Comment Re:Unbreakable? (Score 1) 176
So you mean it is not Sony's fault then? Because if I remember correctly their random number usage was totally flawed and therefore it was no real challenge.
Obligatory http://xkcd.com/221/
Comment Re:So much for the safety of nuclear energy (Score 1) 752
You are comparing apples to oranges.
Drugs shouldn't have much to do with nuclear energy safety. Moreover, if you start asking about coal mine accidents, you should also consider uranium mining accidents. I have to admit I didn't find much about any accidents, but there are a few. (and probably I would have found more if I had been looking harder) Of course, with nuclear energy you often can't directly find correlation with accidents. What about permanent disposal. How do you know everything will be OK with the nuclear waste we have produced up to now. It has only been a few decades of nuclear energy, so it will take some time before these materials are not dangerous any more.
Comment Re:SEAgel (Score 1) 182
Comment RFID? (Score 1) 175
Privacy problems aside: So basically these "tiny transistors" are RFID chips?
From TFA:
These low-voltage transistors could one day provide added security or tracking by transmitting information wirelessly to a scanner.
Security for whom btw? For the banks I assume?
Tiny Transistors Could Be Used To Track Cash 175
disco_tracy writes "Banks have long considered placing silicon transistors on currency for security purposes, but the technology was too chunky and intensive for paper bills. Now, tiny low-power organic transistors developed by German scientists could make it possible to really follow the money."
Comment Re:Manufacturers don't want it (Score 1) 188
I think manufacturers could be forced to do it. The same way they have been forced to use the same type of phone chargers by the EU.
Submission + - Do Hobbies Decrease Chances of CS Success?
theodp writes: "Who knows what lexical analysis is?" asked the CS prof. "No one? What, don't you guys do this constantly in your spare time?" Quips like that, and fellow students who never seem to leave the computer lab, make CS student blogger Carolyn sometimes wonder if she really belongs in programming because she doesn't program all the time. "While I don't live to program, I do love to program," she explains, and in the end has decided that's good enough. Somewhere, the late, great, always-room-for-outside-interests Jeff Raskin is smiling.
Comment I hope the driver doesn't think about ... (Score 1) 137
... Facebook
Comment Watchmen a box-office disappointment? (Score 1) 771
I didn't read TFA, but why is Watchmen considered a box-office disappointment? According to this it grossed $185 million and had a budget of $130 million.
Comment Re:Multi-tasking (Score 3, Funny) 266
Exactly. It's just awful, how slowly things are evolving in these locked down mobile systems.
Comment Re:Anecdote (Score 1) 220
As long as he only drops bananas
Man, I hate those red turtles!
Comment How it works (Score 5, Informative) 133
As the page is slashdotted, I just wanted to post how it is done here:
For GMail, he added an image to his own GMail account, which he set to "visible for everyone". On his own site he added an invisible img and tries to access the image in his GMail account. He then triggers a javascript function depending on the outcome of the img inclusion (onload or onerror), so he can make the decision, if the visitor of his website is logged in to GMail.
For Facebook, Twitter and Digg he uses http status codes. He tries to access some URL (https://www.facebook.com/imike3) via javascript and depending on the status code he gets, he can decide whether you are logged in or not. This attack doesn't work with IE or Opera, because they do not trigger the onload/onerror events when receiving invalid js.
For GMail, he added an image to his own GMail account, which he set to "visible for everyone". On his own site he added an invisible img and tries to access the image in his GMail account. He then triggers a javascript function depending on the outcome of the img inclusion (onload or onerror), so he can make the decision, if the visitor of his website is logged in to GMail.
For Facebook, Twitter and Digg he uses http status codes. He tries to access some URL (https://www.facebook.com/imike3) via javascript and depending on the status code he gets, he can decide whether you are logged in or not. This attack doesn't work with IE or Opera, because they do not trigger the onload/onerror events when receiving invalid js.
Euler's Partition Function Theory Finished 117
universegeek writes "Mathematician Ken Ono, from Emory, has solved a 250-year-old problem: how to exactly and explicitly generate partition numbers. Ono and colleagues were able to finally do this by realizing that the pattern of partition numbers is fractal (PDF). This pattern allowed them to find a finite, algebraic formula, which is like striking oil in mathematics."
Polynomial Time Code For 3-SAT Released, P==NP 700
An anonymous reader writes "Vladimir Romanov has released what he claims is a polynomial-time algorithm for solving 3-SAT. Because 3-SAT is NP-complete, this would imply that P==NP. While there's still good reason to be skeptical that this is, in fact, true, he's made source code available and appears decidedly more serious than most of the people attempting to prove that P==NP or P!=NP. Even though this is probably wrong, just based on the sheer number of prior failures, it seems more likely to lead to new discoveries than most. Note that there are already algorithms to solve 3-SAT, including one that runs in time (4/3)^n and succeeds with high probability. Incidentally, this wouldn't necessarily imply that encryption is worthless: it may still be too slow to be practical."
Arx Fatalis Updated, Released Under GPL 153
Kevin Fishburne writes "According to WtF Dragon at Ultima Aiera, 'The long and short: Arkane Studios have released what is probably going to be the final patch for their Ultima Underworld-inspired game (which, indeed, they tried to license as the third entry in that series), Arx Fatalis. They have also released the source code for the game. That's right, the complete source of Arx Fatalis is available for download.' The readme notes that the original game installation is required in order to play the compiled game, as the data files are certainly still copyrighted. Linux is in need of a good FPS dungeon crawler, though the code will need a hell of a lot of cleanup as it's a VC8/9 project and uses DirectX (ugh...)."
