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Super-Earths Discovered Orbiting Nearby, Sun-Like Star 242

Posted by Soulskill from the i-for-one dept.
likuidkewl writes "Two super-earths, 5 and 7.5 times the size of our home, were found to be orbiting 61 Virginis a mere 28 light years away. 'These detections indicate that low-mass planets are quite common around nearby stars. The discovery of potentially habitable nearby worlds may be just a few years away,' said Steven Vogt, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UCSC. Among hundreds of our nearest stellar neighbors, 61 Vir stands out as being the most nearly similar to the Sun in terms of age, mass, and other essential properties."

Comment Re:Well, at least the rest don't do this. (Score 1) 605

by sten ben (#30371922) Attached to: TSA's Sloppy Redacting Reveals All
Thermobaric Weapon

Put a lot of flammable liquid in a bin, dyed as Coca-Cola in 2 liter bottles (better yet, glass bottles, gotta love shrapnel) with a twin stage explosive in each bottle. This of course requires that the bottles are discarded before the xrays though

Crap now I'll probably be added to the shit-list as well.
Mozilla

Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272

Posted by kdawson from the hot-bits dept.
supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3. Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
Censorship

Sharp Rise In Jailing of Online Journalists; Iran May Just Kill Them 233

Posted by timothy from the your-ethics-may-vary dept.
bckspc writes "The Committee to Protect Journalists has published their annual census of journalists in prison. Of the 136 reporters in prison around the world on December 1, 'At least 68 bloggers, Web-based reporters, and online editors are imprisoned, constituting half of all journalists now in jail.' Print was next with 51 cases. Also, 'Freelancers now make up nearly 45 percent of all journalists jailed worldwide, a dramatic recent increase that reflects the evolution of the global news business.' China, Iran, Cuba, Eritrea, and Burma were the top 5 jailers of journalists." rmdstudio writes, too, with word that after the last few days' protest there, largely organized online, the government of Iran is considering the death penalty for bloggers and webmasters whose reports offend it.
Biotech

Algae Could Be the Key To Ultra-Thin Batteries 54

Posted by Soulskill from the green-power-that's-actually-green dept.
MikeChino writes "Algae is often touted as the next big thing in biofuels, but the slimy stuff could also be the key to paper-thin biodegradable batteries, according to researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden. Uppsala researcher Maria Stromme and her team has found that the smelly algae species that clumps on beaches, known as Cladophora, can also be used to make a type of cellulose that has 100 times the surface area of cellulose found in paper. That means it can hold enough conducting polymers to effectively recharge and hold electricity for long amounts of time. Eventually, the bio batteries could compete with commercial lithium-ion batteries."
PlayStation (Games)

US Air Force Buying Another 2,200 PS3s 144

Posted by Soulskill from the quick-who-knows-a-good-ps3-flight-sim dept.
bleedingpegasus sends word that the US Air Force will be grabbing up 2,200 new PlayStation 3 consoles for research into supercomputing. They already have a cluster made from 336 of the old-style (non-Slim) consoles, which they've used for a variety of purposes, including "processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and 'neuromorphic computing.'" According to the Justification Review Document (DOC), "Once the hardware configuration is implemented, software code will be developed in-house for cluster implementation utilizing a Linux-based operating software."

Comment Re:Users should not get to be root. PERIOD (Score 1) 502

by sten ben (#30151396) Attached to: Fedora 12 Lets Users Install Signed Packages, Sans Root Privileges

To allow a non root user to in essence do root commands without prompting for a password just begs to be exploited.

I don't agree. First, we are talking about a desktop distro, and not a server: on a desktop the admin=the user. Second, if a user with physical access to the machine wants to exploit it, installing a package and searching for something to exploit would be the hard way. Just reboot, enter grub and start with runnlevel 1. There. root.

I don't agree. First, you're doing it wrong. You should be the admin and the user. Those accounts should not be the same (as implied by the = )

Second, if a user is good enough know how to install stuff, does that mean he groks GRUB and runlevels? My brother does the first, not the last. I trust him with my computer and account any day, because he doesn't know my password, thus can only damage my (backed-up) $HOME.

Comment Re:This makes sense (Score 1) 502

by sten ben (#30151254) Attached to: Fedora 12 Lets Users Install Signed Packages, Sans Root Privileges

It makes sense if you want to be able to install trusted apps without having to enter or know the root password.

You mean like sudo and gksudo? No surely you can't mean them, they've been used for a gazillion years now and work splendidly. And as far as I know no distro has been *ahem* "brave" enough to ship them set to execute apt-get without a password yet.

(gotta say I love your sig though)

Comment Re:This makes sense (Score 1) 502

by sten ben (#30151174) Attached to: Fedora 12 Lets Users Install Signed Packages, Sans Root Privileges

Does it somehow harm you if someone else thinks that this is a good feature? I'll repeat what I told someone else: if you aren't comfortable with this, don't use it.

Of course someone thinking this is a good feature doesn't harm me. Someone deciding for me to change the way my computer looks on software installation might though.

Installing software is a system-level change affecting all users of a system. Those changes commonly require consent of the administrator of the system to apply. That has been the default for ages. Neither you or anyone else has so far made a good case for why it is a good idea to change that default. It's not about if I can disable it, I know I can, but should I have to? Someone (perhaps that someone you are talking about) out there has made a decision for me that I should be using it. That person is not making his case very clear and neither are you.

Comment Re:This makes sense (Score 1) 502

by sten ben (#30150992) Attached to: Fedora 12 Lets Users Install Signed Packages, Sans Root Privileges

You are of course correct about setuid etc, and although I could argue about expectations a bit more, the rest of my post still stands.

From a desktop standpoint (Fedora is a desktop OS, not an enterprise one), it makes perfect sense to allow a user to install software that's already been verified as clean of malware without having to escalate their privileges.

I think you can find plenty of posts here describing software a person might not want his friend, colleague or brother installing on his computer. But some: GDM, anything with suid root, any networking daemon (yeah yeah, they're disabled on boot, but can still be run)... All users are not *NIX literate enough to root you by borrowing your laptop, but they can still be good enough in a terminal to install a bunch of crap I don't want.

And besides, if you don't like it, it's superd00per easy to disable. If you can't figure out how to disable it, you probably should be administering a server with anything remotely important on it.

Nice ad-hominem there. This issue doesn't apply to servers by the way. And i got out of the admin-business a while ago, so no worries. But: It used to be "easy": pklalockdown –lockdown org.freedesktop.packagekit.package-install but that command is deprecated. In the oh so nice future I'll have to go edit /var/lib/polkit-1/localauthority/50-local.d/10-my-pkgkit-policy.pkla and put some semi-documented commands in it. Most users/admins of Fedora will probably just google it, not read the man page or docs, and end up with a configuration they might not understand.BAD DEFAULT

Everybody just keeps repeating "It makes perfekt sense". I have not seen a single good argument for in what way it does.

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I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.

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