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Comment Re:Easy (Score 1) 1091

by mewrei (#29159169) Attached to: How To Prove Someone Is Female?
Well we could always go with the classical definition of female within most mammals (yes I know exceptions exist) in ability to bear young. She may be a sterile subject or she might be a hostile subject for such, but does she have the remote capability of doing so =naturally=
Privacy

Sensor To Monitor TV Watchers Demoed At Cable Labs 302

Posted by kdawson from the audience-has-reached-critical-mass dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Cable operators at the semi-annual CableLab's Innovation Showcase have informally voted as best new product a gizmo that can determine how many people are watching a TV. Developed by Israeli company PrimeSense, the product lets digital devices see a 3-D view of the world (the images look like something from thermal imaging). In other words, that cable set-top box will know whether three people are sitting on the sofa watching TV and how many are adults vs. children. Do we really need cable and/or video service operators knowing this? It all happens via a chip that resides in a camera that plugs into the set-top box."
Education

Submission + - Best Research Oriented Graduate Program

Submitted by mewrei
mewrei writes: As a CS undergraduate, I'm debating what to do for graduate school. I'd like to get into high level research jobs like for NASA or DARPA (as an example, maybe not specifically), and bearing that in mind, I know I'll need a post-graduate degree (preferably as high as doctoral). I've looked into CS graduate but it seems as if the overwhelming majority focus on IT for a corporate environment rather than theoretical CS or research oriented CS. Therefore I've been looking at getting a second bachelor's degree in either physics or electrical engineering and moving into post-graduate in one of those fields. Does anyone have a better suggestion or experience with the same situation to give further advice?
Mars

Mars Robot May Destroy Life It Was Sent To Find 129

Posted by CmdrTaco from the oops-sorry-my-bad dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "New Scientist reports that instead of identifying chemicals that could point to life, NASA's robot explorers may have been toasting them by mistake. Even if Mars never had life, comets and asteroids that have struck the planet should have scattered at least some organic molecules over its surface but landers have failed to detect even minute quantities of organic compounds. Now scientists say they may have stumbled on something in the Martian soil that may have, in effect, been hiding the organics: a class of chemicals called perchlorates. At low temperatures, perchlorates are relatively harmless but when heated to hundreds of degrees Celsius perchlorates release a lot of oxygen, which tends to cause any nearby combustible material to burn. The Phoenix and Viking landers looked for organic molecules by heating soil samples to similarly high temperatures to evaporate them and analyse them in gas form. When Douglas Ming of NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, and colleagues tried heating organics and perchlorates like this on Earth, the resulting combustion left no trace of organics behind. "We haven't looked the right way," says Chris McKay of NASA's Ames Research Center. Jeffrey Bada of the University of California, San Diego, agrees that a new approach is needed. He is leading work on a new instrument called Urey which will be able to detect organic material at concentrations as low as a few parts per trillion. The good news is that, although Urey heats its samples, it does so in water, so the organics cannot burn up."
Image

Giant Spiders Invade Australian Outback Town Screenshot-sm 373

Posted by samzenpus from the welcome-to-my-sleepout-said-the-spider-to-the-bloke dept.
youth68 writes "Australia is known around the world for its large and deadly creepy crawlies, but even locals have been shocked by the size of the giant venomous spiders that have invaded an Outback town in Queensland. Scores of eastern tarantulas, which are known as 'bird-eating spiders' and can grow larger than the palm of a man's hand, have begun crawling out from gardens and venturing into public spaces in Bowen, a coastal town about 700 miles northwest of Brisbane."
Politics

Swedish Pirate Party Gains 3000 Members In 7 Hours 410

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the unintended-consequences dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Due to outrage over the verdict in The Pirate Bay trial, the Swedish Pirate Party has gained 3000 members in less than 7 hours. It is now bigger than 3 of the 7 parties represented in the Swedish parliament. 'Ruling means that our political work must now be stepped up. We want to ensure that the Pirate Bay activities — to link people and information — is clearly lawful. And we want to do it for all people in Sweden, Europe and the world, continues Rick Falk Vinge. We want it to be open for ordinary people to disseminate and receive information without fear of imprisonment or astronomical damages.'"

Vista Post-SP2 Is the Safest OS On the Planet 1010

Posted by CmdrTaco from the color-me-skeptical dept.
pkluss noted Kevin Turner, COO of Microsoft making the proclamation that "Vista today, post-Service Pack 2, which is now in the marketplace, is the safest, most reliable OS we've ever built. It's also the most secure OS on the planet, including Linux and open source and Apple Leopard. It's the safest and most secure OS on the planet today."

Comment Why Linux and F/OSS are better (Score 1) 674

by mewrei (#26809851) Attached to: How To Argue That Open Source Software Is Secure?
Exactly why is F/OSS better? It's subject to peer review. Some of the best programmers in the world have access to, and readily submit, code for F/OSS projects (not to say that EVERY F/OSS project is superior mind you). Look at why hackers use it. Aside from their ability to heavily modify their system, they're also extremely paranoid. I know plenty of hackers that contribute code and readily fix problems in F/OSS code because of their own paranoia. Look at why the DoD and NSA use it. Its laid out like an OS should. ACLs, chrooting, SELinux, all of these help make it much easier to protect their own systems. Want a really good blast at Microsoft? OpenBSD, its been around since 1994, there have only ever been 2 exploits off of the default config, and one of them was for a legacy version. Heck OpenBSD + pf is what the Defcon guys use. And quite damn honestly, code that's open source has met the firing squad. Hackers CAN see the code and compile it themselves, making it EASIER to find exploits, but yet Linux is regarded as far more secure just makes me think about how secure Linux REALLY is in comparison to NT. If you could place the NT Source code in the hands of someone competent I'm sure it would be hell for M$ (just when you thought it couldn't get any worse than MS08-067).
XBox (Games)

Submission + - Jack Thompson likes Mass Effect (kotaku.com)

Submitted by mewrei
mewrei writes: This is the most bizarre thing to ever hit the industry but Jack Thompson has come out and said "I don't see any problem with it" about Mass Effect. He even went out and said the guy who criticized it "had no idea what the Hell he was talking about" See for yourself

Comment finally (Score 1) 129

by mewrei (#21793230) Attached to: U.Maine Law Clinic Is First To Fight RIAA
Finally some is fighting back. Hopefully they'll be the first of many. Until that point though, I agree with sethawoolley, boycott them. Always Jamendo for your music fix and hopefully Pandora will be providing a record label filter so we don't have to listen to RIAA supporting music.

On a minor note, what happened to the college funded music setups? That would've been nice to have a networked repository of music we could access at any time and just have it included with tuition and fees.

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I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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