Contents

1. Brazilian Breaks Secrecy of Brazil’s E-Voting Machines With Van Eck Phreaking
2. Ten Things Mobile Phones Will Make Obsolete
3. Best Practices For Infrastructure Upgrade?
4. Microsoft, Other Rivals Slam Google Chrome OS
5. First Malicious iPhone Worm In the Wild
6. Berkeley Engineers Have Some Bad News About Air Cars
7. Has Sci-Fi Run Out of Steam?
8. NIMF To Close Its Doors
9. WHO Says Swine Flu May Have Peaked In the US
10. Apple Voiding Smokers’ Warranties?
11. Pittsburgh To Tax Students
12. Major Electronics Firms Support Ending Use of “Conflict Minerals”
13. Bing Censoring All Simplified Chinese Language Queries
14. Cyber Attacks On US Military Jump Sharply In 2009
15. RFID Fingerprints To Fight Tag Cloning
16. Try Out Chrome OS In a Virtual Machine
17. iPhone Game Piracy “the Rule Rather Than the Exception”
18. New Microsoft Silverlight Features Have Windows Bias
19. How Heavy Is the Internet?
20. Anti-Smoking Vaccine Is Nearing the Market

This happened with the Dutch in 2006 - by JoshuaZ (Score: 3, Informative) Thread
As discussed here in 2006, the Dutch had to modify their voting machines back in 2006 due to exactly this sort of attack. http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/14/1641239

Whew, that was a close one… - by robwgibbons (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
“Listening in” and actually breaking the security of the machine are two entirely different things. What’s the most someone could do with this exploit? Basically it just allows for a more accurate exit-poll. As far as I see it, the machine’s security has still yet to be bested.

Re:Whew, that was a close one… - by Vellmont (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread

 
What’s the most someone could do with this exploit? 
 
Uhh.. find out who someone voted for? All you need is two people, one in the polling place and someone else with one of these devices. If I really have to try to convince you of the value of secret votes, I give up.

Re:Whew, that was a close one… - by Animaether (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

What’s the most someone could do with this exploit? Basically it just allows for a more accurate exit-poll.

Basically.. all of the reasons you want voting to be done anonymously apply here.

If you can couple the emissions at the location of the machine with the emissions from a particular user - say, their mobile phone’s signature - then you can go back to forcing people to vote for X and make sure that they do, roughing them up as an example to the others you told to vote for X if you detected a vote for Y instead, without a need to plant something on them or leaving any trace.

In theory, anyway.

Re:Honestly - by robbak (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Several ideas. Of course, use LCDs, as the CRT circuitry is the bad one. Shield the data connections so they don’t radiate too much. Make the connections that transmit unencrypted data short. Use low-contrast fonts, so the sharp edges do not cause large voltage (and therefore EMI) spikes. Randomise the low bits of data shown on the screen, so you create obfuscating noise.

Maybe you have to go as far as have a white noise transmitter to mask what you cannot elimiate. Plenty of room to move. Good on them for having such a contest - it flushed out all the ‘Ooh, I didn’t think of that’ problems.

Neo-luddite - by mewsenews (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The author poignantly concludes that while it’s great to have so much power at our fingertips it does mean that some of us will rely on mobile phones for even basic mental tasks, which is great until the battery runs out.

Poignant? People tried to say the same thing about calculators in the 50s. Tools augment human capability, they can be a crutch but we’re a little far from walking in the jungle throwing spears, aren’t we?

I found an 11th thing… - by icebike (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

Another thing you can do on most modern web enabled phones is look up phrases like Begs the Question and see what a fool you are making of yourself prior to posting on slashdot.

http://begthequestion.info/

Brought to you by the obligatory and gratuitous grammar snarks.

Many features that I don’t even want. - by NoYob (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

When I got my phone, I bought it because it was the cheapest phone that had the ability to see who’s calling without having to answer. It so happens to have come with a camera which I never use because it sucks. Now, are the camera manufacturers counting my sale as someone who wanted a camera? Probably. There’s a few other features built into the phone that i looked at and never used because I have no use for them.

That’s the thing, there’s only so many choices and it’s impossible to get a phone that has a feature you want without getting a bunch of features that you don’t want. And if you find one, it may not be supported by your cell carrier.

Same Old Song, A Jack of all Trades - by dancingmad (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You keep hearing about the things that phones are going to replace and, at least for me, it’s never been true.

I like having a Nintendo DS. The iPhone has not provided a game with the depth of most AAA DS titles. It’s lack of buttons is a serious problem with gaming.

The camera isn’t as good as any half way decent point and shoot. I haven’t gotten a chance to play with any GPS software for any smart phone, but I hear there are limitations (including the need for cell service) that stand alone GPSes don’t have.

Even the music functions of an iPhone aren’t as good as a regular iPod or (gasp, because I love Apple gear) a Zune.

And yeah, you can use it as a watch, but any fashionable man knows that a watch is how a guy shows off. It’s the only acceptable piece of jewelry for the well dressed man.

Even today’s best smart phones are just communications devices with varying degrees of success. Occasionally a smart phone is “good enough” in a pinch; photographers like to say the best camera is the one you have with you, which certainly applies to smart phones. But if I know I want to play games or take pictures, I take my DS or my camera, or whatever. Phones haven’t and won’t - because each thing needs its own UI and software guidelines, no device is going to be able to do it all well.

Stones and rocks - by El_Muerte_TDS (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

They also make stones obsolete. I don’t long have to throw rocks at a window, I can just throw my phone.

Simple and straightforward = complex - by sphealey (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

So let’s see if I understand: you want to take a simple, straightforward, easy-to-understand architecture with no single points of failure that would be very easy to recover in the event of a problem and extremely easy to recreate at a different site in a few hours in the event of a disaster, and replace it will a vastly more complex system that uses tons of shiny new buzzwords. All to serve 150 end users for whom you have quantified no complaints related to the architecture other than it might need to be sped up a bit (or perhaps find a GUI interface for the ftp server, etc).

This should turn out well.

sPh

As far as “distributed redundant system”, strongly suggested you read Moans Nogood’s essay “You Don’t Need High Availability” and think very deeply about it before proceeding.

What 150 users? - by painehope (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

I’d say that everyone has mentioned that big picture points already, except for one : what kind of users?

150 file clerks or accountants and you’ll spend more time worrying about the printer that the CIO’s secretary just had to have which conveniently doesn’t have reliable drivers or documentation, even if it had what neat feature that she wanted and now can’t use.

150 programmers can put a mild to heavy load on your infrastructure, depending on what kind of software they’re developing and testing (more a function of what kind of environment are they coding for and how much gear they need to test it).

150 programmers and processors of data (financial, medical, geophysical, whatever) can put an extreme load on your infrastructure. Like to the point where it’s easier to ship tape media internationally than fuck around with a stable interoffice file transfer solution (I’ve seen it as a common practice - “hey, you’re going to the XYZ office, we’re sending a crate of tapes along with you so you can load it onto their fileservers”).

Define your environment, then you know your requirements, find the solutions that meet those requirements, then try to get a PO for it. Have fun.

Take your time - by BooRadley (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

If you’re like most IT managers, you probably have a budget. Which is probably wholly inadequate for immediately and elegantly solving your problems.

Look at your company’s business, and how the different offices interact with each other, and with your customers. By just upgrading existing infrastructure, you may be putting some of the money and time where it’s not needed, instead of just shutting down a service or migrating it to something more modern or easier to manage. Free is not always better, unless your time has no value.

Pick a few projects to help you get a handle on the things that need more planning, and try and put out any fires as quickly as possible, without committing to a long-term technology plan for remediation.

Your objective is to make the transition as boring as possible for the end users, except for the parts where things just start to work better.

Think about the complexity of duplication - by El Cubano (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

there’s hardly any fallback if any of the services dies or an office is disconnected. Now, as the hardware must be replaced, I’d like to buff things up a bit: distributed instances of services (at least one instance per office) and a fallback/load-balancing scheme (either to an instance in another office or a duplicated one within the same).

Is that really necessary? I know that we all would like to have bullet-proof services. However, is the network service to the various offices so unreliable that it justifies the added complexity of instantiating services at every location? Or even introducing redundancy at each location? If you were talking about thousands or tens of thousands of users at each location, it might make sense just because you would have to distribute the load in some way.

What you need to do is evaluate your connectivity and its reliability. For example:

• How reliable is the current connectivity?
• If it is not reliable enough, how much would it cost over the long run to upgrade to a sufficiently reliable service?
• If the connection goes down, how does it affect that office? (I.e., if the Internet is completely inaccessible, will having all those duplicated services at the remote office enable them to continue working as though nothing were wrong? If the service being out causes such a disruption that having duplicate services at the remote office doesn’t help, then why bother?)
• How much will it cost over the long run to add all that extra hardware, along with the burden of maintaining it and all the services running on it?

Once you answer at least those questions, then you have the information you need in order to make a sensible decision.

I’d say - by pele (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

don’t touch anything if it’s been up and running for the past 7 years. if you really must replicate then get some more cheap boxes and replicate. it’s cheaper and faster than virtual anything. if you must. but 150 users doesn’t warrant anything in my oppinion. I’d rather invest in backup links (from different companies) between offices. you can bond them for extra throughput.

Microsoft fail; Google holding back details? - by hattig (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Microsoft aren’t considering:

1) ARM version of Chrome OS - means $199 smartbooks instead of $299-$499 netbooks running Windows XP or Windows 7.

2) OS is free.

3) Actually Google might be offering a share of advertising revenue to manufacturers, as with Android. This means that the OS has a negative cost. We could see $149 smartbooks. Who is interested in a Windows 7 netbook at 3x the cost then?

4) Good enough for a second/cloud computer. Especially if it supports the “home cloud” with support for DNLA (media streaming) and other common home/office services.

However there are failings - firstly I think that Google need to make the OS Android compatible. I.e., installing the Dalvik VM and Android APIs by default. Android 2 allows higher resolutions. Android 3 will surely support resolutions up to smartbook (1024x600, 1366x768) and running an app as a tab within Chrome OS, allowing a unified platform. Surely therefore Chrome OS smartbooks will include multitouch displays…

Also Chrome OS 1 will surely be rough, like Android 1 and the G1. Droid is showing what Android 2 can do, and it’s far more mature. Android 3 will probably be the first all-rounded and sweetly remembered variant. Android 4 will be good too. Android 5 through 7 will be dire.

Google has lots of time to get it right - by rmcd (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

What people don’t get about Google’s software is that they are not selling it. That’s not where their revenue comes from. They can spend a lot of time getting the software right, refocusing it, tweaking it, getting comments. Microsoft by contrast has to come out with the big “impressive” release every few years to keep the company afloat. That’s their business model. It’s not Google’s.

Look at Android. 18 months ago the cell phone execs were all saying that Google didn’t understand how hard it is to create cellular phone software. The G1 got a lot of yawns. That reception would have been a disaster for Apple, but for Google it didn’t matter, they just kept working on it. Today, Android is a serious competitor.

Whatever Chrome does or doesn’t do can be changed. And maybe it will flop. That won’t be a huge deal for Google as long as they get their advertising on the next generation of devices.

Attack boot time? - by RiotingPacifist (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

IMO the key selling points for chrome are:

1) Zero user maintenance

2) Security (the thing is even resistant against user-space malware), even Linux distros are years away from sand-boxing desktop apps

3) Simple UI

Even if they were impressed, stunned even… - by w0mprat (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
… it’s part of their paycheck to not be impressed with anything let alone admit it to the media.  
 
Do they use a press release response form ticking the checkboxes for all the usual lines?  
 
Oh come on, Chrome is no threat to desktops, because people will still need their rich apps on high-spec hardware, therefore desktops will be still around as a do-everything machine. Partly though, because laptops netbooks and smartphones haven’t killed desktops yet. I fear though, Microsoft has for a long time been making Windows a one size fits all requirements OS, the indentical OS gets put on netbooks to top end workstations. Chrome OS will appeal people who just want web and social networking and a bit of mucking around with their digital photos, but previously had to fork out for more than they needed in a laptop and desktop.  
 
Having played around with the virtual machine images circulating, I don’t think it’s a threat to anything, but it looks pretty solid for a beta OS, but finally the ideal OS for the focused web tablet we’ve all been wanting for a long time. I also imagine the code could be rolled into existing linux distributions. It could coexist alongside other desktop environments ie KDE/Gnome, although I don’t think Chrubuntu would be a very catch name.  
 
Oh and it’s Linux, open source, if it is lacking any features we will fix it okay?

smartphone — a press of a button and you are - by jamesh (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

I don’t know what smartphones they are referring to. My iPhone and my laptop are seldom ‘off’. They both go into standby when i’m not using them, the times to come out of standby are very similar, and if I actually had to type a password into my iPhone to bring it out of standby the computer would beat it by far.

Has Mr Hobbs never turned a smartphone on from a complete off state? There is a negligible difference between booting my iPhone vs my Windows XP laptop. My old HP iPaq wasn’t much different.

Abstraction - by gmuslera (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread
You just do this and that happens. As in “you run this and your phone gets even more awesome” or “you’ll shut down your firewall be able to get movies in your pc” or things like that. But you dont have to understand what are really doing, or all that it implies. People are getting powerful things, and as childs are irresponsible about what could happen because their actions because they don’t understand them. 
 
It seem plain clear to us that having a common, default admin passwords in all the jailbroken devices is a very bad policy, but how many times we could had fell in a similar situation were are us who don’t understand fully what we are using i.e. in other areas? 
 
To make things worse, we complain a lot about products that takes the “safest” choice for us, not giving enough control/customization to the final (knowing enough?) user, making those impopular and so not taken even by the people that don’t know (or don’t want to know).

Wait a second? - by cluge (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
>Owners of a jailbroken iPhone with a default root password are advised to flash  
>to the latest Apple firmware in order to ensure no malware is present.”

If they flash to the latest apple firmware, will they be able to

• 1. Use the network of their choice
• 2. Run non apple allowed apps (skype)
• 3. Play their music without DRM

Most importantly - will they be able to jailbreak the device after the update?

I see a future where Apple, the RIAA, and others might wish to write worms to help prevent people from hacking their devices or brick devices that have been “hacked”.

Why a default password? - by harmonise (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

why is SSH being installed with a default password left in place? Talk about asking for trouble.

There’s an app for that! - by zach_the_lizard (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
Finally! Now I can tell my friends that my iPhone can run all the stuff my desktop can!

Excessive? - by ickleberry (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

That seems a bit excessive when a simple one-time usage of the included “passwd” utility will suffice. Srsly though, jailbreaking utilities should be pestering users to change their password from the default because this is only scaring less-knowledgeable folk into thinking Jailbreak == viruses

No kidding? - by Brett Buck (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

This is a surprise to someone? Who ever though this *could* work? Certainly not anyone with any knowledge of thermodynamics. The only compressed -gas systems that even have a chance of working are those that store the working fluid as a liquid, meaning it has to be able to be liquified at room temperature at a reasonable pressure (few hundred PSI at most). Otherwise the tanks are huge and heavy (meaning it will barely move under power) or they are small and heavy (meaning it has no range). Two excellent working fluid for this purpose are - wait for it - CO2 and Freon! Oops.

          Brett

Time for a new tagline - by heffrey (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Slashdot - news for idiots, stuff that’s obvious

Re:I guess congratulations are in order - by bmajik (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

The problem of humanity is one of the capture, storage, and application of energy.

Gasoline is a fantastic medium for energy storage: it’s a better battery than any battery we know how to cheaply produce and service, and that’s why we use it. But the energy capture function for gasoline [getting the energy into the gasoline] sucks. And the energy dispersal/application of gasoline has some environmentalists pretty upset.

Nature gives us many ways to store energy now and release it later. The chemical combustion of gasoline is one such mechanism. The desire of a compressed gas to push forcefully against its container is another such mechanism. The strong nuclear bindig energy is a particulary potent and pervasive mechanism. The specific heat of water is yet another.

The fundamental mechanisms of energy storage have been known about for a long time. Taken as a complete system to let humanity accomplish some goal, we are concerned with how we capture the energy, how much of it we can store [and at what cost], and how easy it is to get it back out in a form condusive to the sort of work we want to do with it.

As technology changes we must continually re-evaluate the end-to-end story for a particular aqcuisition/storage/application energy cycle. We may find that we are willing to tolerate a 100 fold decrease in energy storage performance for a 200 fold increase in acquisition efficiency and a qualitative improvement in application performance.

For instance, if i live in arizona and i have a sterling-engine powered air compressor that pumps my 50G tank to 100psi after 12 hours of sunlight, and this lets me go about 10 miles with no consumption of anything other than sunlight… I’m interested. If i commute 5 miles each way, I can get to work and back using nothing but solar energy. And unlike with PV panels and electrical batteries, a guy with a pipe threading die and a welder could build refueling system in his garage, out of stuff that has zero environmental impact whatsoever.

I think that’s cool. I’m obviously playing fast and loose with the numbers. Since the kJ/m^2 of solar radiation is known at gridsquares all over north america, you could actually make some ballpark efficiency guesses about peices of the process and plug in real numbers to my hypothetical example. Even if reality is 1 mile @ 30mph after 8 hrs of sunlight.. that fits _some_ usage profile.

It used to be that every farm in North Dakota [where I live] had a windmill powering the farm. Then they disappeared and became an anachronism paying homage to a bygone era. Now windmills are dotting the countryside again. It didn’t get windier here.

What changed?

The physics of energy capture, storage, and dispersion have always been the same; our efficiency and the context of the problem space continue to change. As such we must constantly re-evaluate what we did in the past against the realities of today.

You should use two measures of electric vehicles - by presidenteloco (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The significant fact about electric (or hydrogen fuel cell), or electrically compressed air vehicles 
is that electricity (and hence hydrogen via electrolysis, or compressed air tanks) can be generated 
in all manner of relatively or completely “green” ways, whereas fossil-fuel transportation is 
at least presently restricted to getting its fuel by digging up stored carbon from the Earth at 
unsustainable rates.

So electric vehicles (or hydrogen fuel cell, or even relatively inefficient compressed air) vehicles, 
are stepping stones on the path to a non-GHG producing future energy system.

So the “green-ness” or carbon footprint of these electrically based technologies should be 
measured with two separate baselines:

1. What would their carbon footprint be if all electricity was generated with carbon-neutral generation 
methods such as wind/solar/geothermal/hydro/wave/nuclear.

2. What is the carbon footprint assuming the US continues to maintain arguably the most carbon-dirty 
electrical generating mix in the world.

Measured in this light, it can be seen that the complete issue is changing the electrical power source for the 
US, in parallel with adopting one or multiple forms of transportation technology that is electrically based. 
Either change without the other does not work. Both are necessary for effective improvement in emissions 
reduction of transportation.

Re:Zero Emissions are worse?? - by commodore64_love (Score: 5, Informative) Thread

>>>all those Prius owners don’t really seem to care about Lithum strip mines

Prius cars don’t use lithium. They use nickle and hydride, and when disposed are no more harmful than throwing-away coins and water. (Although recycling the metal would be better.)

Maybe it’s the publishing side that’s the problem - by ThousandStars (Score: 3, Insightful) Thread
I doubt science fiction has “run out of steam,” in terms of authors or imagination any more than science or technology has run out of steam due to a lack of imagination. Rather, I wonder if the science fiction publishing business has either run out of steam or become an active roadblock between writers and readers. It seems that most publishers are trying a play-it-safe approach that demands giving out the same thing over and over again.

This is based partially on what I see in bookstores and partially on my own experience, which I discuss extensively in Science fiction, literature, and the haters. It begins:

Why does so little science fiction rise to the standards of literary fiction?

This question arose from two overlapping events. The first came from reading Day of the Triffids (link goes to my post); although I don’t remember how I came to the book, someone must’ve recommended it on a blog or newspaper in compelling enough terms for me to buy it. Its weaknesses, as discussed in the post, brought up science fiction and its relation to the larger book world.

The second event arose from a science fiction novel I wrote called Pearle Transit that I’ve been submitting to agents. It’s based on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—think, on a superficial level, “Heart of Darkness in space.” Two replies stand out: one came from an agent who said he found the idea intriguing but that science fiction novels must be at least 100,000 words long and have sequels already started. “Wow,” I thought. How many great literary novels have enough narrative force and character drive for sequels? The answer that came immediately to mind was “zero,” and after reflection and consultation with friends I still can’t find any. Most novels expend all their ideas at once, and to keep going would be like wearing a shirt that fades from too many washes. Even in science fiction, very few if any series maintain their momentum over time; think of how awful the Dune books rapidly became, or Arthur C. Clarke’s Rama series. A few novels can make it as multiple-part works, but most of those were conceived of and executed as a single work, like Dan Simmons’ Hyperion or Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (more on those later).

The minimum word count bothers me too. It’s not possible for Pearle Transit to be stretched beyond its present size without destroying what makes it coherent and, I hope, good. By its nature it is supposed to be taunt, and much as a 120-pound person cannot be safely made into a 240-pound person, Pearle Transit can’t be engorged without making it like the bloated star that sets its opening scene. If the market reality is that such books can’t or won’t sell, I begin to tie the quality of the science fiction I’ve read together with the system that produces it.

If the publishing system itself is broken and nothing yet has grown up to take its place (I have no interest in trolling through thousands of terrible novels uploaded to websites in search of a single potential gem, for those of you Internet utopians out there), maybe the source of the genre’s troubles isn’t where PC Pro places it.

Short Answer - by chrisG23 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Yes.  
 
Sci-Fi lost the last of its steam when it switched from being Science Fiction to being Sci Fi. It’s been part of a continuing downward spiral where while there have been more offerings recently, especially in mainstream culture, these offerings are increasingly more and more derivative and uninspired.  
 
Give me media that is challenging, that is new, that is alien, give me speculative fiction, good writing, things that make me go hmmmmmm. Or get off my fucking lawn and go make your garbage elsewhere.  
 
*Disclaimer: I know science fiction was never as great as I’d like to think it was. But I’ve read things and seen movies that really were great for their time, and for ours. This is what should have driven the direction of Science Fiction. Call an action movie in space what it is, an action move in space (or the future, or an alternate reality, or any other tired setting.)

Why SF is dead. - by Animats (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

The real problem is that most of the big themes in classical SF require vast amounts of energy. And that’s not happening. There hasn’t been a new source of energy in fifty years, just marginal improvements in the old ones. This matters.

That’s why space travel is a bust. With chemical fuels, it will never be more than an overly expensive, marginal enterprise. The better ‘50s SF writers all knew this; read Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon”. They just assumed that, somehow, the energy problem would be cracked. Didn’t happen. So space travel remains an expensive ego trip for countries and billionaires.

Industrial civilization is only 200 years old. 1808, the first time someone bought a train ticket on a commercial railroad and went someplace, is a good starting point. Industrial abundance, being able to make more stuff than people could consume, only goes back to WWII.

During most of the 20th century, “progress” was a big theme. We don’t hear that phrase used much any more. The number by which one measures “progress” for the average Joe, “per capita median real income for urban wage earners”, peaked in 1973. (Median income, not average income; the average is biased by wealth concentration to rich people.) Back then, a guy without a high school diploma could get a job at GM and make enough to buy a house, two cars, a boat, and an education for his kids. That’s over. (You don’t see that number mentioned much any more. It was heavily publicized back when the US boasted “the highest standard of living in the world”.)

Now we’re starting to run out of energy and raw materials. Nobody serious thinks there’s enough left to sustain current output for another century, let alone bring China and India up to US levels of consumption.

It’s hard to write good SF about “the great winding down”. It’s been done, but it’s not read much. The glory days of SF coincide with the period during which “progress” was a win for the little guy.

That’s why SF is dead. The plausible future sucks.

Re:Why SF is dead. - by crazyjimmy (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

I think you’re right, in a lot of ways. However, I suspect a chunk of the problem is that the best path to better energy begins with that N word people are so afraid of embracing. Our society has discovered a new form of fire, and it scares us. Until we’re willing to actually embrace it (dangers of use and all), we’re going to be stuck in our caves.  
 
—Jimmy

No - by wembley fraggle (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

No, it hasn’t.

Science fiction isn’t about “telling the future”, it’s about making commentary about the Human Condition, putting together entertaining yarns, looking at what-if scenarios in society. Do you think PKD really believed any of the futuristic technology he talked about (read Ubik for a nice example) was really possible? Who knows - it’s just a necessary condition to set up the scenario in which we can see interesting ideas play ouy.

Any quick read of the New Masters of SF (china mieville, ian macdonald, iain m banks, ken mcleod, dan simmons) will show you that the genre is alive, kicking, and more literary than ever before.

And so we say farewell… - by Chris Mattern (Score: 4, Funny) Thread

…to the Rats of NIMF.

Economic climate… or lack of concern? - by Somebody Is Using My (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Is NIMF’s inability to procure funding just a sign of the harsh economic climate or is it an indication that people are becoming less concerned with the issues it promoted. 15 years ago, computer and video games were making the transition from “toys for children” (Sonic, Mario) to more graphic and mature titles (Doom, Duke Nukem). Parents and (older) adults saw these gore-soaked, stripper-filled games and wondered what effect this would have on the younger generation. Worriedly, they funded -through contributions or taxes- groups like NIMF.

More than a decade later, a generation has come of age having played these games for most of their lives and -surprise, surprise!- they are not any more messed up than any previous generation. Video games, it seems, are not the corrupting influence people thought they might be. Not only are the supporters of yesteryear lest likely to fund these groups, but the same generation NIMF etal were meant to protect -now grown up themselves- are equally unlikely to open their pocketbooks to them.

Claiming it is merely the “economic climate” that is shutting down these groups is buying into their argument that there is a necessity for the services they provide but that harsher realities requires our finances to be redirected to more essential things. People generally consider “protecting the children” to be a priority. That NIMF is closing is just as likely an indication that we recognize they are not necessary to keep the kids safe because there never was any real danger to them in the first place.

Re:Economic climate… or lack of concern? - by Tim C (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread

Either that, or the Video Game Bogeyman has been replaced by the Terrorism Bogeyman, and people are simply concentrating on that instead.

violence is go - by czarangelus (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
We lost the war on exploding craniums, explicit torture, and visible viscera - but as long as penises, vaginas, and boobs are still kept off limits in a game by adults for adults, we can consider this a victory.

Fortunately - by Dunbal (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

This is one good thing that comes with economic hardship. Idiotic, wasteful, inefficient ideas like this get swept away in the tide while people start focusing on more important issues, like keeping a roof over their heads or feeding and clothing themselves and their children.

      We need many more years of economic hardship to get rid of all the free-loaders who make a living from telling other people how guilty they should be feeling, or making nonsensical claims with no evidence to back them up.

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.

Yes, it is less now … - by kbahey (Score: 4, Informative) Thread

Here in Canada, my doctor said yesterday that he is seeing a drop in people coming in with flu symptoms. It used to be more in the past few weeks.

Also, Google Flu Trends shows a marked drop. In the USA, there is a drop too.

I have also observed less absence at my little kid’s school as well.

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.

Relevance - by Pete Venkman (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Isn’t the peak something that you talk about later when you are analyzing the data? Of what relevance is it to discuss a peak in this current cycle?

What about cat owners? - by Kartoffel (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

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

Re:What about cat owners? - by canajin56 (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread
Bullshit, in 6 months I build up enough shit on my air vents to almost partially block them (almost), and most of it is dust, not cat hair. Meanwhile, a buddy in highschool had two smoking parents. They got their first computer and within a month it was crashing. Opened it up, entire thing was coated in yellow greasey shit that smells like smoke, and dust sticks to it. Tried using canned air, nope, had to wipe it off by hand. Nastiest thing ever, and no shit it’s a health hazard to get near it. But even wiping it doesn’t get the greasy tar off, it’s on there forever, and more dust will just cement to it immediately. Smoking near a computer should void the warranty, as you’re intentionally causing damage to the cooling components.

Re:What about cat owners? - by BrianRoach (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Sorry, but as you say, bullshit.

Unless you’re chain smoking 3 packs a day in a small, closed room while exhaling directly into the thing … not happening.

I smoked for 20 years, and owned who knows how many computers during that time … none of them have ever resembled what you describe.

I now live in a high desert climate and we own two dogs. That requires regular, thorough cleaning or the things will overheat. It also can really reduce the life of the fans. (Same goes for my stereo receiver, and a couple other consumer boxes)

And as I also posted in another thread, I used to run a motorcycle shop. You should see what those PCs go through, especially the one used to run the dynamometer.

So … unless you want to exclude the 10 million other environments that can have a detrimental effect on the PC, you’re simply picking one because the cause has become socially unacceptable by a large group of people.

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.

Re:Two Thumbs UP! - by BrianRoach (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You might actually have a point … if they also voided warranties for people who owned pets.

Or lived in dusty climates. Or where computers were used in places like … motorcycle shops. Or, any of the myriad of conditions that would have the exact same effect on the computer.

See, this is yet another example of where the logic of singling out one stupid little thing while ignoring 10 million others somehow makes sense.

I own dogs and live in a high desert climate … it requires regular cleaning of the PCs with an air compressor. The fans suck in dog hair like you wouldn’t believe, and there’s *always* dust here in the summer no matter what you do. I can gauge the “cleaning cycle” by how much the variable speed fans are running in the box (which right now is at “You should really clean me” by the amount of noise coming from the machine)

I also used to run a motorcycle shop. You should see what those PCs look like after a while, especially the one that’s used to run the dynamometer. (Badly running vehicles spit out a lot of soot, not to mention all the other residues from various vapors from cleaning chemicals)

So … exclude everything else that could possibly harm the PC, and you have a point. Otherwise, you’re picking one little thing out of many simply because the cause has become a socially unacceptable behaviour.

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.

How about some other ideas? - by SleepyHappyDoc (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Why not a politician tax, somewhere around 1% of their annual income, for the privilege of being a politician?

If it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander.

Churches - by Stiletto (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread

Yet, we’re still not taxing churches…

Oh the Burden of Soon to be Educated and Employed - by knapper_tech (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Lifeblood sucking students who contribute nothing to society and ruthlessly download music and movies must pay their toll just like all the rest of us hard working people with income. We all had spare change during school to throw at the municipal government. Why can’t they? 
 
And while we’re at it, we need to tax other non-contributing members of society who place a burden on social services. I’m all for a tax on K-12 students, a tax on pre-schoolers, a tax on the disabled, senior citizens tax, and a tax on people who have crimes committed against them. 
 
After all, with all the student financing available, they’ll just pay it with loans right? So it’s like we’re actually taxing their future income!

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

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.

Re:Irony - by Grishnakh (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

You’ve got to be kidding. China is no paragon of human rights, but they certainly don’t abuse them to the extent seen in war-torn African countries, where rape and murder are common. The only thing that China does that sucks is that they practice censorship, keeping strong control over the media. They’re also quick to use the death penalty, but that’s not really that bad; they’re not executing innocent fishermen, they’re executing convicted criminals. Yes, Tianenmen was bad, but that was a long time ago. They haven’t had any incidents like that in quite a while (and with today’s technology, including iPods with video recording, it would be much harder to keep such a thing covered up). China’s government is all about building up the country for the benefit of the people, and keeping strong control over social order. Their methods are harsh, but their intent is basically positive. They believe their methods are necessary in their culture to achieve the goals they’ve set. Trying to turn someplace like Iraq, for instance, into an advanced country would require similar methods, as democracy would never work there. To compare China to African warlords who are all in favor of genocide is just insulting.

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.

Google maps and satellit images do not match at TS - by j-beda (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

Interestingly, for Tianamen Square, the google maps location seems to be about a block east of the satellite photo:

http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=tiananmen+square,+china&sll=-25.335448,135.745076&sspn=39.349464,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Tiananmen+Square,+Dongcheng,+Beijing,+China&ll=39.903745,116.393924&spn=0.016559,0.036564&t=h&z=15

compared to

http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=tiananmen+square,+china&sll=-25.335448,135.745076&sspn=39.349464,79.013672&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Tiananmen+Square,+Dongcheng,+Beijing,+China&ll=39.903745,116.393924&spn=0.016559,0.036564&z=15

I wonder if their maps are shifted or their images are shifted? Anyone in Beijing have a GPS handy to get a reading for the square?

hmmmm - by the_other_one (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
I have been self censoring my bing english language querys.

Microsoft has become as evil as Google? - by pedantic bore (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

Gasp!

Once we’re boycotting all the search engines that have caved into to the demands of the Chinese government, what search engines are left?

Chinese - by TopSpin (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Bing censors at the “request” of the Chinese government. Google censors at the “request” of the Chinese government. Yahoo censors at the “request” of the Chinese government. As a result of whatever you care to attribute the subservience of the Chinese people, 21% of our species is subject to the filtering policies of the Chinese government. Ultimately the Chinese must be the the reason this tyranny comes to an end. Or not.

The marketing companies of the West aren’t interested in fighting their battles. Stop expecting ad pimps to be responsible for liberating anyone. Instead, raise your expectations of the Chinese.

Re:Chinese - by elnyka (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

Not us anyone, but themselves. There is no reason to despair for 1.34B that prove ultimately incapable of liberating themselves. Most of their wounds since the late 1800’s are culturally self induced.

It’d be nice to see them finally get the fuck up as a modern, democratic (or at least humane in the modern sense) nation, but there is a point that you just go “agh, WTF” and just sit back and watch the train wreck, waiting to see if it implodes into a self-sucking black hole, hoping it doesn’t fuck up nearby nations in the process.

I find it deplorable that search engines, corps and entire governments bend over to China’s economic might and implement/look over things that are unjustifiable by any modern notion of morality. But social reform is not their job or duty - that’s the people’s. The onus is eventually on them.

One could argue that knowledge is power, and that by removing search access to them you deprive them of the ability to fight for freedom. But the Chinese as a whole aren’t some tiny tinie minority fighting for survival with bows and arrows. They have always proved themselves resourceful, and at some point they need to take responsibility for their own destiny.

Their freedom is not dependent on western search engines or corporations choosing to fight a moral fight that is not their own and for which they are not capable of even dreaming to win. Freedom, freedom in the modern sense of the world as people in the developed world knows, that depends on them, the Chinese people.

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.

Re:Garbage - by justinlee37 (Score: 4, Insightful) Thread
Who knows, maybe you are the one spreading propaganda. Someone could have faked the evidence of this “50 cent gang” in order to make China look bad. Basically both sides have the motivation to do this sort of thing and it can be hard to figure out who is who sometimes.

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.

Nope. You are not targeted - by WindBourne (Score: 4, Interesting) Thread
You are simply the result of the many worms working its way through the net. All Western DOD’s are under attack and are actively targeted.

This is nothing new - by ian_mackereth (Score: 5, 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.

Define killer app - by Art3x (Score: 5, Insightful) Thread

I don’t know about you, but long battery life to me would be a killer app. I think that the standard six hours or less shows a peculiar lack of any progress. Sure, I can go to a coffee shop with my laptop. But I can’t relax at a coffee shop with my laptop. How long will a smart-phone CPU with a notebook-sized battery last, I wonder?

I also consider a boot time of less than 10 seconds a killer app. The standard 45 seconds or more that even Windows XP (old) on my Core 2 Duo (new) gives me is baffling after 25 years of the PC. (Really, its more like two minutes before it is really ready to give me attention.) If my computer shuts down in two seconds and boots in three, l wouldn’t plan my morning around it: “Time to make coffee —- no, wait, start the computer before you make coffee, then it will be ready at the same time.”

Security is also a killer app. Encrypted home directory + read-only root + twin root partitions + a lot of other things = a lot more peace of mind. What if my laptop is stolen? Well, at least they’re not going to find anything on it. My house guest is asking me if he can borrow my laptop. If it’s a Windows laptop, I (but admittedly not the average user) will do a quick mental check —- do I have anything private on it that he might see? Is he going to accidentally download a virus on it? Etc. Sure, I can do things so that it will be less of a problem, but it’s a lot easier if the computer already is set up as much as Chrome OS is for sharing.

Now that I look at them, what do these things all have in common? A less-stressed user experience. I don’t have to think as much as I used to about taking care of my computer. Sure, it won’t run Final Cut Pro. But I say, you should have made these the priorities —- at least with some —- any of your models. Get battery life, boot speed, and security to where you would have expected to be in the 21st century. Then branch out to fancy applications. Which is exactly what will probably happen. Browsers are only getting abler.

Fast download - by R.Mo_Robert (Score: 5, Funny) Thread

I’m on dial-up, you insensitive clod!

ChromeOS is a Good Thing! - by a.ameri (Score: 5, Interesting) Thread

ChromeOS is a very good move for everyone involved. Remember, this OS and the devices it will run on are not targeting average slashdotters. I can personally vouch that I come across daily contact with people, business people not just teenagers, who don’t use anything other than their browser. The worst aspect of a computer for them, is upgrading, updating all applications, viruses, malware, and general maintenance of the system. They nearly all fail in these, and after a year, they think their laptop is not usable anymore and go and buy a new one. They would LOVE this OS, and are they primary targets of it. Also, synchronisation between multiple computers is a bitch, that even they most fail at. And they hate leaving their documents here and there. Files and directories don’t work for them, it’s a broken metaphor for most people, and as much as love to organise my files in hierarchical directories, they simply don’t care. They just want access to their information, when they need, as conveniently as possible.

I hate Web apps as much as the next guy on this forum, and even use my trusty IMAP client for fetching my emails from Gmail. But I can’t deny that web apps are the future, specially when HTML 5 comes off age and becomes widespread. If you look back at what the Web looked like 5 years ago and compare it to now, you’ll see that it will be irresistible in 5 years time. Have a look at http://www.chromeexperiments.com/ to get a taste of what we are looking at.

On a more general note, anyone who is comparing this to old failed projects based on thin clients, X terminals or net pcs, is missing the point. Yes, the technology behind this might be similar to those, but times are changing. On the one hand, people are getting used to ever-present always-available services. On the other hand, 3G is now widespread, affordable, and provides great utility for many. Laptops and phones are converging. 2007 was the year of netbooks, 2010 might be the year of smartbooks (running ARM processors). Smartphones are morphing into Internet tablets (e.g,, N900). These are very different, and interesting times.

Yes, this is cloud computing, and yes, it raises huge privacy issues. It is up to us the tech savvy crown to raise these issues and address them.

Slashdotters can always run their trusty Debian or Fedora or FreeBSD or on their computer. And they remain great choices. But Google is pushing applications to go online and cross browser. They are pushing for open source drivers. They are pushing for open standards and cooperation with upstream and downstream projects. This is a Good Thing (TM) for all of us, even if we are not the target consumers of this OS.

Shameless Plug - by Jrabbit05 (Score: 5, Informative) Thread
Torrent and Info: http://pastie.org/706872 http://dl.dropbox.com/u/457451/ide.vmdk.torrent Because making an account on some shady website that’s exploiting the situation seems wrong.

Change to GNU/Linux/Chorome OS… Quick! - by imaniack (Score: 5, Funny) Thread
before RMS crashes the party!

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:Hey, Submitter! - by DNS-and-BIND (Score: 4, Funny) Thread
The point is to get people angry and accomplish positive change. I have a problem with you criticizing a very valid tactic used daily by working journalists. Who the hell are you to judge? You can’t do that by dryly reporting a mind-numbingly boring story in didactic terms. You do that by “taking an angle” on the story, and making it relevant to people’s lives.

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

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.

Signal to Noise ratio over time