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Comment Re:Thoughts can be controlled? (Score 1) 206

What if he really never had stolen anything, and was just telling you stories in an attempt to get you kids to incriminate yourself? That would be pretty low, but I can imagine that a 30 year old stockboy working with kids half his age, any of whom he might be calling "boss" in another few years, might have just such a mindset.

Comment Re:People are just now realizing this? (Score 1) 354

I'm pretty sure every car sold in the US since the Yugo will last more than 15 years, unless you do something really stupid with it.

Yes, I'm sure that the experience of someone who knows how to "port the heads" (whatever that means) and "install a new camshaft" (whatever that means) is representative of the experience of the rest of us who just take our cars to the shop down the road when something starts clanking.

Comment Re:Blow to 'creation science' (Score 1) 435

Not really a blow to creation science. Don't get me wrong - I think evolution has more than enough science behind it to accept it as fact. But I also think it's good to try to really understand all sides of an argument. Just casually flipping through a creationism book will show that creationists don't have any problems with natural selection - which is what this is. It's the idea of evolution - one species turning into an entirely different species - that gets their panties in a bunch. Just using natural selection to make herbicide-resistant weeds isn't really any different than selecting certain traits to create new dog breeds. But that isn't evolution either.

Comment Re:Yay ignorance. (Score 4, Insightful) 372

So long as there aren't any requirements that porn must use .xxx then this isn't a problem.

They will be required. Not explicitly, but laws will be drafted that make porn sites liable for minors viewing their material unless it's through the .xxx domain. Sites will comply out of financial reasons. Honestly, I can't figure out why the moralists are against this.

Comment Re:A big Slashdot-y example of this from my life (Score 2, Interesting) 121

There weren't really any good anti-hacking laws on the books in 1988. The Internet wasn't really on the public radar, and Morris did a lot to change that. I remember this time well because I was 20 years old in 1988 and was doing a lot of the same things Morris was. For anyone who could read a Unix man page, Internet security back then was a complete joke. Every system from pretty much every vendor was trivially hackable from the second the coax was attached. The thing that Morris did that the rest of us didn't was hack together some shell scripts to automate the process.

Anyway, when the worm hit, there were a lot of questions over what he could be charged with. I think the whole "unauthorized access of a computing device" was drafted in response to that. At that time, My cohorts and I were on fairly good "friendly enemy" terms with the college sysadmins, and would dutifully notify them (i.e. brag) whenever we found a new exploit. However, starting right about the time the Morris worm hit, attitudes about our activity started changing rapidly. Laws were drafted, at the Federal and state level. There were mutters from higher up about "teaching those kids a lesson". The sysadmins didn't smile and wave anymore when we passed each other. Computers were starting to become important to "regular people".

Personally, I wised up, and found more creative uses for my talents. I also got my own sysadmin job, which changed my outlook regarding hacking greatly :). But I would have fully expected, two years after the worm, to have faced far harsher treatment that Morris had, and it wouldn't have occurred to me to blame class-ism. It was a time of great change, in technology, attitudes, and criminal statutes.

Comment Re:20 years? (Score 2, Insightful) 291

Kernell was found guilty of computer fraud - a misdemeanor subject to a prison term of up to one year -- and obstruction of justice, which carries a maximum 20-year sentence.

Don't lie to the feds. They get all bent out of shape about that. Frankly, even if they were to question me about someone else's crime, I would give serious consideration to refusing to speak to them, out of concern that my version of events might not be the same as someone else's, and they might decide that I was the one "misremembering".

Comment Re:Sidestep? (Score 1) 238

The reason we require the offer to be valid for any third party is so that people who receive the binaries indirectly in that way can order the source code from you.

And if I want to keep my mods private I will charge one million USD for the source. I am allowed to do this because I initially charged that much for initially distributing the binaries (to one of my shell companies, of course, which then redistributed to you). When I receive payment, the source will be mailed to you in leather-bound hardcopy, in 6pt dingbats font, and you will find that there is a 100,000 to 1 comment-to-code ratio. Enjoy your source distribution! :)

Hardware

Submission + - Ultra-Efficient Gas Engine Passes Test (technologyreview.com)

chudnall writes: Technology review has a story on a new gas engine injection system that promises increased efficiency of up to 50%.

The key is heating and pressurizing gasoline before injecting it into the combustion chamber, says Mike Rocke, Transonic's vice president of business development. This puts it into a supercritical state that allows for very fast and clean combustion, which in turn decreases the amount of fuel needed to propel a vehicle. The company also treats the gasoline with a catalyst that "activates" it, partially oxidizing it to enhance combustion.


Submission + - Theoretical Breakthrough For Quantum Cryptography (technologyreview.com)

KentuckyFC writes: Quantum cryptography uses the quantum properties of photons to guarantee perfect secrecy. But one of its lesser known limitations is that it only works if Alice and Bob are perfectly aligned so that they can carry out well-defined polarisation measurements on the photons as they arrive. Physicists say that Alice and Bob must share the same reference frame. That's OK if Alice and Bob are in their own ground-based labs but its a problem in many applications such as ground-to-satellite communications and even in chip-to-chip comms because its hard to keep chips still over distances of the order of the wavelength of light. Now a group of UK physicists have developed a way of doing quantum cryptography without sharing a reference frame. The trick is to use entangled triplets of photons, so-called qutrits, rather than entangled pairs. This solves the problem by embedding it in an extra abstract dimension, which is independent of space. So as long as both Alice and Bob know the way in which all these abstract dimensions are related, the third provides a reference against which measurements of the other two can be made. That allows Alice and Bob to make any measurements they need without having to agree ahead of time on a frame of reference. That could be an important advance enabling the widespread use of quantum cryptography.

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