Comment Obiligatory Car analogy (Score 1) 789
"My used car is better than your new motorbike!"
Yes, your bike may look impressive and be good for pulling the ladies, but can it pull a caravan? No! Can you put fourteen crates of beer in the back? No!
Comment Some reasons (Score 5, Interesting) 665
Ok... In reverse order of significance:
1. Expense (at least traditionally) of SSL Certificates. Although today that's not such a big issue, and an SSL certificate costs about the same as your domain registration. However, if you have multiple subdomains you still need a more expensive certificate.
2. Complication. It can be a highly confusing process for someone who's not an expert to do the certificate request process and the associated installation of the certificate. I know the first time I tried to do it, it went horribly wrong and I spent a day trying to sort it out.
3. Client Performance: SSL websites are slower than non-SSL websites. Not such a big deal again these days, but I remember when I had to wait it would seem forever for the images on my online banking site to load, cursing them every time for such a graphically-intensive SSL site.
4. IP addresses: This is a big one, if you host multiple websites on your server, and you only have a single IP address, you can't host more than one SSL certificate. So you need more IP addresses (which is not easy nowdays). Big deal for small company hosted websites, which are often on shared IPs.
5. Server Performance: A server that can cope with one million users per day using HTTP will not be able to cope with anywhere near that number of connections over HTTPS for obvious reasons. So you not only need a certificate, you potentially need a whole new server architecture to deal with it. Scale this up for a big business like Twitter or Facebook and you're talking implementation costs in high millions of dollars.
Comment Re:What's after 360? (Score 4, Funny) 134
Well, seeing as it's going to be a major INCREMENT of the X-Box family, I'd suggest the name Xcrement
Comment Lame HTML = Bogus Journal (Score 1) 103
Truism of the internet. The more crackpot your ideas are, the larger you have to set your HTML border widths on your table elements.
Submission + - O2 block Google Translate from under 18s 1
jolyonr writes: Are you one of the many people who are dismayed to see how easy it is for teenagers and children to get access to online translation services?
Well, fear not, because UK mobile internet operator O2 have now stepped in and made sure that Google Translate can no longer be accessed by anyone under 18.
"The site you tried to visit is restricted to over 18s", claims the statement when you visit the site.
To remove the block, you need them to charge £1 to your credit card. They offer £2.50 in mobile credit in return, but what about those who are under 18 and actually need something translated?
Almost certainly O2 are blocking this because their systems are not clever enough to block porn sites that are fed through Google Translate. But then what next? Blocking Google search because of the Cached pages?
Well, fear not, because UK mobile internet operator O2 have now stepped in and made sure that Google Translate can no longer be accessed by anyone under 18.
"The site you tried to visit is restricted to over 18s", claims the statement when you visit the site.
To remove the block, you need them to charge £1 to your credit card. They offer £2.50 in mobile credit in return, but what about those who are under 18 and actually need something translated?
Almost certainly O2 are blocking this because their systems are not clever enough to block porn sites that are fed through Google Translate. But then what next? Blocking Google search because of the Cached pages?
Comment Re:Acceptance (Score 5, Funny) 202
Who can accept an award on behalf of the Internet?
Al Gore, of course!
Milky Way Stuffed With an Estimated 50 Billion Alien Worlds 331
astroengine writes "Using data extrapolated from the early Kepler observations of 1,235 candidate exoplanets, mission scientists have placed an estimate on the number of alien worlds there are in our galaxy. There are thought to be 50 billion exoplanets, 500 million of which are probably orbiting within their stars' habitable zones."
Comment Re:SATA early adoptors (Score 1) 212
or ST-506 interface drives if you are just about to tell me that MFM is an encoding method rather than an interface. But they were called that back then. I remember!
Comment SATA early adoptors (Score 4, Funny) 212
Well, I guess this vindicates my decision to stick with MFM hard disks.
Researchers Track Mouse Movements and Hesitations 116
lpctstr writes "Researchers from the University of Washington and Microsoft Research have found that cursor movements and cursor hovers can detect the relevance of a search result and whether a user may abandon the search. They use an efficient algorithm written in Javascript to silently record movements and clicks on Bing and find that computing relevance using movements + clicks works better than just clicks (the current state-of-the-art). They explain some of this due to cursor and gaze being closely aligned on the web, and especially so on search result pages. Is this the future of innovation in search ranking — Google and Bing tracking your every twitch and pause?"
Has China Already Flown a Space Plane? 176
garymortimer writes that according to a report published by China Aviation Journal, "China has successfully launched its own space plane prototype; the news came out shortly after the US Air Force announced the successful test of their advanced X37B space plane. This story has now been deleted. Hong Kong's Ming Pao daily on Tuesday said Shaanxi TV last Saturday quoted acting provincial governor Zhao Zhengyong as saying China has 'succeeded in the test flight of a prototype aircraft that can fly through the atmospheric layer.' Zhao was visiting a state-run aircraft corporation at Xi'an high-tech industrial development zone."
Ski Lifts Can Could Help Get Cargo Traffic Off the Road 225
An anonymous reader writes with this except from a beautifully illustrated, thought-provoking article: "These days, we use them almost exclusively to transport skiers and snowboarders up snow slopes, but before the 1940s, aerial ropeways were a common means of cargo transport, not only in mountainous regions but also on flat terrain. An electrically powered aerial ropeway is one of the cheapest and most efficient means of transportation available. Some generate excess energy that can be used to power nearby factories or data centers. An innovative system called RopeCon (not to be confused with a role-playing convention held annually in Finland) can move up to 10,000 tonnes of freight per hour."
Molybdenite As an Alternative To Silicon 169
An anonymous reader writes "Molybdenite (MoS2) can be used to make transistors that consume 100,000 times less energy in standby state. This mineral, which is abundant in nature, is often used as an element in steel alloys or as an additive in lubricants. Research carried out in Switzerland at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne's Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) has revealed that is a very effective semiconductor. Molybdenite's 1.8 electron-volt gap is ideal for transistors and gives it an advantage over graphene (which does not have a gap)."
EFF Uncovers Widespread FBI Intelligence Violations 268
An anonymous reader writes "EFF has uncovered widespread violations stemming from FBI intelligence investigations from 2001 — 2008. In a report released today, EFF documents alarming trends in the Bureau's intelligence investigation practices, suggesting that FBI intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was previously assumed. Using documents obtained through EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, the report finds: Evidence of delays of 2.5 years, on average, between the occurrence of a violation and its eventual reporting to the Intelligence Oversight Board; reports of serious misconduct by FBI agents including lying in declarations to courts, using improper evidence to obtain grand jury subpoenas, and accessing password-protected files without a warrant; and indications that the FBI may have committed upwards of 40,000 possible intelligence violations in the 9 years since 9/11."
Comment Re:Well, I can see the tradeoffs. (Score 1) 314
Seawater contains 3.3 parts per billion of uranium, which according to wikipedia means there are about 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium in the world's oceans.
One leaky reactor isn't going to make a spot of difference.
