessary and good part of democracy.

They just shouldn't be able to give politicians money.
Tough in up. Man up. Grow some balls. These common expressions may have something to do with it. Aside from being physically stronger, men have been programmed since childhood to keep quiet about their discomfort and pain. It is far more acceptable for a woman to cry and complain about her pain (physical or emotional) than it is for a man. Both genders should be able to express their feelings freely without fear of being considered less of a man or woman. So I don't find it surprising that a man may underestimate or downplay their level of pain on a scale between 0 and 10.
Using Answer Connect Is A Great Idea
I agree with everything but your last point:

> Apple should have just completely created their own format instead of extending ePub, and we wouldn't be having this discussion. Now Apple has become the convenient scapegoat for ePub's failure, whilst others, most notably Amazon, get a free pass for doing exactly the same.

That seems like a terrible reason to head off on your own and create a totally new format. Case in point, look at audio/video CODECs. Under the hood, many of them have startling similarities. The consumer has no idea they're similar, because they're named differently.

More directly, what is wrong with extending ePub, provided you don't represent it as ePub. Gruber's best points are made on a technical basis, not a business basis. Apple isn't calling the iBooks Author output ePub. That would be egregious.

As is typical in the technology space, everyone is conflating arguments. They're pissed about Apple's business tactics, and so the argument spreads like fire in a field of dry grass.

From a black box perspective, iBooks files are proprietary. Whether their "based on" ePub is no more relevant than the fact that VP8 bears similarities to H.264 and many other video CODECs [1].

1 - http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/archives/377
There is no conversation to be had. They're just gonna keep pulling this shit until they pass what they want to pass.
The wealthiest countries in the world have large governments

I'm not sure that trying to emulate the [other] wealthiest countries is the best of goals. Doesn't that ensure that we will be, optimally, second best? Given that corruption is endemic everywhere, including those other wealthy countries, isn't it worthwhile to strive for something better?

Outlaw political campaign advertising

That's just another way of saying "Throw out the 1st Amendment and outlaw freedom of speech". That is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

allow the people to better represent themselves using technology.

What makes you think that the electorate as a whole can do any better. Consider the rampant ignorance of the issues in our voting today. And on top of that, most people aren't simply ignorant, but just plain wrong about matters of statistics and economics. I'm inclined to believe that the result would be far worse.
Has it actually been defeated though? I'm not that well versed in what's been going on, but the last time I read about it they just said the bill had been shelved after public outcry

Shelved surely means they'll pick it up later and push it through discreetly?
Isn't this essentially a PAC or Super PAC. Give money to a middle man, who then "gives" it to the politicians in exchange for a vote.
Supercharge your jQuery Mobile theme
That's exactly what's done with cameras and microphones in high-security environments.
Classic Chris Dodd. Obvious outcomes -- like the 2008 financial crisis, which occurred on his watch as Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee-- are "watershed" and heretofore "never seen before." This way, he can escape responsibility for the role his own actions played in creating the mess.
Dutch court rejects Apple appeal, says Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 is legal
A court in the Hague has just cleared the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 for sale in the Netherlands, rejecting Apple's requests for a nationwide ban. As NU.nl reports, a different Dutch court had already issued a similar ruling in October, which Cupertino promptly appealed, claiming that Sammy's slate was too similar to its own iPad 2. Today, though, the Court of the Hague shot down Apple's arguments, determining that there are enough differences between the two products to legally justify their coexistence. Granted, this is only one of many patent battles that the two companies are currently waging, but for today, at least, it looks like Samsung has come out on top.
businesses are subject to market forces

Markets are inefficient. Many products and services are inelastic. People will consume them while hating the companies that provide them. It was government, not market forces, that forced companies to stop making kids pajamas out of inflammable material. When people heard that Ford was letting people die in its Pinto rather than recall them because it was cheaper, did people stop buying Ford? I wish it was so simple.

The plain fact is that if you look at the richest countries in the world, with the best standards of living, they have huge governments that provide their citizens with a host of services without profit, such as healthcare.
If you are really worried about this, I recommend surgery. I used to have this Windows box at work that would always make sounds for no reason, even though the sound was muted. The solution was to open it up and physically disconnect the speaker. Never made a sound again.

If you don't want your computer to be used as a listening device, first try adjusting your tinfoil hat. If you're still worried, open it up and remove the speakers and microphones. Make sure you get them all! Though I'm sure someone can figure out how to make a hard drive into a microphone, so you'd better replace that with an SSD. Also get the camera while you're in there.

There. Now you just have to worry about the bugs the Agents put all over your house.
Relational databases have their place, and lots of problems fit onto a relational database very well. But that doesn't mean SQL is a good language. SQL is poor language by many measures, and to make matters worse, nearly all implementations of SQL have all sorts of procedural extensions that just doesn't fit well with declarative relational programming. Also mathematical purity doesn't imply maintainable code. I'm also not really sure that real life SQL databases stick too closely to their mathematical foundations.

And yeah, the optimiser does work, if you know how to play it's games. Yesterday, I was working on a really slow query (13 seconds), and I restructured it in such a way that produced exactly the same output and shouldn't really have had any impact on the performance. However, suddenly the optimiser kicked in and started doing what it should have done in the first place, and the runtime went down to about 0.1s. Note that this isn't just a problem with SQL, you get the same kind of issues in anything declarative or functional, where you're relying on the compiler to select the appropriate algorithm. Awesome when it works... nightmare when it doesn't.

Though a more fundamental problem with current SQL relational databases is locking. If you want an entity from a document/object database, you only need to lock that object, but a given entity stored normally in a SQL DB may be scattered all over the database in lots of tables, requiring loads of various kinds of lock. Plus, SQL acquires locks implicitly in whatever order it feels like (which may be optimiser dependent), which causes deadlocks. Avoiding this requires careful planning and denormalisation, which kills of a lot of the advantages of using SQL in the first place.
what about a political triple bottom line? Cost, Constitutionality, Efficiency.
I'm not expert on the subject but one should also consider how it goes into countries like France where lobbying is already illegal, but still happening in other ways or channels.
The people we really need to be able to get our bribes to are the un-elected, appointed positions like the "czar of this and that".

Feature request: Bribes to those in appointed positions for special favors. Thanks.
I remember someone suggesting we monitor the democratic process using something like github for legislation documents.

It probably wouldn't end lobbying entirely, but it would make the process a lot easier to monitor.
...Fithian arguing that cheap-prices-up-front approaches such as Netflix streaming and $1 Redbox kiosks are "bad business models.""

I read this as "if we sell movies this way I'll have to work for a living."
but in what other way than by reducing its power does making it smaller make it less corruptible?

if a teeny weeny government has power over conglomerates, then it is worth a lot of money, and can be just as corrupt as what we have now. so what you are suggesting doesn't solve the problem. the only way "small" fixes the problem with buying influence is if power is reduced.
The two conservative Supreme Court justices brawl over technology and privacy.
also his book - http://www.amazon.com/Republic-Lost-Money-Corrupts-Congress-...
I had thought that was the problem. The right side that listed my answers didn't always seem to be correct.

Thanks for following up - best of luck