Comment Re:inflaton? (Score 4, Insightful) 163
Anyway just
OR PERHAPS $20! You won't know until you look.
Submission + - NYT claims Slashdot losing relevance in social web (nytimes.com) 3
azoblue writes: Why is Slashdot almost irrelevant to the social media community? It used to be the biggest driver of traffic to tech web sites, but now it hardly delivers any traffic at all to them.
Submission + - Tribalism is the enemy within (markshuttleworth.com)
climenole writes: "Tribalism is when one group of people start to think people from another group are “wrong by default”. It’s the great-granddaddy of racism and sexism. And the most dangerous kind of tribalism is completely invisible: it has nothing to do with someone’s “birth tribe” and everything to do with their affiliations: where they work, which sports team they support, which linux distribution they love."
Submission + - IBM crafts silicon optical amplifier (eetimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes: LIght amplifiers have been called the optical-transistor, because they will someday enable all our electronic devices to use light instead of electricity to compute. If this report pans out as expected, then this ultra-cheap CMOS light amplifier from IBM has begun to realize the dream of silicon photonics:
"Optical amplifiers used in applications like telecommunication links must be made with materials such as indium gallium arsenide phosphide today. IBM researchers said they have been able to do the same thing for other applications using a much less expensive standard silicon process. Fabricated at its Yorktown Heights, N.Y., pilot line using the same silicon photonic waveguides used for telecommunications optical interconnects, the new silicon optical amplifier targets the mid-infrared band used by heat sensors, medical imagers and industrial process monitors...--EETimes"
"Optical amplifiers used in applications like telecommunication links must be made with materials such as indium gallium arsenide phosphide today. IBM researchers said they have been able to do the same thing for other applications using a much less expensive standard silicon process. Fabricated at its Yorktown Heights, N.Y., pilot line using the same silicon photonic waveguides used for telecommunications optical interconnects, the new silicon optical amplifier targets the mid-infrared band used by heat sensors, medical imagers and industrial process monitors...--EETimes"
Comment Re:Maybe because programmers like to be clear (Score 3, Insightful) 878
What do you expect? To me it appeared to be little more than stumping for the programming language he wrote - Google Go. Which has yet to impress me. They say that it's flexible like an interpreted language but fast like a compiled one. To me, it seems like it's missing all the cool shit that makes me USE an interpreted language, but doesn't provide the same low-level access that makes me use a compiled one! All languages have their niche, I suppose, and I guess I'm just not the target demographic for Google Go
Comment Temperature on the surface of Sol (Score 3, Informative) 202
For anyone curious, as I was, what the surface temperature of our star is: 5500 degrees C
My source was NASA's world book page (then again, it goes on to state that our solar system has nine planets, so trust NASA at your own risk)
Millions of Home Routers Are Hackable 179
Julie188 writes "Craig Heffner, a researcher with Maryland-based security consultancy Seismic, plans to release a software tool at the Black Hat conference later this month that he says could be used on about half the existing models of home routers, including most Linksys, Dell, and Verizon FiOS or DSL versions. The tool apparently exploits the routers through DNS rebinding. While this technique has been discussed for 15 years or more, Heffner says, 'It just hasn't been put together like this before.'" Notebooks.com has a list of routers tested and some advice on securing vulnerable routers.
Submission + - Open Source Hardware Gets Defined - Linux Magazine (linuxpromagazine.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Industry leaders in open source hardware published a working definition of open source hardware. The definition, which consists of 11 tenants all projects must adhere to in order to be recognized as open source, is the first document of its kind to be published with regard to open source hardware. The definition also came published with a set of endorsers. The list features members of Creative Commons, Wired, MAKE, MIT Media Lab and many others.
Submission + - Hotels the industry leader in credit card theft. (nytimes.com)
katarn writes: A study released this year found that 38 percent of the credit card hacking cases last year involved the hotel industry. At hotels with inadequate data security, the greatest amount of credit card information can be obtained using the most simplified methods. It doesn’t require brilliance on the part of the hacker. Most of the chronic security breaches in the hotel industry are the result of a failure to equip, or to properly store or transmit this kind of data, and that starts with the point-of-sale credit card swiping systems.
Comment Re:What is the definition of 'distro'? (Score 1) 221
I was interested in the bit about busybox (namely, wondering why they wouldn't include such useful and dead-simple flags like -f), and the first page I discovered (http://www.busybox.net/downloads/BusyBox.html) listed the following for cp:
cp
cp [OPTIONS] SOURCE DEST
Copy SOURCE to DEST, or multiple SOURCE(s) to DIRECTORY
Options:
-a Same as -dpR
-d,-P Preserve links
-H,-L Dereference all symlinks (default)
-p Preserve file attributes if possible
-f Force overwrite
-i Prompt before overwrite
-R,-r Recurse
-l,-s Create (sym)links
Comment Re:I'm not worried (Score 1) 160
Dammit. You fucking got me with The Weather Channel.
I got pretty close, too
Comment Re:Really? (Score 3, Interesting) 168
I think the parent brings up a good point, albeit sarcastically:
Why not just play this out? Isn't there some legal strategy LimeWire could pursue to not only continue losing (while taking it to higher and higher courts), but to increase their damages by orders of magnitude each time? After they owe more than the combined wealth of all resources humanity could ever potentially obtain, surely someone somewhere will realize something was wrong with that picture.
On a related note, has anyone ever sat down and thought of bankrupting the music industry with legal fees? That is to say, to make their legal bills exceed their revenue, and for all defendants to basically be unable to pay a dime? They would see dollar signs all the way until they starved to death...
Comment Re:Meh (Score 0, Redundant) 431
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/09/15/109-the-onion/
You're one of those people, STFU.
Comment Re:This guy deserves a medal (Score 1) 698
There's a good chance he will... a nice round lead one.
Comment 200 seconds at Mach 6... (Score 1) 326
Mach 6 is a little over 2 km/s, for 200 seconds, is 400 km... so in 3 minutes and 20 seconds, the plane just about crossed over the equivalent of Pennsylvania, from east to west.
