“The whole idea that one organism would voluntarily ingest and be regulated by the fecal by-products of another,” she says, “makes us wonder what is going on.”

You and me both.

Past the squick factor though, it really is an amazing example of how many forms life can take.

1 - Infect a few virtual machines

2 - Collect decryption keys

3 - Laugh at the hackers

Of course not many people out of the general population know how to make a (primarily) windows VM, but I'm surprised that others aren't mentioning it in this thread.

They require that the other people you infect pay the ransom, so you'd still have to pay for the VMs. (Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13147428 and replies)

Whoops, I missed that bit, that would be why. Thanks.

Regardless of whether it is just or not, it is still the law. If it is harmful, then it should be changed.

Illegal immigrants often do not enjoy all the rights and privileges citizens of the United States do. Many underpaid, overworked, and denied benefits.

If we need more people in this country, we need to make it easy for them to come, and we need to treat them right when they arrive.

Yep. The law should be changed so legal immigration is much easier.

I think taking advantage of social services without paying for them is pretty clearly unjust

And I don't think open borders are a good idea for america in its current state.

This is a total straw man. Illegal immigrants pay their taxes. The IRS doesn't care about their immigration status, but they do care about getting paid.

I worked at a school helpdesk for a while, and I saw that whenever school email accounts were hacked, the attackers would set up forwarding to some other account. People wouldn't notice the forwarding for weeks or longer, and would only come in to us by chance. In the meantime, a lot of information could be siphoned off.

There could be some legitimate security concerns there, especially since most yahoo accounts don't have a convenient and free help desk to stop by, right?

(Disclaimer: I am only a novice when it comes to security, I could be totally off base)

There is a very easy solution to this, which I believe Gmail employs: Place a very noticeable banner on the inbox when all your email is being forwarded to another address.

I forward everything that _does not_ match a specific string using the filter feature in Gmail, and I get no such banner. It is a company owned email, with a custom domain and such, but should not differ in this case.

The banner only shows for a week after you set it up.

That's assuming everyone composes e-mails through the web UI. Maybe they don't want to make that assumption.

Should just auto reset forwarding when a password reset is done.

We had such an attack recently; the banner disappears after a time (also, users don't read banners)

Maybe I'm naive, but I just can't see how these NetSweeper people justify this to themselves.

Demand <--> supply.

Controls might help prevent this type of thing but often just pushes it underground. In all likelyhood they'd probably just get it from some source without public tenders. Then we'd know even less about their censorship capabilities.

Or at best they'd get a less-capable software version from an amoral and less technically savvy country - which may be easier to circumvent.

Bluecoat seems to still be operating fine despite doing similar things years ago in the US.

"Somebody is going to do this, so we might as well do it" is not a valid defense for doing something that is immoral.

You mischaracterized my argument. To reiterate:

If somebody is going to do it anyway it is therefore often better to have it done in public rather than pushed into black markets via controls (see: drug war).

The additional condition I provided is where the black market options are much weaker or limited than the possible public options, allowing the markets to effectively circumvent or eliminate the negative utility of the black market products - therefore making controls a valid option (see: nuclear arms).

They care about money. And that's it.

Money are extremely good at placating the conscience of a person.

A cool 1.2m dollars

You help built momentum for a proper electoral system instead of the garbage we have now. I blows my mind that after centuries we still have something as idiotic as the electoral college, and all the imbalance it brings, in our nation.

How is getting rid of the electoral college going to solve the problems you identify above? You do realize that it only affects the election of the president and vp? Do we imagine that lobbyists will be unable to adjust to a world in which those two positions are elected in a slightly different manner? All this true-though-trivial "every vote should matter" stuff is just the sort of distraction from reality that lobbyists love.

It always drives me crazy when people that make 50k+ a year complain about not having money. I live on about $500-$600 a month and I'm fine. Granted, not everyone is ablebodied and living within biking distance of their school/work, but most certainly could be, especially with a little effort.

Not needing money is incredibly liberating, I advise everyone to just try it for a year.

I agree with you. My current life style ends up around $7,000 a year. I live in a very affluent mid-east city. I don't own a car (15 minute walk to downtown), I don't eat out constantly (I prefer healthy meals), and I don't buy a bunch of luxury junk. I can honestly say that I do not feel like I'm struggling at all.

Having the 'standard' car, house, and family are unnecessary luxuries. It's fine if you choose to do these things but it's silly to me that people feel poor making 50k+. I would argue that if you are struggling with those types of income, your lifestyle is severely out of whack. You don't have to keep up the Jonses to lead a very happy, healthy life.

The benefits of living cheaply are pretty obvious and already pretty well covered. The ability to work on whatever I want, whenever I want all without ever having to think about the personal finance side of it, is just incredibly freeing.

$600/mo is less than the price of a filthy studio apartment in the cities where most of HN's jobs are.

$100/mo for rice and beans, $70/mo for water,trash,electric,heat,telecom ; $400/mo for rent, ???

Do your kids have their own jobs? Your spouse doesn't, because someone has to watch the kids, and that is over $600/mo alone.

In many places, living within biking/walking distance of school/work means rent goes up exponentially.

None of us 'need' money after a certain point but everyone's perceived 'enough' is different. Some of us love having a good chunk of money and the amazing opportunities that it brings.

I think it's worth noting that MMA fighters don't tend to suffer as many injuries. Boxing's strict ruleset forces fighters to beat eachother into putty to win, but other fights can be won without (as many) concussions.

The difference in MMA is that as soon as a fighter is not intelligently defending themselves, the ref stops the fight. There is a much lower standard for a technical knockout. There are many stoppages that occur after "flash" knockouts, where the fighter is only unconscious for a brief moment. Usually the fighter will protest, as he doesn't even realize it's happened. In boxing, a flash knockout doesn't end the fight, as long as the fighter gets back up. In a boxing match, this could happen twice every round without ending the fight.

I also wonder if the ability to wrestle in MMA plays a role. In boxing, as soon as the fighters clinch, the ref breaks up the fighters. In MMA, it's rare to see fighters stand within each other's range and throw full powered punches for extended periods.

Is there concrete data to back that up? There have been terrible bone breaks and joint damage in mma. It also seems too young to know if there will be the same neurological issues. It could be true but it also sounds like marketing.

From my experience MMA fighters and kickboxers spar extremely hard. Boxers seem to be a little smarter that way.

I expect that a lot of amateur MMA fighters will end up with brain damage from training even if competitions may be a little safer.

As a game maker, this stuff terrifies me. I think that there are a lot of devs out there who string together compulsive elements in their games without realizing just how potent they can be.

There are just as many who intentionally make the game as addictive as possible. It was bad enough before F2P, now it's getting out of hand.