There's an app for that!

This "weakness" seems a little silly.

You typically make your backups on your office desktop PC, and leave them there. But all the sensitive data in the backup file was already there on that same PC, in your corporate mailbox, completely unencrypted.

Cracking a Blackberry backup file would be the hardest way to get access to that data.

They've been doing this for four years?

Perhaps Mr. Williams is starting to think he really is Swan, the evil record producer he played in Phantom of the Paradise.

A shame really, that he's revealing himself to be such a tool, because I do like his music.

It's the bad guy that draws first. The good guy only shoots in self-defense.

WHOIS privacy was created in the first place to protect us from spammers (the WHOIS database being ripe for email address scraping). Then the spammers took advantage of it to protect themselves from justice.

It seems like there's some kind of insightful point to be made here, but I'm not sure what it is.

The "safety factor of three" was something that NASA management claimed. The O-rings would supposedly fail catastrophically if they eroded half-way through (one radius). In previous launches, the O rings had eroded only 1/3 of a radius. NASA management claimed this represented a "safety factor of three".

Feynman was very critical of that assertion. The design did not expect the O rings to erode at all. The presence of erosion meant that they had already failed, and there was no safety factor at all. It just dumb luck that there had been no disasters before Challenger.

Those O-rings had a safety factor of three!

I remember seeing, hearing or reading something, a long time ago, from one of the effects guys on the Buck Rogers TV series (the Gil Gerrard one.) He was describing an effect in which they needed a 3-D wireframe model of a spaceship rotating on a computer monitor (much like you see here.)

He said that he spent a fair bit of time trying to program a computer to do it, but couldn't get it to work (not really a math or computer guy at all). In the end, he fell back on what he knew best: mechanical effects. He whipped up a wireframe model using actual wire, painted it day-glo orange, mounted it on a gimbal, and stuck the whole thing inside a hollowed-out computer monitor with the insides painted black.

Sometimes the old ways are the best ways...

Not a week goes by that you don't hear about yet another breakthrough in cheap and efficient solar cells. Every week, without fail, since 1979, I swear to God. Any more grains of salt, and I'll have a heart attack.

Sounds like they should be giving the bees Brawndo, The Thirst Mutilator. If it works as well for the bees as it does for crop irrigation, then they'll be swimming in honey in no time.

Isaac Asimov wrote a short story along those lines. I can't remember the title. Massive spoilers here, though you can probably guess what they are just from the context of this reply...

It's set in a space capsule on the way to the moon (it was written before the Apollo landings.) One of the men starts going kinda loopy during the long isolation, gets crazy ideas about Man's place in the universe, maybe it's all a big trick. When they finally reach the moon and start coming around to the dark side, which had never before been seen by human eyes, they see that the entire moon is just a gigantic stage prop with wooden struts and fabric stretched over it. The guy goes insane and tries to kill the others to keep the secret.

Turns out the entire trip was actually a simulation, conducted in a research facility on Earth, though the crew didn't know it. The image of the moon they saw from their viewport was actually generated using a scale model of the moon and a tracking camera. The simulation was supposed to end before the camera came around to the far side of the moon, but the mission controllers forgot or were asleep or something.

It's a cool story. Probably would have been cooler if you hadn't read this...

I don't find that form of argument particularly compelling.

All physical inventions are composed of atoms. Atoms are not patentable, therefore any physical invention isn't patentable.

Same for copyright. You can't copyright the letter 'A', or any other letter. All written works are really just collections of uncopyrightable letters, and hence not copyrightable.

It makes a nice mathematical proof, but you're trying to apply mathematical rigor to a question that is not suited to that kind of analysis. It's like trying to prove mathematically that murder is wrong.

I'm not entirely comfortable with Bilski. I think the Bilski test has thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

Not, in the case at hand... this patent sounds like 100% pure unadulterated bathwater. But nevertheless...

I'm not sure why so many Slashdotters are so opposed to software patents as a concept. To my mind, the problem has been that the "non-obvious" requirement has been ignored or interpretted in such a way as to render it meaningless.

There are some really clever algorithms out there, though. Algorithms that are not at all obvious, and really advance the state of the art. If Quicksort was invented today, wouldn't it deserve a patent?

But if the bath water is going to include such notorious crap patents as 1-Click, Desire2Learn, NTP, and many others, then I would have to say that the bathwater is so rank and disgusting that it's not too high a price to pay to lose a handful of babies, as Bilski does.

But can't we do better? Can't we find an "obviousness" test that works?