I didn't bother to read the article, but I imagine it says a bunch of laser beams come out around a circle and then magically combine into a big beam that goes straight out from the circle. So give the credit to George Lucas' production artists.

I've been wondering for months what's with the onslaught of "new" ideas and inventions being touted on Slashdot that anyone half-conscious would see have known have been around for decades. Secretly, I figured it was ignorant 19-year-olds who had simply never seen the technology develop. Now I see even CmdrTaco doing this and it's not even April Fools' Day. and he's GOT to be older than 19. So WTH?????

You plugged a strange USB device into a machine with you logged in as an admin? Why would you do that? Have you ever heard of logging in as a standard user and running admin tasks using admin commands? Can even be done in Windows using the "Run As..." command.

"Security expert" is probably about the same level of expertise as Jen of The IT Crowd. It seems to me that anyone with any technical expertise has been run out of every corporation and government position. That's how it was in the company that laid me off, anyway. By the end, you couldn't even say the word "network" or "computer" in a management meeting without peoples' eyes glazing over, because the only people left after the massive layoffs were all incompetent butt-kissers who were so technically challenged they thought those were Hard Words to Understand. Thus the talk about a "sophisticated attack" which is only sophisticated if you're completely ignorant of anything technology-related. And, of course, there's this scramble to make the attack sound really unfair and It's Not Citibank's Fault At All That Such Clever Bad Guys Attacked Them.

Score 4 insightful, wow ... the case was in CANADA. Which, believe it or not, is a different country from the United States of America, and even has its own legal system! Notice the several posters who came before you, not to mention the article, talking about the case being in CANADA? BTW, the world contains 194-or-so countries. So not everything you read about on the World Wide Web is going to be about the United States of America or based on the legal precedents thereof.

You know what's really cool. Being stuck in jail for weeks on end because they can't put a jury together because our society is full if irresponsible, narcissistic bastards who think jury duty is something someone else should do because of the minor inconvenience it represents. Just hope you don't get to find out about that first-hand.

The story confuses me because I swear we learned about the body's use of perforin in my anatomy and physiology class over two years ago. Maybe that lady in the Charlie Chaplin film wrote our textbooks.

Which is why it's a good idea to forego buying food that advertises itself as having "0% trans fats."

I remember this from a few months ago ... the models were horrifying, grossly misshapen for the most part. Only the skinny ones with longer arms even looked like female humans. Leading to their inevitable conclusion. I figured at the time they simply were too incompetent or cheap to hire somebody who could create the reasonable human figures needed for a real study of attractiveness. I doubt such a shit study actually discovered anything at all.

I spent two years explaining to users how pass phrases would be easier to remember and much, much, much more secure. I don't think we had even one person take me up on the idea. Almost every single person told me it was "too much work" to type in a pass phrase. The place I worked in was a newspaper, and nearly all of these people were required to type 70 wpm or better! I tried to use password generators then, and no one would accept any password-generator-made passwords. They were "too hard to remember." I tried to get them to at least keep their passwords in their wallets instead of posted up on their cubicle. But it was "too much trouble to remember where the password is and too much work to get it out of the wallet to look at it." The only way computer systems will ever be secure is if they are designed to work well with completely stupid and lazy people using them. We kept looking into biometrics but last I knew they were just as insecure as bad passwords and too unreliable. The first time one wouldn't let somebody into his computer would be the last time the system was ever used. And don't bother saying the "management should do" this or that. Our management was far dumber and lazier than any normal user ever was, and the biggest roadblock to any sort of progress. One day I was expressing my frustration with trying to help save people from themselves with their stupid behavior. My own boss angrily told me there was NO WAY he would ever remember a password unless it was HIS OWN NAME.