That is absolutely right, but I will note right away that this is a problem specific to the Linux PRNG - OpenBSD does not have this vulnerability (also, because PIDs are randomized under OpenBSD)...

Oh boy, there is so much wrong here... Where to start?

First of all, OpenSSL problems are not ''getting fixed''. Part of the problem is that funding for OpenSSL was primarily based on company XYZ sponsoring function ABC. This gave incentives to the OpenSSL devs to add more functionalities on top of the cruft, the horrible mess that was the code base. More funding equals more developpers equals more eyeballs, but we haven't seen the progress so far.

Second of all, OpenBSD has given a HUGE amount of (BSD licensed) code to the rest of the world, Linux included. Try typing "ssh -V" on any Linux machine and I can guarantee you will get OpenSSH. And if you are like me, this is something you use EVERY. FREAKING. DAY. So please stop the trolling about OpenBSD, mmmmkay?

Third, the amount of code that has been cleaned up, improved, deleted and just plain scrubbed is simply amazing. You can say whatever you want about OpenBSD cranky devs, they know their stuff and they know their way around C code.

Fourth, OpenSSL is BSD/Apache licensed, and not GPL, so stop spouting off about supporting GPL software - not everything has to be blessed by Stallmann to be acceptable. And, yes, the Linux Foundation recognizes this - while you don't.

There is not just ''cruft'' in the code base: if I remember correctly, they removed thousands upon thousands of lines of code from OpenSSL - think VMS, Borland C, Windows 3.x, MS Visual C++ (etc) support.

And they tested the whole thing on the OpenBSD ports - so far, nothing has been broken.

Oh and FIPS support? Not gonna happen. Bob Beck has been very very clear on that subject. OpenBSD does not care too much about US government standard.

That was the goal from the vey beginning: make the code less horrible to get people involved and correct as much as possible.

So, yes, they will find more problems. They expect that.

Acetaminophen is illegal now??!! Please say it ain't so!!

Structure, from the sound of it, although mostly this is people committing various fallacies of reification and making false claims of "natural kinds".

Everything is a continuum. Humans divide the continuum up using acts of selective attention. The only infinitely sharp edge is the edge of our attention (because we scale the edge to match the scale we are attending to, so whatever scale we are attending to seems to have a sharp division between the things we are selecting out.)

"Species" do not have particularly crisp boundaries in the general case: they fade into each other, and we draw edges around them in more-or-less arbitrary ways. When we find new varieties we can either create new categories (by drawing new edges) or lump them into old categories (by moving old edges). Which move is to be preferred depends on the purposes of the knowing subject.

Insofar as that statement isn't gibberish (that is: not very far) it's anti-science.

Here's a question for you: is it a "scientific fact" that the impact of an extraterrestrial body occurred at the KT boundary and cause the mass extinction associated with that world-wide discontinuity in the geological record?

A fair majority of scientists concerned with the question certainly think so. But there are some notable hold-outs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

People whose area of expertise is directly relevant to the question at hand, who bring up cogent if not compelling counter-arguments, alternative interpretations of the evidence, facts that appear to be in contradiction to the impact theory, and so on.

Yet they don't have a crowd of anti-scientific loud-mouths calling them "Denialists" or accusing them of being shills for "Big Paleontology."

They sometimes get into heated discussions at scientific meetings, but that's the way science works: there is no limit on the questions we can ask and if we have evidence and Bayesian argument we get a seat at the table, no matter how wigged out the ideas might seem ab initio.

Only in the area of AGW has the arena become a completely political one, where anti-scientific loudmouths compete with shills for Big Hydrocarbon, and everyone ignores the serious question, which is: given its almost certain human activity is adding about 0.25% to the Earth's energy budget (1.6 W/m**2) and we have almost no idea how the climate will respond to that (despite what climatologists sometimes claim about their unphysical models) how do we best respond?

There is a loud and well-funded contingent who believe in "abstinence only" solutions, despite those having failed in every other case they have been applied to (drugs, alcohol, contraception...)

There are green-energy people promoting solar, wind, algal biodeisel, biomass, and other carbon-neutral forms of energy generation and storage.

There are people working on better battery tech (Heinlein's "shipstones").

There are people saying we should seriously consider nuclear power as the only currently known working alternative to base-load coal.

There are people saying we should investigate geo-engineering to stablize CO2 levels.

And there are people saying that since we don't know what is going to happen we should do nothing (see: Shills for Big Hydrocarbon, above)

All of that important stuff in the middle gets drowned out by the anti-scientific loud-mouths and bullies allied with the first and last of those groups, who do nothing but spew gibberish like "climate change is a scientific fact" as if that added something to the debate rather than helped to quell the debate we should be having.

"Scientific literacy" is not or should not be knowledge of discoveries, but a willingness to practice the discipline (not method) that is science: the discipline of testing ideas by systematic observation, controlled experiment and Bayesian inference. If you aren't practicing that discipline, you are almost certainly an enemy of science, because that is the natural state of the human mind.

I use Python both professionally and for fun (and C and C++ professionally) and don't get this impression at all. Major upgrades to shipped languages take time. The willingness to impose one-time incompatible changes for the sake of long-term improvements takes guts, and can certainly go wrong, but can very well be worth it.

As someone who worked in C and C++ pre-standardization, I recall (perhaps erroneously) that the new standards broke a fair bit of existing code, albeit in minor ways. And of course Microsoft's broken C++ compiler in Visual Studio 6 resulted in a vast amount of borken code when they finally caught up to the rest of the world.

That said, I haven't moved to Python 3 yet, although I believe all the libraries I really care about have now migrated. I tend toward late-adoption, though, and my sense of the Python community is that everyone accepts we are eventually going to move to 3. Big changes take years, so it's no surprise that lots of developers are still on 2.x. The real watershed will be when a few major libs (wxPython, say) drops 2.x support.

In contrast, my impression of Perl 6 is that it's the language of the future, and always will be. It appears so different from Perl 5 that it's a little weird the same name is being used, and it has mostly resulted in sucking the oxygen out of Perl 5 development.

Reading between the lines, it looks like it is a thin layer of mixed carbon and hydrogen with a structure that they have not yet properly characterized but which they have shown has the properties required for transparent electrodes in solar cells.

Specifically, they say the properties of the layer can be controlled by the properties of the polymer they start with, which suggests that it partakes in the polymer's nature, which would mean it is more than just a single layer of carbon atoms.

They may be being cautious and simply saying it is "graphene-like-enough" for this application, but having not fully characterized it may not want to claim it is "truly" graphene, which is a fairly vague term for a variety of single-sheet carbon materials that may have a variety of defects, in just the same was as "paper" is also fairly vague (from tissue to construction.)

... And just about any form of meditation revolves about emptying your mind, focusing on your breathing and discarding thoughts (after examination) rather than dwell on them.

I just read this study as an example of how people are completely disconnected from their own inner life and addicted to constant stimulation. Seriously, an electric shock instead of enjoying a little bit of peace and quiet and a chance to gather yourself? What kind of total lack of self-control is that?

... Yet. They are working on it, thank you very much. See here. Or here.

Your poor attempt at sarcasm betrays (a) an overly sensitivity to criticism of your country, and (b) a complete misunderstanding of the issue at hand. There is no Berlin Wall because there is no escaping the NSA. They are spying on the entire world. You can move to Mexico - that makes you a suspect. You can move to Canada - that makes you a suspect. If you even talk to someone who may know someone who may have been in contact with a suspect, you will be caught in the dragnet.

Everyone is fair game, everyone is a potential target. Everyone will be spied on, because terrorists! 9/11! Dirty bomb! Mushroom clouds! They hate our freedom!

I suspect YOU did not get THAT memo. Or maybe you are of the "I did not do anything wrong - so I have nothing to hide and nothing to fear from Big Brother" persuasion? Hmmm?

By the way, why are you reading Slashdot, citizen? Do you have your permit for that? And why talk to this terrorist suspect or that one?

The rest of your comment are more of the same drivel, so I will not even dignify it with a response.

The Stasi (East Germany Secret Police) used to be one of the most powerful intelligence service in the world. It is estimated they had hundreds of thousands of informants and it maintained files on millions of citizens of East Germany.

But the Berlin wall eventually fell, despite all its efforts and all its agents. I believe the same thing will happen in the US. When the times comes, the whole rotten house of cards will crash down to earth.

Oh, and, NSA? Please go f**** yourself.

No, but Rpy can.

I've used R, and it really has a lot of strong points, but I prefer to access it these days via Rpy, which gives me all the power of R along with everything else I get from Python (other libraries, better application development frameworks, etc.)

Both R and Python are real programming languages that are going to be completely useless to non-programmers, so neither of them is a SAS replacement, but of the two, I'd choose Python+Rpy over R for flexibility, power and ease of use (the latter is of course a strongly personal preference... if you really think like a traditional stats geek R will likely seem nicer, as it is clearly created for and by such people.)

"Variety" is probably a better word than "race" or "species". The "biological species concept" is extremely poorly defined, which is a bit of an embarrassment for a field largely based on a book called "The Origin of Species".

Like all concepts, the boundaries of a "species" are fuzzy, and the only really precise dividing line is the attention of the knowing subject. In many cases this is unprobelmatic: almost any knowing subject looking at the same population would draw the edges between species in the same way. There are, however, many cases where different people will draw different edges for different purposes.

Again: this is no different from any other concept, although people who don't get out much will often insist that the edges they choose to draw by an act of selective attention are "real" and everyone else's are "wrong".

In the extreme case, in the plant world, ubiquitous hybridization results in populations that are practically all genetically unique individuals, and the species concept breaks down entirely.

That's funny. It's almost as if some people just can't grok emacs while other can't grok vim.

I suspect you are right in this: maybe the first exposure is the one determinant factor. If you learn Emacs first (I remember trying it for the first time on my Amiga 500 - Lord, I am getting old) then you are going emacs all the way. If it's vi you learn first, then vim is the one you use. Almost philosophical.