Contents

1. WHO Says Swine Flu May Have Peaked In the US
2. Apple Voiding Smokers’ Warranties?
3. Pittsburgh To Tax Students
4. Major Electronics Firms Support Ending Use of “Conflict Minerals”
5. Cyber Attacks On US Military Jump Sharply In 2009
6. RFID Fingerprints To Fight Tag Cloning
7. iPhone Game Piracy “the Rule Rather Than the Exception”
8. New Microsoft Silverlight Features Have Windows Bias
9. How Heavy Is the Internet?
10. Anti-Smoking Vaccine Is Nearing the Market
11. Proton Beams Sent Around the LHC
12. Microsoft’s Lack of Nightly Builds For IE
13. Climatic Research Unit Hacked, Files Leaked
14. Aging Nuclear Stockpile Good For Decades To Come
15. Netbooks Have Higher Failure Rate Than Laptops

If vaccine was available, people would get it - by iamacat (Score: 3, Informative) Thread

Our whole family just had H1N1 and yet none of us could get a vaccine beforehand, not even our 2 year old daughter. If vaccine was available, all of us would have gotten it. To top the confusion, the doctor is still asking us to get the shot when it becomes available. Give me a frigging break.

Now what amazes me is that our daughter coughed for 2 days and then she was fine, while we are still sick after 3 weeks. Daycares must create some kind of mutant immune systems that put interspecies viruses to shame.

yea, right - by frovingslosh (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
So glad to hear it. Pay no attention to the mutated Tamiflu resistant versions that were reported in both Norway and North Carolina just yesterday.

The WHO is horrible. - by Timosch (Score: 3, Funny) Thread
They did horrible things, e.g. killing the electric car, Sgt Pepper, …

BS - by dagamer34 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
You can’t know something has peaked or bottomed out until way after the fact. It’s like having a sign of relief when in the eye of a hurricane or ignoring the possibility of aftershocks from earthquakes.

Re:Where does the money go? - by Afforess (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Because the lost productivity from having massive amounts of the workforce absent due to illness, never mind the costs of delays and other problems would cost us more than one billion.  
 
(Swine Flu) A virus that was super-contagious and infected nearly everyone, and got them sick for 2 weeks, but barely anyone would die from would be far more economically damaging than a virus that was not very contagious, but killed all those it infected. (HIV) 
 
This is because our economy was never meant to handle a mass exodus of workers. We’re lucky it wasn’t worse than it was. In places in Michigan, 1/2 of entire counties got sick, and schools and businesses were closed for days.  
 
Just because You didn’t get sick doesn’t mean the illness is trivial.

What about cat owners? - by Kartoffel (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

I’ve seen more computers clogged with cat hair than I’ve seen clogged with cigarette ash.

Two Thumbs UP! - by TravisHein (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

For once I am pleased with Apple’s quirky business policies.

In addition to being a biohazard, enough smoking over time by many people seems to actually deposit a greassy residue on the inside of the computer parts, like the heat sinks, integrated circuits, fan blades. I used to be the IT administrator for an office of a dozen people, back when it was somehow allowed to smoke indoors in the office while you work. And the style was for everyone to smoke. As a non smoker I was a minority, and had to put up with working in that mess.

But for the computer parts, after about six months the parts looked as though someone had sprayed them with PAM cooking oil, and then dusted with ashes. All chunder stuck on fuzzy layer of dust bunnies, and “that” smell of 1000 cigarettes. We went through a lot of computers because of the lack of ability for the parts to cool themselves with the ambient air circulation inside the cases.

So my fendangled point was, it is not fair for Apple, or any computer company to have to honor warranty claims for computers that were subjected to the abuse of a smoker, as the hardware was subjected to environmental conditions that was not in any of the designed intended use. For example, if I put my computer through a dish washer, they would have the equal right to not honor my warranty claim, as I ‘intentionally damaged’ it in much the same way. I would like to see other companies start doing this too.. Buy a car? Did you smoke in it ? Oh, now it has no resale value, sorry.

I’m not surprised - by Trevin (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

They’ve also refused service on devices where their litmus indicator shows signs of turning pink (http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9214797, http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/04/14/smart.phones.buggy/index.html, http://techgeist.net/2009/09/apple-iphone-abuse-detection-sensors-abusing-2/). It sounds like they’re still looking for more excuses not to honor their “warranty.”

I won’t be buying any more Apple products.

Maybe get some facts straight? - by sribe (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Why yes, I do. I also remember that it’s a perfectly legitimate (though perhaps conservative) claim as well. And I also remember all the people mocking Apple who clearly had no idea at all how revenue must be accounted for in publicly-held companies. Apparently some of you ignoramuses just do not want to let go…

Hard to deny - by foniksonik (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

As a smoker I find it hard to deny Apple’s case here. Tobacco smoke is not a good thing for electronics. Neither would be lots of candle smoke, grease smoke, auto exhaust and many other environmental contaminates that could leave a residue on the hardware.

For the smokers out there: is it really that hard to take a break and go outside? I’ve always felt that was the best part… take a break, go out, have a smoke and consider what ever you’re doing - then go back and get it done.

Of course these are not likely people using their computers for productive things… probably ex-AOLers chatting up people while drinking and smoking. In which case - ??? WTF just get a life already.

Oh and it’s gross to smoke cigs in your house. Same as it would be gross to smoke a turkey inside or any number of things that leave residue everywhere.

The whole story… - by sugapablo (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
The problem is, in Pittsburgh the two major enterprises/employers are colleges and hospital systems. Both non-profit and both tax exempt. They own a tremendous amount of land (tax-free) employ the most people (tax free) and use up a tremendous amount of city services (such as police, ambulance, fire, water, sewage, etc, all tax free). The city has been trying for years to get the universities and hospitals to pay something, ANYTHING to help the city with its budget situation. In other cities where non-profits make up a large percentage of the area, the non-profits usually contribute something in terms of “voluntary payments”, such as in Boston. What the mayor is doing, is trying to pressure the universities to come to the negotiating table to help support the city in its time of financial need, using other major cities with major university systems as a model. So far, the universities and hospital systems have refused. (Keep in mind, our major hospital system is UPMC (University of Pittsburgh Medical Center). Luke cares little for this tax and doesn’t want it to pass. He want to use it to cause a big firestorm (which obviously it has) and force concessions. We’ll see if it works. PA State Reps are already proposing laws to prevent the City of Pittsburgh from being able to tax students directly.

Priorities - by six11 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

As a CMU student (sort of), this doesn’t surprise me, and I invite Luke Ravenstahl to kiss my poor ass. Considering this guy prioritizes money in the most bogo-riffic ways (e.g. spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on fancy trash cans sporting his name) it seems clear he is not and has not been fit to run the city.

Pittsburgh’s new economy is fueled by the universities*. Everybody knows this. Taxing the students—-those people least able to pay—-is akin to cannibalism.

Of course, what will happen is students will just borrow a bit more and stack on a little more debt. So maybe Luke’s idea is to get students to hedge their futures on his present financial problems.

* And the Steelers

I will. - by NoYob (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The problems that California have is the result of spending more that it earns. It’s as simple as that. The economy was booming and tax revenues went through the roof because of it. Their tax policy, as far as income was concerned, wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately, on April 15th in past years, the California legislature sees that huge pile of cash come in and they spent it thinking that California’s boom will last forever. The Legislature, especially the liberal Democrats, have no clue about saving for the future or any clue that times do change and there are downturns in an economy.

Every time someone had some sort of project and regardless of its merits, they put money into it. Look now, when they want to cut spending, regardless of where, some special interest protests saying that they are important and the legislature needs to cut somewhere else.

If they had a responsible fiscal plan instead of spending every penny that came in they wouldn’t be in this situation.

Laffer said that reducing taxes stimulates the economy as long as government reduces spending to match inflows. The California legislature was too stupid to realize that and they were too beholden to the special interests that always have their hands out for government money.

Students need to do a economic demonstration - by Registered Coward v2 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

1. Get $2 bills and dollar coins and use them for all their purchases for two weeks.

2. Then spend a week or two not spending a dime - ideally until they’ve saved the $400 tax.

3. Publicize it. Write articles in the student paper and letters to the editor.

4. Sit back and watch the results. Lather, rinse and repeat.

5. Profit?

Seriously, students need to show their economic impact on the local community. Using money not normally used will help make that point.

pay their ‘fair share.’ - by commodore64_love (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

They already do shithead Mayor. Students pay:

- property tax (included in the school’s tuition and the dorm room rental fees) 
- sales tax (by buying local products) 
- gas tax or road tolls (when they drive around)

This story reminds me of Baltimore City Council, which keeps trying to tax neighboring counties on the theory that suburban folks work in the city, or visit the Raven stadium, but don’t pay taxes. (Except that they do - via state income tax and sales tax and providing income to stadium/restaurant/other inner city workers.) Same stupid first-order level of thinking. These politicians need to dig deeper.

They might as well rename it - by zogger (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

To the “Turn over to the Chinese all the minerals in Africa” act. They’ll take them, and they do not care one bit about which local regime is in charge today. They go out of their way all the time to state they have no desire to interfere in local politics, they just want the business/raw materials.

Oh, by the way, how about they ban petroleum products, fuels and plastics? Or do they want to claim petroleum doesn’t come in huge part from regimes where human rights are routinely abused, where murders rapes torture and so on are common?

Fungible Resources - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Hmmm, does anyone in Congress know what a fungible resource is?

Basically, there’s no way to know if the tungsten in your product (or even in your supply chain) came from the Eastern Congo, or pretty much anywhere else.

If the price for “tungsten” goes up appreciably, then Eastern Congo “tungsten” will just show up indirectly from other sources.

Yeah this work like the Drug War - by commodore64_love (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

We all know that banning the use of marijuana, cocaine, and other naturally-occurring drugs helped de-escalate violence.

/end sarcasm

The banning of these conflict minerals simply means that you’ll leave former miners without jobs, and then they’ll starve, as happened when we embargoed Iraq in the 90s, and Cuba over the last several decades. I honestly don’t think there’s ANY workable solution to the Congo problem.

This will do nothing to end the “conflict”. - by John Hasler (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The fighting is about politics, not minerals. This will just make everyone in the region poorer. The minerals will continue to come out albeit at a reduced rate while yet another layer of criminal politicians seize the opportunity to enrich themselves by falsifying the documents necessary to get the stuff on the legal market.

This is just more feelgood crap from the assholes in Washington.

Re:Hardly surprising - by Phil-14 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Not only that; there are a lot of unexploited Tungsten sources in the United States; one supposes they could stop nickel-and-diming to death extraction industries here and we could probably produce them a lot more cheaply than the Congo; doing business in a war zone is expensive.

I also just checked Wikipedia, and I think this subject is sufficiently non-controversial/political that they will give accurate information; it looks like China produces several times the amount of Tungsten as the rest of the world _combined_.

Garbage - by kestasjk (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

“cyber operators”.. “Information Warfare Militia”.. What? 
Try actually reading the linked PDF and see if you can take it seriously. All this stuff about increased “cyber attack incidences” and I can find absolutely nothing explicitly linking any incident with the Chinese government or anything even making explicit what a “cyber attack incident” is. (Also “cyber warfare” is a pretty small part of the report itself; the report isn’t about “cyber-warfare”, but US-China relations.)

I think that quote just about sums it up. I am stunned that people here on slashdot are taking this seriously, this is the sort of thing I’d expect to see on Fox News.

define “attack” - by zkrige (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
I have linux boxes all over the place and there are literally thousands of ssh/sft/etc attempts on each box each day. None of them are successful though. Can I claim that my boxes have more attacks than the US Military?

Re:define “attack” - by 1s44c (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If the US government would give you a 100 dollars to investigate each attack you might be tempted to.

They still don’t like us? - by hwyhobo (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

And here I was, thinking that the Presidential Apology Tour would make it all better.

On a serious note, by moving our high tech industry offshore we have helped to make it happen. Now, with a broken economy, we appear weak, and we invite ridicule and attack. Clever bandaids added to firewalls will make little difference long term. We need to regain strength and respect. This is not just a technical problem. Our recent administrations (Republicrats and Demopublican alike) through suicidal short-sighted policies aimed only to benefit a few fat cats have made us an easy target. Such is the fate of a fallen giant. Everyone wants to kick him. After all, what are we going to do about it?

Re:They still don’t like us? - by 1s44c (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Not quite. Windows is the best target due to its low coding standards, the huge number of security holes it suffers from, and it’s unmanageably.

The fact it is used heavily doesn’t make it any more or less secure.

This is nothing new - by ian_mackereth (Score: 4, Informative) Thread
This sort of physical characteristic fingerprinting has been done for years on magnetic stripe cards and EEPROM smartcards, so this is nothing new in theory, just in what physical characteristics are being measured.

In mag stripes, the magnetic remanence of the strip is different from card to card, in EEPROM, differences in the voltage levels and speed of reading of the cells are used.

The general principle is that it’s no point having unbreakable crypto if the data can simply be copied to a new medium. Consider a card (of whatever type) that stores monetary value for public transport or photocopying or whatever: Put $100 on it and copy the data, not knowing which bits are what. Copy that data onto a heap of cards bought with $5 of credit on them and sell them in the grey market for $50 each and pocket the profit.

With this sort of technique, though, part of that encrypted data is a fingerprint based on the physical characteristics of the original card. The new cards will generate a fingerprint in the reader that doesn’t match the original, making the copies invalid.

Sure, if you can crack the encryption, this method is useless, but that’s not the point. Crypto can be pretty good and costs more than a cheap reader/writer to break to duplicate cards/RFIDs.

Solving the wrong problem - by lhunath (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

RFID tags are not security devices, they are hyped barcodes. They do not provide any authentication.

If you’re worrying about your RFID tags being cloned for a malicious purpose, you are using them for the wrong thing.

Re:What’s the point? - by cortesoft (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Crypto wouldn’t work… the cloner doesn’t have to break the encryption to copy the chip.

Imagine in this way… you have an encrypted hard drive, and someone wants to pass off their hard drive as yours. They don’t have to break the encryption… they can copy the drive byte for byte, and hand it to the person who if verifying that is the original. The person checking the data is the one who does the decrypting.

Re:What’s the point? - by owlstead (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Depends on the chip. If you include ISO 14443 processor cards then you can have crypto, combined with secure on chip storage of the key of course. You are giving away this chip, so you must make sure that the chip storage and on board crypto is sufficiently protected against attacks. E.g for passports you can have active authentication or chip authentication to verify that the chip is not cloned.

Re:Security enhancement at best - by cortesoft (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

I don’t know if it will be that easy. These fingerprints seem to be based on the fact that all RFID chips have flaws, and they are all flawed in different ways… including the device that is trying to act as the clone of the RFID. What this means is that this clone RFID has to be able to mimic EXACTLY the flaws of the real thing without giving itself away by its OWN flaws. Without knowing more details about the flaws they are trying to measure, it is hard to say whether that would be possible. If the flaws are easily mimicked in the sense that you can create a clone whose own defects are not detected because they are all superseded by the original’s flaws, it may work. If they vary so much that every clone will have some flaw that is severe enough to shine through, it would be impossible.

Here’s the flaws in their reasoning - by ShooterNeo (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Ok, wait a second

- In order to pirate an iphone app, you have to jailbreak your phone. Only a small percentage of the user base have done this

- By measuring the total number of “phone homes”, you can figure out how many copies of your app are out in the wild, INCLUDING copies on jailbroken phones.

So if you find out that your app has 1000 copies in the wild.

600 of those copies are on the jailbroken iphones that make up maybe 5% of the total phones.

Therefore, you’re out the revenue from those 600 copies? Nope, because if those users hadn’t hacked their phones, they probably WOULD NOT have paid for your app. The reason you only have 400 sales in this scenario is that the 95% of users who are eligible to buy it weren’t interested enough in your app. The jailbreaking users just grab whatever they want whenever they want, but wouldn’t behave like that if they had to pay.

Shhhh, - by Icegryphon (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Don’t tell the MPAA or RIAA that. 
They will get all uppity in your shit!

Hey, Submitter! - by cliffiecee (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Don’t change the meaning of the article when summarizing.

over 60% of iPhone applications have definitively been pirated 
as submitted

60% of paid apps using Pinch have been pirated. 
(as written in the article, bolding included)

Let’s “reverse-bold” that… 
60% of paid apps using Pinch have been pirated. 
(emphasis mine)

It might be relevant to non-pinch-using apps, it might not. But let’s not delete that relevant bit of data.

Re:Losing to Piracy, or, Over-Estimating App Value - by wrook (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I once worked for a small company with a semi-popular application. Sales were almost all of the form of pay pal purchases off the website. It wasn’t a lot of money, but it was enough to pay one developer. But piracy was a huge problem. It was quite obvious that more than 90% of the copies running were pirated.

The company changed directions and started bundling the application for free with online services. The service provider would pay for the application and the customers would get the software for use only with the service. But the company was worried about piracy, so they asked me to write DRM that tied the application to the service. They would continue to sell an untied version off the website, but with “call home” DRM (it’s an internet app, so it’s not quite as draconian as it sounds). I very reluctantly agreed (i.e., I had to decide whether it was worth quitting over — if I had to do it again, I’d quit).

The end result was that all piracy stopped. In fact, all usage stopped. Instead of selling 2 or 3 copies a day off the website, not one copy of the DRM version was ever sold. And due to very poor choices of service provider partners, the company received no revenue at all. Within a year the company had folded.

The thing is, the new version was head and shoulders better than then non-DRMed version. And the DRM was truly unobtrusive (think DRM in WoW). Paying customers wouldn’t even know it existed. But sales are generated by popularity, not quality. Piracy, like it or not generates popularity. The company was very small and had no means of effective advertising. By cutting off the pirates, they shut off their only revenue source.

What always kills me about this story is this: The app we were making was *perfect* for an open software model. Ask the service providers to each spend a small amount of money to cover development and give them the app for free. Give them branding in the app to thank them for their help. But the “sales” people were always quick to point out that the service providers they found had no money and couldn’t afford to pay us up front. How on earth did we fail? :-P

Yes but there’s more to it than that. - by Anonymous Coward (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

My company also tracks iphone piracy rates. And while the piracy rate is in line with the OP there’s more to it than that. Apps with demos generally have lower piracy rates. Also we track usage rate, pirates tend to only launch once or twice, as if they’re sampling the app. So it’s not as bad as the article makes it sound.

Features? - by shutdown -p now (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

So far, the only feature in TFS that I can see as having “Windows bias” is ActiveX support. Which is kinda not surprising (I mean, who doesn’t know that ActiveX is “that evil Windows thing” - even people who don’t even understand what it is and how it works?). Qt also has an ActiveX support module, and it doesn’t make it any less cross-platform - no-one forces you to use it. Same applies here.

Re:Features? - by cbhacking (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Thank you for a voice of sanity and reason. The fact that you can embed COM objects in the latest version of Silverlight does nothing to harm Silverlight on other platforms; it simply means that if you (as a developer) are willing to limit yourself to Windows users, you can now embed third-party controls written in C++ into your desktop app (what a bizarre concept, I know…) If you want portability, you don’t use this feature (any more than if a Java developer wants portability, he doesn’t rely on a native code module that does registry I/O).

Speaking of Bias.. - by Dragonshed (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

From TFA:

The difference in rendering between IE on Windows and Safari on Macosx is a reality, whether silverlight is involved or not. The purpose of the HTML Control is to allow scenarios dependent on the HTML Bridge, the part of silverlight that blurs the lines and allows communication between the html dom + javascript and C# code, to run correctly when the app is hosted out of the browser. It’s essentially a crutch to allow developers that want to use siverlight a way to leverage existing investments in web application development.

This is a fairly obscure feature, and I’m fairly surprised that it was included at all, but doubt it’ll be of use to the vast majority of current and future silverlight developers out there. Like the html control, it’s a crutch, to allow developers that want to use silverlight a way to leverage existing investments. The mantra I’ve heard out of the silverlight team is to focus on unblocking customer scenarios (scenarios they cannot unblock themselves) without compromising the overall feature goals (like keeping the runtime download small).

I don’t think it’ll matter. Any developer that is seriously considering using silverlight over Adobe AIR, but is then persuaded not to because Silverlight’s Trusted Out-Of-Browser scenario has COM support on Windows and not on Mac is “Doing It Wrong”. It’s an edge case feature that doesn’t affect Silverlight’s over all “Cross-Platforminess”.

Flame On.

MS releases Silverlight 4, nobody cares - by David Gerard (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Microsoft today announced the release of version 4.0 of its world-beating Silverlight multimedia platform for the Web. As a replacement for Adobe’s Flash, it is widely considered utterly superfluous and of no interest to anyone who could be found.

“We have a fabulous selection of content partners for Silverlight,” announced Microsoft marketer Scott Guthrie on his blog today. “NBC for the Olympics, which delivered millions of new users to BitTorrent. The Democrat National Convention, which is fine because those Linux users are all Ron Paul weirdos anyway. It comes with rich frameworks, rich controls, rich networking support, a rich base class library, rich media support, oh God kill me now. My options are underwater, my resumé’s a car crash, Google won’t call me back. My life is an exercise in futility. I’m the walking dead, man. The walking dead.”

Silverlight was created by Microsoft to leverage its desktop monopoly on Windows, to work off the tremendous sales and popularity of Vista. Flash is present on a pathetic 96% of all computers connected to the Internet, whereas Silverlight downloads are into the triple figures.

“But it’s got DRM!” cried Guthrie. “Netflix loved it! And web developers love us too, after all we did for them with IE 6. Wait, come back! We’ll put porn on it! Free porn!”

Similar Microsoft initiatives include its XPS replacement for Adobe PDF, its HD Photo replacement for JPEG photographs and its earlier Liquid Motion attempt to replace Flash. Also, that CD-ROM format Vista defaults to which no other computers can read.

In a Microsoft internal security sweep, Guthrie’s own desktop was found to still be running Windows XP.

COM is windows only… - by wandazulu (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

…thank God.

Only Microsoft has the peculiar genius that allows them to take a relatively straightforward concept (reference counting/smart pointers) add a totally over-the-top, incomprehensible library that was designed around the limitations of the broken template support in VC6 (ATL), then totally abandon it for “teh new shiny” because you lost a court case against Sun (.net).

I have written a *lot* of code in ATL, and I regret practically every moment of it; I liked the idea of COM/ActiveX, it’s actually a really cool concept, and it even seemed to have an awesome future (all these COM objects that could talk to each other…Excel could control my toaster via my custom ActiveX dll) but suddenly it became all about the web and the era of a component-laden operating system ended before it really ever began. So for that I slogged through a bunch of ATL books, got to the point where I thought I knew how it all worked, and then all Microsoft wanted talk about was C# and .net.

Re:The internet has no weight… - by calzones (Score: 3, Interesting) Thread

Thank you!!!

I came to read this posting thinking there would be some great discussion on the weight of information. What’s the difference in weight between a full hard drive and an empty hard drive for instance, and what can qualify as empty (since it’s possible having a series of alternating 1s and 0s is lighter than pure 0s for instance… I wouldn’t know) .. point being, that there is a difference between the average drive containing random or “no” bits encoded on it, and one that does actually contain information encoded on it by intention.

But instead this was all about the weight of devices storing said data. Humbug!

I want to know how much all the data (and only the data) on all devices and transmitting on all lines actually weighs. Because the media can and probably will become lighter with time, but information itself can not become any lighter.

I hope some mods gives you some points because this was the best post on here today. Of course, I’m late to the party and this is waaay down the page, so who knows if mods will ever make it down this far :|

No - by N7DR (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Ever wondered how much the internet physically weighs?

No.

And, oddly, even after someone else has asked the question, I still don’t.

What a useless question - by straponego (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I need to know how much of the internet is 1, and how much is 0. 
 
I suppose I could get a start on that by running VMs of the most popular OSs, and examining snapshots of each one, multiplying that by… oh, and do the same with backbone traffic… be a bit of a pain to handle all the embedded stuff, but in principle… well, in principle, the internet could be represented as a single number. I wonder if it’s odd or even. I guess it depends on who has the last bit. 
 
Ooops, time to takes me pills again.

idleispants - by davidwr (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Why isn’t this in idle?

If it’s supposed to be serious, you have to amortize the weight of the equipment over its uses. A desktop that spends half its use playing solitaire, 1/4 of its use surfing the web, and 1/4 of its use spamming the world under viral control only counts for half.

Don’t be silly. - by Mr. Bad Example (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

The internet doesn’t weigh anything.

Ibogaine - by casings (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The only reason why this is necessary is because a compound that already exists is illegal and not profitable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibogaine

Side-effects - by Reason58 (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Unfortunately, this new vaccine is highly addictive. Not to worry though, they are hard at work on a cure for vaccine addiction. It is passed into the bloodstream through the lungs…

Re:Unfortunately… - by betterunixthanunix (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
This has me worrying about “vaccines” for other drugs. In a century, maybe nobody in the USA will be able to relax with $drug_of_choice, because of mandatory “vaccination” against the effects of any psychoactives.

So, this new vaccine… - by camperdave (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
So, this new vaccine… Does it come in a smokable version?

Re:“Vaccine” - by RManning (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

From TFA…

So it effects the immune system to recognize some particular foreign matter and deal with it? That sounds like a vaccine to me.

Re:A picture from LHC - by Mike Van Pelt (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Ha ha, funny guy.

They’ve set up some webcams so you can watch what’s going on at the LHC for yourself.

http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html

Hopefully they’re more careful - by Nautical Insanity (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

this time around. I have a physics prof who’s part of the project. Part of our lecture on superconductivity was dedicated to the catastrophic malfunction. There’s nothing that conveys the epic nature of the failure like technical language.

According to my professor, they were in too much of a rush to get the thing started they didn’t fully test the whole thing. One of the superconducting junctions quenched (transitioned from superconductive to non-superconductive states due to the 7-8 Tesla magnetic field), necessitating the dispersal of IIRC 1500 A of current. This turned insulating copper into plasma which breached the chamber wall and caused the explosive vaporization of 2 tons of liquid helium into the accelerating chamber.

Long story short, it’s a very large, complicated, and expensive machine. They’d better sure everything works this time.

Real-time Updates - by SMQ (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
http://twitter.com/CERN

Re:Thanks for the warning - by lorenlal (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

You’re planning on *not* getting really drunk for 3 more years? That’s gotta be a killer party you’re planning.

I plan on getting really drunk as soon as I can get myself to the corner liquor store (and home safely).

‘Pew Pew’ noises uttered by people with PHDs - by Kenja (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Come on, you know someone did it…

This story is bookmarked - by Osrin (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Filed under “weirdest story ever to appear on /.”

Next week we can discuss the outrage that stems from Microsoft’s refusal to offer free back massages on the New York subway.

Coming up next - by Sowbug (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Can bees think? A new study indicates that no, they cannot.

More Microsoft Bashing - by maxrate (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
Why is the finger always at Microsoft? I vote we embargo the use of the word Microsoft on Slashdot, say, for a month. Usually any Microsoft related post is biased and ill-spirited - getting very old. There are countless software vendors that do not release nightly builds. As much as I adore Slashdot, all the MS haters on here often make me feel as if I’m associating myself with a ‘new low’ of computer users (sometimes). Kinda like finding yourself in the company of a bunch of racists. It’s very fashionable on \. to hate Microsoft. Don’t like their stuff?…simply use something else and STFU. I do agree with the article’s opinion of saying the update process Microsoft uses is broken - I think Microsoft can do better.

Who is Many? - by clinko (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

”Many wonder why Microsoft doesn’t offer nightly builds of Internet Explorer.”

Whoever “Many” is, they seem to always be interviewed by Ars and FoxNews.

Normal - by bigstrat2003 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
WTF? Most companies don’t release nightly builds of their software. Why on earth are we singling out Microsoft, and only one of their products at that? Infrequent releases are the norm, not the exception, and while you may argue that it should change, it’s ludicrous to single out one program among thousands for following the standard practice.

My heart goes out to those researchers. - by inhuman_4 (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I feel really bad for these researchers.

I have published only a few papers and would be mortified if my emails got released to the public. I am constantly joking around with other lab denizens about fudging stuff, and removing data that doesn’t fit the expectations. The opportunity for out of context quotations is scary to contemplate. Not to mention all of the politically incorrect jokes about such-and-such a graph’s sexual orientation.

If one of these guys said anything like that over the years of emails in this dump, they are in some deep shit for nothing. Image someone going through all of the comments for all of the code you have ever written just looking for any tiny detail to prove you’re a hack.

“just added one to this variable now it works” = screwed. 
“need to go back and fix this” = screwed. 
“not sure why this works but it does” = screwed. 
“Bob is an idiot, I am just going to comment out his code” = screwed.

Like Cardinal Richelieu said: 
“If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him”

Right or wrong, these guys are gonna get the shaft.

Another good writeup - by Eukariote (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Another good writeup on the leaked emails can be found here. Summary: manipulation of evidence, private doubts about whether the world really is heating up, suppression of evidence, fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists, attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period , and communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process.

The shame of it - by idontgno (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

isn’t that these files and this correspondence got hacked.

The shame of it is that hacking was necessary at all.

Transparency, People. We’re debating public policy and making decisions for the benefit of all Mankind. Credibility is only hindered by opacity and closed data.

0880476729.txt is interesting: - by inviolet (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

[…header information omitted…] 
Subject: Re: ATTENTION. Invitation to influence Kyoto. 
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 1997 11:52:09 -0700 (MST)

Dear Eleven,

I was very disturbed by your recent letter, and your attempt to get 
others to endorse it. Not only do I disagree with the content of 
this letter, but I also believe that you have severely distorted the 
IPCC “view” when you say that “the latest IPCC assessment makes a 
convincing economic case for immediate control of emissions.” In contrast 
to the one-sided opinion expressed in your letter, IPCC WGIII SAR and TP3 
review the literature and the issues in a balanced way presenting 
arguments in support of both “immediate control” and the spectrum of more 
cost-effective options. It is not IPCC’s role to make “convincing cases” 
for any particular policy option; nor does it. However, most IPCC readers 
would draw the conclusion that the balance of economic evidence favors the 
emissions trajectories given in the WRE paper. This is contrary to your 
statement.

This is a complex issue, and your misrepresentation of it does you a 
dis-service. To someone like me, who knows the science, it is 
apparent that you are presenting a personal view, not an informed, 
balanced scientific assessment. What is unfortunate is that this will not 
be apparent to the vast majority of scientists you have contacted. In 
issues like this, scientists have an added responsibility to keep their 
personal views separate from the science, and to make it clear to others 
when they diverge from the objectivity they (hopefully) adhere to in their 
scientific research. I think you have failed to do this.

[…]

secrecy and data hiding - by zerosomething (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The primary issue is that most climate science has not truly been scrutinize and reviewed. I’ve been reading the files and it’s very damming. It’s almost as bad as cold fusion. For example. In note 1075403821.txt Timo Hmeranta states.

One other thing about the CC paper - just found another email - is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this.

So they are going to hide behind Intelectual Property Rights to keep their data from being reviewed!. Holy Fucking Shit! How can science do that and still remain respectable?

Re:What about the Foam? - by georgewilliamherbert (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

“Fogbank”, widely presumed to be a heavy-metal doped aerogel material.

We can manufacture it again. There was a gap - we couldn’t for a while, but it’s back in production.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/FOGBANK

Man… - by Monkeedude1212 (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

Can you imagine what the world was like 100 years ago? Where wars were fought on foot and were mostly civil wars, or simple trade disputes? Where mutually assured destruction and worrying how long your nukes will last were never present.

Or go back even further, like 500 years, where the world was a bold new place worth exploring, and if a war were to be fought, it’d be because you want to rescue the pope, or payback for a political insult, or because you were bored…

Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong century. The internet is way over-rated.

“Guarantee their Destructiveness” - by natehoy (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Does that mean nukes will now have a new label on them?

“Best if used to initiate Global Armageddon by December 12, 2054”

Not atypical - by Overzeetop (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Many programs which require significant development, and then get shelved into “production” with no push to advance or modernize fall prey to this. NASA maned spaceflight vehicles is a prime example.

If you only need to do research and development once every 25-50 years you end up starting nearly from scratch every time you decide to upgrade. Now, I’m not advocating some kind of special nuclear bomb advancement program. Still, by the time somebody wants to “replace” these, there will be nobody left who actually worked on them tom begin with. Humans are particularly bad at passing this kind of knowledge over extended time gaps.

Re:Not atypical - by jpmorgan (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Yes, as unpolitically correct as it may be, an active nuclear weapons program might be necessary. Complete disarmament is all well and good, and a slow loss of weapons and skills to age could be one way to accomplish that. But complete disarmament isn’t worthwhile without permanent disarmament also, and I don’t see how that’s possible. The knowledge and technology exists, and as the general level of technology in this world increases it will only become easier to build nuclear weapons. Without permanent disarmament (which would be impossible without some form of world government), you have to accept one of these possibilities: 
1. A hostile power is nuclear armed and you are not. 
2. You are now racing a hostile power to rearm yourself… except they have a headstart, since you only found out they’ve been building weapons after their program has progressed considerably. And that in turn gives them an incentive to use their weapons before you finish yours… 
3. Abandon disarmament and proactively maintain a deterrence force.

Look, the technology to build nuclear weapons is never going to go away. Until we find a technology to neuter these devices without playing deterrence/MAD games, then a continued nuclear weapons program is essential. Otherwise we are locked in a cycle of decay, and panicked rebuilding. I’d rather things be as boring as possible, even if that means the occasional underground bang.

Question the source - by greyhueofdoubt (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Another /. story brought this to my attention and I did some digging. It turns out that the entire tech-blog-sphere is basing their articles on a ‘study’ done by Squaretrade, a company that sells extended warranties for computers and phones. I won’t get into the ethics of selling warranties for brand-new computers that already carry OEM warranties.

The problem is that Squaretrade is in direct competition with Apple’s Applecare. A few quick searches on their website shows that their plans cost more than applecare and that they lack some of the features of applecare (phone support, apple store support, ups dropoff service, etc).

So my advice is to take that bar graph with a grain of salt.

-b

Re:Jive with anyone else’s experience. - by King_TJ (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Not sure what type of I.T. support you do, but could your experiences be a bit limited because you work in corporate I.T. where only certain brands and models were purchased in any quantity?

I’ve done quite a bit of on-site service for people, and my experiences line up fairly accurately with some of this. I definitely see a *lot* of HP notebook failures out there. Dell always seemed to me like they build “hit and miss” products. It’s a crap-shoot with them, essentially. They’ve produced some of the most durable and reliable laptops out there, and turned around and produced some total duds that practically ALL had failures in a 2 year time-frame. You can’t really make blanket statements about Dell because depending on when you analyze the data, they’re going to look really good, somewhere right in the middle, or really bad.

I used to like Toshiba products, but I’ve come to realize that they have a pretty high long-term failure rate. Satellites, especially, seem to suffer from a large number of motherboard issues. (Ever run across one that lets you power it on but powers right back off after 2 seconds or so? Usually a bad motherboard, and I run into it pretty often.) A buddy of mine had a Toshiba Qosmio (high-end media centric model) that died like that just out of the factory warranty period. Luckily, Toshiba had a “silent recall” on that one, which we found out about online. He was able to call in, demand they repair it under said recall, and get it fixed free — but only after getting past a 1st. level tech. on the phone who wanted to charge him for the repair and denied knowledge of any recall…

I haven’t had real good experiences with Sony laptops either, all in all. It seems like they build really attractive and sleek machines, but they break fairly easily.

I was a bit surprised that Lenovo didn’t rate better. I know their quality has gone downhill from back when IBM owned the Thinkpad line (and they weren’t assembled in China). but they still seem to take a lot of design cues from the IBM days, and as a result, seem fairly well-built. They tend to have fewer “bells and whistles” than some models too, so less stuff to go wrong.

And Apple? I have a lot of experience with their notebooks. They do need warranty service occasionally. The idea that “they practically never break!” is kind of a myth. I mean, they do use the same hard drives and displays as everyone else … But I’ve had better than average results getting an Apple notebook serviced by Apple while under warranty, and I think more people buy the AppleCare warranties on them up-front. If you have an issue and Apple overnights you a return mailer box to put it in, fixes it in 1 day, and overnights it back, how annoyed are you going to be about the problem vs. the guy with some other laptop that has to wait WEEKS for a repair? That’s what helps Apple keep in the lead with “customer satisfaction”, even if they don’t have the absolutely least likely to break systems.

Re:Jive with anyone else’s experience. - by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

According to consumer reports, the opposite has been true for a long time. Dell used to have terrible rates, and as of the last study, was doing poorly for desktops, but near the top for laptops. Apple consistently scores the highest for laptop reliability among all companies.

Re:What “legendary reliability of Macs”? - by Anonymusing (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

As someone who professionally provided tech support for Macs for more than 15 years, I have to disagree with you. I do think that when Macs have problems, they have BIG problems, but overall they have proven (to me anyway) that they are generally much more reliable than systems made by Windows PC vendors.

As for this SquareTrade article, it wouldn’t surprise me if Apple fell a few points behind other manufacturers, though I cannot possibly imagine why someone would buy a new Mac and get a SquareTrade warranty instead of Apple’s excellent 3-year warranty. Makes me wonder if the Macs covered by SquareTrade are largely used? You can’t buy them at Target.

I also find it very odd that this year’s SquareTrade report is almost entirely the reverse of last year’s, when HP came out on top. Also, Lenovo is calling shenanigans on this year’s data.

Re:What “legendary reliability of Macs”? - by SunnyDaze (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
And the reason for the MagSafe adapters is because in the old Mac books the Weak Power plugs were breaking off when someone hit them requiring a full main board replacement :D

Signal to Noise ratio over time