Whatsapp, WeChat and Facebook Messenger are probably the three most widely used messaging apps in the world. It would obviously be interesting to see how much of the /. crowd actually uses them. I personally checked Signal, having been a user and trying to promote its adoption for years.

However I also very grudgingly used Whatsapp until recently as my international contacts all used it exclusively. I have finally been able to erase my account and delete the app this month because people are finally waking up to the threat of Facebook and installing Signal enough to make it a true alternative.

WeChat is of course mostly used in the Sinosphere but I imagine there are plenty of /.ers who live partially in that world.

My dad's F-250 is used for hauling cows to the auction a dozen or so times a year, over 30 miles of nasty mountain roads; the rest of the time it mainly drives around our fairly mountainous ranch, hauling gear for redoing fences, towing a hay trailer and generally getting beat to hell by my dad and my brother's casual attitutde toward driving through brush and backing into things.

The CybrTrck looks to me like it would beat out the soon to be retired f250 on every spec. Better or equal hauling, at least in the higher trims, with plenty of range for runs to town with a trailer load of cows. Awesomely useful as a utility truck (it's got a frickin' air compressor and AC power 'generator' built in!), great off-road specs for going up and down the mountains. And the stainless steel body will probably hold up a heck of a lot better than the body panels on the Ford ever did to my dad's tendency to drive into things.

If this thing looked like a "normal truck", my dad would be buying one already, I guarantee it. But I think the out-there design is going to throw him for a curve. What will the other good ole boys say when he drives to the store?

While there is insight in your post, "they are a stabilizing force in the region," is frankly laughable. They are the single most destabilizing force in the region, and perhaps in the world, and they have been for more than a generation. Saudi oil money has financed and promoted jihadi terrorism throughout the Arab world and the broader Muslim world. Regarding the rest of what you said, yes, and then some: from what I've read, Saudi oil can be extracted from the ground "profitably" at anything over about 8 dollars a barrel, but the country's national budget (including a ludicrously high and also ludicrously ineffective military budget) requires something like 100 dollar a barrel oil now. As you note, they are spending down their foreign reserves so fast that they will be gone in five years and the Saudis will be running a deficit. And then they are screwed.

Yeah, it had only been operating for three months in the surveyed period, and they'd only spent $1.7 million dollars, meaning about $21,000 per job. Not too bad, and it's only 2 percent of the program's projected budget, according to the second linked article. The Dice.com 'article' is ridiculous equivalent to hiring a coder, then the next morning issuing a performance evaluation saying "he's only written 12 lines of code!"

This is not really a purely online college, as the poster describes. It's an interesting mix between online and offline: all the students are supposed to live together; they do their classes on computers. The physical location can change annually too. The Atlantic had a better article about Minerva a couple of months ago, and it's not behind a paywall: http://www.theatlantic.com/fea... What's really interesting is the instant and continuous feedback from the professor described here as the Minerva method. It sounds like truly scientific learning, a much better technique than the big lecture hall format, with students zoning out half the time.

Every grammar school kid knows that the other gas giants also have (faint) ring systems. How did the submitter AND the Slashdot editor put such a ridiculous mistake on the front page of a nerd site? (Also this is kind of old news, widely reported last week).

Reading the Effing Article suggests that this was a more or less planned separation, even before the crash. They were doing a contracted design/build for Virgin, and were supposed to handoff the project after successful completion of these test flights; Virgin decided (for publicity reasons I suspect) to take nominal control now. Also, note that Scaled Composites is now an (autonomous) unit of Northrop, so the end of their direct partnership with Virgin isn't a very big deal for Rutan and his team.

Well, with Ted Cruz taking over the Senate Committee on Science and Space (!), we can expect less support for weather modeling supercomputers, I suppose. Since those are the computers those pesky climate change scientists run their simulations on.

Glad somebody pointed this out. The Forbes writer, and the Slashdot headline and introduction are extremely, and in the case of Forbes intentionally, misleading. Who knows, the numbers may well be true. But to say that "Actual Results were Leaked" is a crock of shit; this is just some Putin-sock-puppet human rights "council" *speculating* on what the true numbers might have been. Sort of funny that his own people are saying this, but not actually informative. Makes you more suspicious of Forbes than anything else.

It's interesting that the Boston Globe's article talks about astrophysics and chemistry PhDs as if that is still where all the smart people end up.

I would say that one of this country's biggest problems is that we 'track' so many of our best and brightest into the financial 'industry' where their mathematical and creative talents are frittered away coming up with better arbitraging formulas and the like. In other words, not doing anything useful at all, just figuring out ways to make the overall economy more unstable and susceptible to crashes. If all of the great minds who ended up on Wall Street over the past two generations had ended up in science careers, there would have been less market instability, and more scientific and industrial advancement.

On a side note, it's too bad (and somewhat depressingly predictable) that the 'debate' here largely turned into a boring malthusian/eugenics discussion.

I deleted my Whatsapp account from my phone and my wife's as soon as this news broke for this precise reason. I don't want Facebook having my telephone number, IMEI, router information, etc.

But you make the very good point that all of my 2 dozen or so Whatsapp contacts that have my phone number will be giving it to Facebook anyway. As we are all well aware, Facebook's backend is VERY good at identifying who you are through its analysis of social networks [viz. the 'People You May Know' feature], so they will likely be able to fill in phone numbers for basically all of their users using Whatsapp's database, even if those users do not actually have a Whatsapp account.

When I lived in Egypt some years ago, before the fall of Mubarak, I used to hang out with quite a few anti-regime activist types. They would organize pathetic little demonstrations, frequently via Facebook. And every once in a while, if they were organizing something that the regime really didn't want them to do (demonstrating at the Interior Ministry or something), the government would come in and efficiently round up everyone who had checked in or whatever via Facebook, before the demo got started. It was pretty clear that they had penetrated the online social networks pretty thoroughly, either with or without help from Menlo Park. I've had a very healthy skepticism of Facebook ever since.

It's funny how when we were kids (and for generations before), the bugbear was the all-encompassing government surveillance state. And it has arrived, but it crept in through the ethernet port, with our own little voluntary checkmarks next to the User Agreement. And it came through private companies like Facebook and Google.

The ship has sailed.

As you say, cue the fawning Forbes ''analysis.''

The fact that Jan was on food stamps just a couple of years ago and now is worth something like 10 billion dollars on paper should say...something to all of the right wing assholes who hate on the poor for being shiftless losers, and who try to destroy the tiny little safety nets this country has left for people on the edge of starvation or homelessness.

Public key cryptography using open source tools that have been tested and retested by lots of other coders still works pretty well. The RSA backdoor you are referring to is certainly discouraging news. But on the other hand, the fact that RSA had backdoored itself was sort of understood by the community at large as far back as 2006, shortly after they issued the compromised tool. This week's news is merely confirmation. That's why PGP and its ilk, open source and made by activists, might be a better option than commercial tools by companies with a strict profit motive.

If you are really concerned about security, you might very well want to roll your own machine, and certainly should run a fresh, clean linux install off a CD every time you start up, to reduce the chances your machine is compromised.

anachragnome - that's a very interesting document. however to me it has the feel of someone speculating about how govt agents might take control of a forum, rather than a real instructional document. Any background info or further knowledge about it?