Source? Given the extreme cost of any wasted launch mass, I can't imagine they would operate every launch armed. That they have experimented with arming the capsules would be no surprise - I'd be shocked if they hadn't experimented with arming *some* of their spacecraft, even if only unmanned satellites - and they might even have launched armed craft, but I sincerely doubt they've done so on *every* launch.

Not sure if serious, so I'll respond as if you are: nuclear waste does not "explode". The reason it's "waste" is because it no longer is even capable of maintaining a barely critical chain reaction in a moderated reactor core (neutron moderation - slowing them down to the point that they can be captured by other nuclei - is an important part of reactor operation). By itself, it's hot (decay heat) and radioactive (most of the half-lives are really long, so it doesn't actually release a ton of radiation per unit time but it will keep doing it for a long time), but that's about it. Now, it could be reprocessed to remove the low-grade stuff and refine out the actually really useful material. Only about 3% of the potential energy gets extracted from fuel in modern reactors before it drops to the point of being unable to maintain criticality, but with enough work you can purify it and make it usable again. You could, in fact, purify it even more to the point where it will go supercritical *without* a reactor core's moderation - this is one way to make bomb-grade material - but that's difficult, expensive, and never going to happen naturally.

Oh, that's hardly true. As a random example, SpaceX's Merlin rockets (currently on their 4th revision, not counting the difference between atmospheric and vacuum variants) have the highest thrust-to-weight ratio of any production rocket engine, and they are a very recent design. The Space Shuttle Main Engines have a significantly higher specific impulse (thust*time per mass of fuel) but the fuel (hydrogen) is so low-density that you need a ton of it to get anywhere, and volume has its own costs (especially in atmosphere). The SSMEs also went through a number of revisions that increased their power and efficiency.

On the other hand, just because SpaceX is busy pushing the bounds of chemical rockets does not, by any means, mean we shouldn't be researching alternate thrust systems... and we are! Not as enthusiastically as I'd like to see, but it's happening. There's research into high-efficiency space drives, alternate launch systems, and even some research into drives which have the capability to make interstellar flight potentially feasible. None of these are close to production, and some of them (especially the ones involving nuclear-powered drives) have been mothballed for years or decades, but even if the test apparatus (for those projects which got so far) no longer exist, the designs and theories and mathematics do, and rocket scientists can and do continue building on those. I'd really like to see practical research start up again on these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N..., such as this project (which was building and testing actual hardware!) from the 70s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

Do you have any basis for this "hard time believing" or are you just going to ignore evidence in favor of your prejudices?

Don't get me wrong, I was *surprised* by the finding; I live in Seattle, and there are a large population of minorities (blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanics are still very rare in tech, but Indians and various Chinese/Korean/I-can't-tell-by-looking Asian ethnicities are common and I would have guessed they are becoming more common). On the other hand, the rents *are* going up - significantly faster than inflation, in most parts of the city - and that will tend to drive the not-in-tech ethnicities out because they can't command salaries commensurate with the rising cost of living. Seattle has plenty of suburbs (though our relatively awful public transit system means commuting from the suburbs is either very slow or requires a car) and it's not at all inconceivable that the city itself is getting whiter.

Speaking as a cis het white male from a family of above-median income, *you* appear to be (at a minimum) overreacting to the whole "white male guilt" meme, accusing people of "throwing race into the mix" and "stok[ing]" guilt even when citing simple facts. I guess if those facts don't agree with your prejudices then they must be the work of people out to make you feel guilty? Sucks to be you, I guess...

Also, of all the things to critique this study for, you chose them reporting the racial shift? There are far more valid critiques available.

Citation on the "legalized drugs" causing a problem? It's not like weed was hard to get before, you just had to buy it from criminals and were a criminal yourself for doing so. Now that this is no longer true, people have less, not more, incentive to commit crimes.

Outlawed firearms: you don't live anywhere near WA, do you? The state rate of concealed carry is quite high, especially for a "blue" state. People raise a fuss about it sometimes, but overall there's still a good number of guns around.

This makes me wonder how well battery-optimized Sailfish is (and its apps are). I never owned an N900 or N9, or used one for long enough to get a really good feel for the battery life, but even when new, the N800 could not last even the waking hours of a day. That's assuming I used it similar to how I use the smartphone I got a couple years later (which would last well into a second day, and which - unlike the N800 - has a cellular radio chip).

Anyhow, my point is that most Maemo (N800 OS) apps were really poorly optimized for battery life - not surprisingly, all things considered - and the multitasking model of the OS just compounded the problem unless you were obsessive about closing stuff that you didn't need to have in the background. So, when I hear that a new tablet based on a descendant of Maemo has 2/3 the battery capacity of its competitors, I get concerned. There are mobile OSes that could probably get by with capacity like that, but Maemo was emphatically not one of them. On the other hand, six years is a long time; maybe they've fixed all that now and Sailfish *is* one of the more efficient OSes. If it has true, "desktop-style" multitasking, though, I doubt it.

Thanks! Already commented or would mod you up.

Somehow, the place is ranked 858th of 894. Considering that their reviews (going back months) are mostly terrible - it's not just the recent wave of them, and the photos are damning - plus the recent wave of awful reviews in the wake of this news breaking, I have to wonder how there are 36 hotels that are ranked even *worse*...

Yep. One of the few times I issued a chargeback (HP laptop repair by manufacturer due to a non-functional video card; the service request explicitly did not include the hard drive but they took it out, (supposedly) destroyed it, and replaced it with an OEM imaged one; fortunately it was a dual-drive laptop and all my data was on the second drive which I'd removed prior to sending it in) the vendor (HP) tried to contest it. After an annoying phone call with my CC company (Visa through Wells Fargo, which I do not recommend) I faxed them the repair order (clearly stating not to touch the HDD), repair receipt (which clearly stated what they'd done to the HDD), and a printout of the IM transcript where their service agent had assured me they wouldn't touch the hard drive. Not *quite* the only time I've had to send a fax in the last ten years, but close.

Anyhow, got the charge for the service reversed, but I did have to prove they had failed to uphold their service agreement to the terms that I'd paid for.

Incidentally, this was after going through numerous complaints with the service center itself (where they used the laughable argument of an analogy to car repair. I had recently had a significant amount of car repair, which by law includes a very detailed statement of what things are and are not to be replaced, itemized costs, and a stipulation that all replaced parts must be available for return to the owner (i.e. no destroying them without the owner explicitly asking you to). I also filed a report with the BBB. This is all from back in 2008 though, and the laptop actually still works so I have no other significant complaint about HP.

Ah, I didn't realize. I assume they're still used for major transactions like buying a car or something?

I live in the USA, but aside from rent and occasionally paying a friend for something expensive I haven't used a check since graduation except to pay rent and buy my car.

Speaking as somebody who has spent year living on a sailboat where electricity was entirely provided by solar:

Even within a few miles of the equator, at local noon, a good rain squall will drop PV production to under 20% of its normal amount at that time. Later (or earlier) in the day it can easily drop all the way to effective zero - the charge controller eats a bit - until the sky clears. Of course, on the tropical ocean, "until the sky clears" is usually not that long. We (well, "they" now; my parents still live aboard but I do not) can run for a couple days (if fully charged) just living off the battery bank, though that would drop its charge lower than we like to let it go. On a really rainy day we might only get about 1/4 the normal production; if that keeps up for three days or so we'll run the engine for an hour to juice the batteries up.

As for winter, the biggest problem is not the angle of the sun (that is *a* problem, even if you tilt the panels, because of atmospheric losses... but it's not a huge problem) but instead is the length of the day. You might get 80% of summer noon on a sunny winter noon in some places (I doubt it would be true up here in the Pacific Northwet, and no, that's not a typo), but the boat has never been anywhere that *has* a "winter" so I can't speak from experience. However, on an average tropical Caribbean day, I measured meaningful power from 7:30 AM to 5:30 PM (10 hours total), with peak output around 1PM. That's only ten hours of electricity generation, and the vast majority of it occurred between 9:30 AM and 4 PM, for a period of only 6.5 hours (call it 2/3 of the day) where the panels produced more than 50% of their typical mid-day maximum. In Seattle in the middle of winter, we don't even get close to 10 hours of daylight; I wouldn't be surprised if we didn't get more than 6.5 hours of usable light at all. So, 2/3 as much time, multiply by 4/5 for lost brightness even at midday, and you're looking at barely over half the power per day in winter that you get from peak summer brightness. Take into account the fact that tropical days are shorter than summer days, and it looks even worse for a comparison of winter vs. summer.

Checks (cheques, this being a British hotel) do still exist, but yeah, that would still be pretty much a death knell. The only time I don't pay for a hotel online (with my credit card) is if I'm in a place so remote I either don't get cell signal or they aren't listed on the online booking sites. Even in most of those places, though, I pay with my card. The only time in the last decade I've paid cash for lodging was a few "tea houses" in the Himalayas, most of which didn't even have electricity (maybe one solar panel, battery, and a light over the kitchen/dining area).

A) WTF do you mean, "nearly worthless"? It'll mean what it does today: the connection is secured using SSL/TLS. Nothing more and nothing less. HTTPS isn't some special indication that a site is Serious Business or something. It just means that an eavesdropper can't listen in on the connection or intercept the traffic. If you *REALLY* think there's value in that distinction, though, Extended Validation certs (green URL bar) will still exist to take money from people like you.
B) Vaguely possible, but not something I'm really worried about. If their server is so insecure that the data they send is easily exposed, then they probably wouldn't have cared about what data they were or were not sending in the first place. Besides, that's *still* better than having *all* the data (including authentication data) be sent in plain text!
C) Bullshit. There are many ways around that. The easy (obvious, to anybody who knows anything about the subject) one is to fake up your own CA, install its certificate, and use a proxy server that serves up faked certs signed by your faked up CA. Burp Suite and Fiddler (two common web proxy tools, the first of which is explicitly intended for web security testing) already support doing this and have supported it for years.

i) How do you think it'll do that? The technique these people are using to authenticate domain ownership is better than what some existing "trusted" CAs use...
ii) Cry me a fucking river. The world will not miss them.
iii) See previous points, including the ones that express "WTF are you talking about?".

Authority: I've been in the information security and penetration testing profession, including lots of tests of web apps, web services, and mobile apps, since 2006.

Actually, there's a pretty damn good reason why Slashdot *should* be private:

You (and I) are logged into this site. That means a unique identifier tied to our Slashdot accounts is sent to the server (in a cookie) with every request we make. This lets Slashdot know who we are, primarily for when we post a comment. The problem is, this unique identifier is sent in plain text; anybody on the same network as you or anywhere in the network between you and Slashdot's servers can see it.

Now, I don't know about you, but it's not *that* hard to get from my Slashdot identity to my real name. I assume everything I post here can be traced back to me. I'm OK with that; if I wanted to post something privately (and for some reason didn't want to post AC) I'd create and use a throwaway account, possibly via TOR + an additional proxy redirect at an Internet café or something (Slashdot blocks known TOR exit nodes, if I recall correctly). However, just because I'm OK with the posts I make being traceable to me does *not* mean I'm OK with just anybody who wants to posting in my name.

Right now, if you and I were on the same local network (wireless or wired), I could use techniques such as ARP spoofing or DNS poisoning to intercept every HTTP request you send to Slashdot, an every response it sends you. I could extract your authentication cookie and use it to make requests that Slashdot would think come from you and would post under your username. I could even have an excellent chance to steal your password; all I would have to do is modify Slashdot's responses to make it look like you aren't signed in. Then, when you go to the login page (which normally sends your password via HTTPS, but is itself served over HTTP), I use a technique called SSL Stripping to modify the login form so that it submits your password over plain-text HTTP (I could then submit that password to Slashdot over HTTPS, as it expects). Now I have your username and password, I can modify your account, I can post as you, and odds are you don't even know you were compromised.

None of that even requires any special skill, not even basic coding. The tools to do it all are pre-built and available for free download.

Well, or you could STOP BUYING DRM SHIT instead, too. If Steam can take away your game library (and they can, and sometimes will) then they're DRM and they're shit, plain and simple. I do not get all this fawning over Steam that I see from so many people in what's normally a very anti-DRM community.

This is why I don't drop a lot of money on a game unless I've been able to trial it. Not pirate it, just trial it. There are, in fact, game devs that release trials of their games.

Most single-player RPGs and adventure games do not, which is kind of odd because it should be pretty easy to figure out a point (in either time or game progression) where if the player is enjoying the game they'll be hooked but which still leaves lots of content. Conversely, damn near all MMOs do offer such a trial, typically with a level cap and/or time cap. While I'm well aware of the differences between MMOs and single-player games, I don't understand why the big devs are so aware of the "get them hooked and they'll pay up" system for MMOs but don't take the obvious adaptation for single-player games.

Well, unless they know their games are shit and don't want people to know that before they buy. But that still doesn't justify pirating the game, just watch other people play (friends or reviewers), or borrow from a friend if possible.