I agree with you. Otherwise, please ignore this comment. I accidentally downmodded you, and I don't know of any way to undo the moderation. Thanks, Slashdot.

You're probably making a joke, but to be clear Backup Day is March 31, the day before April Fools' Day (don't be a fool with your data, etc. etc.). It just happens to fall on the same day as Easter this year.

Yes, this is one of the reasons why DNSSEC holds such promise. It doesn't even need new records or extensions. The CERT, IPSECKEY, and SSHFP (source) records have existed for years but haven't been used since they weren't really useful before DNS was secure. Those three can be used to secure nearly anything you might want, with CERT being the catch-all record that can store web, email, or any other certificate. Since DNS is the system that is charged with knowing who a name is, it makes a lot of sense to put the trust there in a single place, rather than the large number of certificate authorities that it seems are not always trustworthy.

Perhaps you were already alluding to this, but that is exactly why DNSSEC is such a great idea. The trust of a site being who they say they are belongs in the DNS, since that's the system which is actually responsible for knowing. There are already records that exist to store such things: CERT and SSHFP records can secure web sites, email, and SSH, and with secure DNS such things can actually be useful. Just recently .com became signed, so now all three major TLDs (.com, .net, and .org) are signed, and several others are besides (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains). Once this becomes widely deployed it could significantly improve some issues of trust on the Internet.

You're contradicting yourself. If the Sievert already has units of a rate (J/s), then the 400 mSv per hour you mention is a double rate (energy/time^2), some kind of energetic acceleration, which doesn't make sense here. Your second paragraph is correct, but it contradicts your first.

As others have noted, the units for a Sievert are J/kg, not J/s. This is a very important distinction. An accumulated does requires these units, as J/s is a rate, and then you have to know how long a person is exposed, i.e. there is no accumulation. An accumulated dose implies that if you receive 1 mSv, that is all one needs to know: there is no time scale involved. It is a certain amount of total radiation received. Correcting your first paragraph, 1 Sv received in 1 second is (approximately) the same as 1 Sv received in 1000 seconds and as 1 Sv received in one million seconds. Sieverts are therefore a useful measure for directly determining the effects the radiation will have on a person.

So in fact Randall's image is accurate, unless there is some minor error in it that hasn't yet been discovered. Given your own misunderstanding of the situation, I hope the press's confusion is a little less inexplicable. You still come to the correct conclusion, which they often do not, but sometimes, science is hard.

What tunnel providers have you looked into? I use the IPv6 Tunnel Broker from Hurricane Electric and routinely am able to reach 12 Mbps speeds, which I'm pretty sure is maxing out my home broadband. If you haven't looked into them before, or if you have but ran into problems, it may be worth checking out again.

For most any phone from AT&T, after the contract is up, they will let you unlock it. This makes since, because after the contract is done, you have effectively paid for it, and it does belong to you. I just recently did this with a Motorola RAZR V3xx. I called them up, said the phone was from an ended contract, and asked to unlock it. There were no questions or uncertainty, just "I can help you with that", and the person then gave me the unlock code and instructions after getting the phone's IMEI number.

This does not happen with the iPhone. After your contract is over, you still are not allowed to unlock it.

In addition, I personally will probably be paying the full ($600) price for my next iPhone, so that I am not tied into a contract. Why shouldn't I be able to have the phone unlocked?

Also, don't forget that you need to enter a contract with AT&T to get an iPhone in the first place. If you decide to get the phone for $200, you'll need to pay an extra $325 - $10 a month if you end the contract early. Plus there's the $36 for activation. If you cancel in the first month, you must return the phone, so you have to pay for at least one month of service, which is $65. So if you go this route, you end up paying a minimum of $200+$315+$36+$65=$616 plus taxes and fees.

So no, it is not in fact possible to have any sort of iPhone for a mere $200. Your complaints about entitlement are misplaced.

Absolutely. The whole doomsday clock just seems like FUD.

That argument says that the energy is non-ionizing and therefore it cannot change DNA and therefore it cannot cause cancer. How does this indicate any change to DNA? It does not refute the argument you mention.

This sounds a lot like the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

That site labels and stores integer sequences for easy lookup, and will let you simply search for a subsequence to find the one you're looking for. This proposed site keeps track of numbers instead and incorporates more than the pure math that the sequence encyclopedia limits itself to, but it sounds very similar in concept.

Absolutely. In fact, what is being claimed is that Microsoft released under the GPL, and even though they didn't want to do so, they claimed that they did want to. So what? The fact remains that they are in full compliance with the GPL license, and contributed to open source.

How can people claim that Microsoft is doing this to show how the GPL is a terrible viral license? If they wanted to do that, they would have said so, or it would have been they who claimed that they had to release the software under the GPL. The simple fact remains that Microsoft's own statements regarding this cast open source in a positive light. How so many people can just ignore this boggles the mind.

But the point is that here it's not really significant to say "five dimensions." You would be just as right to say four, if you go by this definition of dimension. The idea that it is five is purely in the eye of the beholder.

Certainly, it would be much more interesting to hear what, if anything, Conficker is actually doing since today is a day that it could conceivably do something,.

Works produced by federal government employees during their jobs is in the public domain, which gets us for example great pictures from NASA that have no restrictions on use.

However, works produced by non-employees who simply receive federal funding has no such restriction. If the federal governments contracts out production of, say, a report, it will be under copyright, which can be assigned to the federal government. Thus we have the somewhat interesting situation wherein the federal government holds copyrights only on works they didn't produce.

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog

http://www.hulu.com/watch/28343/dr-horribles-sing-along-blog