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Comment Re:Wrong Agency (Score 1) 486

I don't believe that's correct. AES is to the best of our knowledge uncrackable by the NSA with current computing resources. The flaws that have been discovered publically are minor and inconsequential. It is possible that the NSA has a practical attack against AES, and others but that they choose not to reveal this as GHCQ did not reveal their cracking of Enigma.

Practically this doesn't make much difference to 99.9% of us The NSA is unlikely to go after us little guys, the risk of revealing their secret would outweigh the benefit. However if you're ever holding the UN to ransom don't assume that AES, RSA et al are secure against a national government.

Comment Re:its a step in the right direction (Score 1) 278

IPython is an interactive interpreter that will allow you to skip the brackets in many cases, but you'll still need them in an script. Certain editors and IDEs have a mode that auto-complete/inserts the brackets.

The benefit of having print as a function, is that one can override it:

old_print = print

def print(*args, **kwargs):
        # Do something custom, maybe filtering, time stamping
        old_print(*args, **kwargs)

Using the logging module is normally a better approach than print though...

Games

Submission + - Geohot brings other OS support to PS3 with custom (engadget.com)

suraj.sun writes: Geohot brings back other OS support to PS3 with custom firmware 3.21OO :

Well, Geohot promised a workaround for Sony's removal of the "install other OS" feature in PS3 firmware 3.21 and now Geohot has delivered. While it's not available to the public just yet, Geohot's 3.21OO custom firmware will apparently be simple to install and, as you can see in the video after the break, it works just as you'd expect and simply restores the "other OS" option to its previous place. Geohot even says that the custom firmware might actually enable the other OS feature on the PS3 Slim, but he hasn't yet had a chance to try it out.

Engadget : http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/07/geohot-brings-back-other-os-support-with-ps3-3-21oo-custom-firmw/

Youtube : PS3 3.21 with OtherOS : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-9wLWQ4-uA

Science

Submission + - Finally, Element 117 Is Here! - ScienceNOW (sciencemag.org)

cremeglace writes: It's taken years, but physicists have finally filled in a persistent gap in the periodic table. Eight years after the creation of element 118, the heaviest known atom, researchers have made a few atoms of its slightly lighter neighbor, element 117, by shooting an intense beam of calcium ions into a target of berkelium. Besides sketching in the blank space in the table, the discovery bolsters the notion of an "island of stability," a group of superheavy nuclei still tantalizingly out of reach that theorists predict may be as stable as more familiar elements.

Comment Re:Oi, hippy, shut it. (Score 1) 328

Thank you for the examples. I fear Dos Equis counts as a bad use of Flash to my tastes, and I've found it annoying rather than stylish. It breaks use of the back/forward controls, bookmarking of pages. Text on The Most Interesting Show page is barely readable, and I cannot resize it. Admittedly it's better than , my usual example of bad Flash.

The game looks fun enough. Not sure why it can't be a real flash game, embedded in the page, rather than being restricted to Mac or Windows.

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