Saw 'Bones do this on TV. See, Spocks' brain was cut out by bimbos to run a planet-sized HVAC system. "Brain and brain, what is brain?" demanded the head bimbo when Kirk requested it back. Fortunately, 'Bones put a colander on his head and hooked the brain back up with a nerve hooker upper.

So, that's how it's done.

I'd like to remind David Treddinick, and any other non-US citizens contemplating similar actions, that we in the US take our intellectual property rights seriously. We believe that we and we alone enjoy the right to use or sell crackpot politicians. Unless Mr. Teddinick has a license for our technology, he's set himself up to be on the receiving end of some very strongly worded letters from our attorneys.

Then they are doing their customers a disservice by including it. No way around it, stuffing retail machines with crapware is evil.

Running FF here with Adblock Plus (with "nice advert" box unticked), Flashblock, and html5 turned off by about:config and disabling media.ogg.enabled, media.wave.enabled, media.webm.enabled, media.windows-media-foundation.enabled.

No ads, no autoplaying video, and not terribly inconvenient.

The signal emitted by Sputnik allowed mapping of the Earth's gravitational field. Something that needed doing for subsequent flights.

Exactly. Can I throw up now?

How often I've wished this were true. Here is an example of why C isn't an assembler. How do you access the condition codes maintained by the underlying machine? Try writing C that adds together two 8 (or 16 or 32 or 64 or whatever) bit binary integers while preserving carry out of the high order bit without having to perform additional integer operations to either synthesize the carry or recover it from an addition wider than the operands. C implements a simplified virtual ALU that has no notion of carry or overflow. It is certainly not the only language that does this, but it does make it impossible (or at least extremely inefficient) to do some things that an assembler allows as a matter of course.

The internet of things is getting to be scary crazy. Here's what worries me. Once you put things like your door locks into the internet of things, you're allowing some outside agency to decide whether or not you can enter your home, or worse, leave it. Fail to pay a parking ticket? Get confined to your home. Your ex accuses you of something nasty? Get confined to your home. Fail to make your Visa payment on time? Get confined to your home.

Yes, OS X prefers the 64-bit binary, but will happily run the 32-bit binary if that's all there is.

I know this is OT. What the heck happened? Using two different browsers, Slashdot's page formatting is suddenly a mess. What happened?

Given the type of backup you are perform (a "push"), there is nothing you can do to prevent an active infection from destroying your backups while the HD is mounted. In theory, a backup to a blind drop may provide some protection, but there is no backup solution that I am aware of that will work without read access to at least its own metadata. Perhaps a developer opportunity?

I might be inclined to agree with you, except for the fact that Actavis engaged in cynical manipulation of patent law to obtain protection that they were not entitled to. I say throw the book at them!

Thanks for the clarification, that's exactly what I'm saying. Oh yes, there was nothing crude about the 3850.

The IBM 3850 mass storage system, announced in 1974, held up to 472G on strips of magnetic tape. The 3850 was a rectangular box large enough walk into, with the strips stored along its interior walls in a honeycomb arrangement of slots. A pair of robotic pickers took turns running along a set of rails where they would fetch a tape strip, carry it to a device that wrapped it around a drum for read/write access, and later return it to its slot. You could watch it operating through a window in the box (IBM loved to show off their stuff).

My point is that none of this is new. It is neither interesting nor innovative.