Comment Re:Steve (Score 1) 124
Guttenberg doesn't write biology books, he copies them!
Comment Re:Lol (Score 4, Insightful) 381
If that laptop doesn't have at least 8 GBs of RAM and a 1 TB 7200 RPM HD or 256 GB SSD, with a separate video card, it cannot be sold. Your company depends on repeat business, correct?
I don't disagree with your point, but I think your "minimum" specs are a little high. 1 TB 7200 rpm 2.5" HDDs don't even exist yet in the 9.5mm format that will actually fit inside most laptops. And if it has discrete graphics, then I'm not buying it. I value battery runtime over flashy graphics, and I doubt I'm the only one. And given that even the i945 integrated graphics in my five year old laptop can do flashy graphics (compiz) at 1920x1080 just fine, I doubt any modern chip couldn't. Unless you play games or run CAD software, discrete graphics are overkill.
Comment Re:I wish this was the case in the UK (Score 1) 575
It takes a pretty exceptional human to actually remember a useful crypto key
Not really. How hard is to remember a paragraph from your favorite novel or lyrics from a popular song. It's even better if you *mis-remember* the quote/lyrics so that you're the only one who would come up with the result even if someone tried to brute force the key by scanning all your books and listening to all your music.
I was going to comment that this doesn't make a good key because human languages have so much redundancy and therefore rather little entropy per word, but then I actually checked and came to the opposite conclusion: While an n-bit paragraph wouldn't make a good n-bit key, a much longer paragraph actually does. If we assume 7-8 bits of entropy per word (a number a quick Google search turned up), then your examples would all make for very good 256-bit keys.
The only disadvantage is that such a long passphrase is quite annoying if you have to type it often, and it's hard to type correctly at speed if you can't see what you've written on the screen.
Comment 3.11 (Score 5, Funny) 165
I for one am holding out for 3.11. I heard it will be for Workgroups!
Drone Kills Top Al Qaeda Figure 885
wiredmikey writes with this excerpt from a Wall Street Journal report:
"The U.S. ushered in a new CIA-led counterterrorism program in Yemen on Friday, sending unmanned aircraft to kill an American-born cleric who occupied a top place on the U.S.'s anti-terrorist list. The death of Anwar al-Awlaki eliminates a leading figure in Yemen's branch of al Qaeda and one of its most charismatic recruiters. A Web-savvy Islamic preacher with sparkling English, Mr. Awlaki was known for his ability to couch extremist views in ways that appealed to Western youth. He had been linked to suspects in the 2009 Fort Hood, Texas, shooting spree and the botched bombing of a Detroit-bound jet that Christmas."
Comment Re:Only one to protect yourself (Score 1) 417
So that's your ingenious business model!
1. Produce adult film
2. Preach abstinence
3. Profit!
Ask Slashdot: Network Backup Solution Out of the Box? 251
First time accepted submitter file terminator writes "I want to buy a network drive for home usage, and am looking for something that would allow for secure and encrypted remote backups over the Internet to a second network drive, preferably advanced enough that all drive content does not have to be transmitted every time. The solution may come as a pair of network drives, and two-way synching would actually be a plus. The drives would be behind respective NATs and setup must allow connecting to any target port. The solution should be readily available (no obscure/local brands/solutions) and not unreasonably expensive. Does anyone have any recommendations for a full out of the box solution?"
EU Extends Music Copyright to 70 Years 536
MrSteveSD writes "The copyright on sound recordings by the Beatles, Rolling Stones and other famous bands was due to expire in the next few years. However, the EU Council has now scuttled any such hopes. The copyright term has been extended from 50 to 70 years with aging rockers expressing their delight."
Comment Re:/(slash) works great, except... (Score 1) 567
Huh? The slash works fine here (Firefox 5.0). Must be your settings.
Most People Have Never Heard of CTRL+F 567
Hugh Pickens writes "Google search anthropologist Dan Russell says that 90 percent of people in his studies don't know how to use CTRL/Command + F to find a word in a document or web page. 'I do these field studies and I can't tell you how many hours I've sat in somebody's house as they've read through a long document trying to find the result they're looking for,' says Russell, who has studied thousands of people on how they search for stuff. 'At the end I'll say to them, "Let me show one little trick here," and very often people will say, "I can't believe I've been wasting my life!"' Just like we learn to skim tables of content or look through an index or just skim chapter titles to find what we're looking for, we need to teach people about this CTRL+F thing, says Alexis Madrigal. 'I probably use that trick 20 times per day and yet the vast majority of people don't use it at all,' writes Madrigal. 'We're talking about the future of almost all knowledge acquisition and yet schools don't spend nearly as much time on this skill as they do on other equally important areas.'"
Comment Re:Fascists, or? (Score 1) 101
Calling for the assassination of unelected generals who are engaged in an opposition purge as part of a counter-revolutionary strategy isn't evil or immoral.
There, FTFY.
Comment Re:Turkey and EU? (Score 2) 103
Don't be so hard on them. They're just trying to pass the candidate requirements!
MPEG LA Says 12 Parties Have Essential WebM Patents 136
suraj.sun tips this report from the H Online:
"The hopes that the VP8 codec at the heart of Google's open source WebM video standard would remain unchallenged in the patent arena are diminishing after the MPEG LA says 12 parties hold patents that its evaluators consider essential to the codec. ... No VP8 patent pool has been formed yet; the MPEG LA says it met with the patent holders in late June and is 'continuing to facilitate that discussion' but the decision to form a pool is up to the patent holders. ... Google responded to the MPEG LA's interview saying it is 'firmly committed to the project and establishing an open codec for HTML5 video' and noting the April launch of the WebM CCL, a community cross-licencing agreement for essential WebM related patents."
Windows XP In a Browser 217
An anonymous reader writes "JPC — the pure java PC emulator — has now been upgraded to JPC2, and can run WindowsXP inside the Java Applet sandbox."
Comment Wrong assumption (Score 1) 306
The assumption that we have to take "the coming age of austerity" for granted is backwards. Health care and research aren't mutually exclusive. We need both, and the world has enough resources to provide both!
