Comment Re: Metric units (Score 1) 282
No more imperial shit.
Oh, just wait until the NeoCons hear about this rocket.
Look what happened to the British Empire.
Comment Re:New-age "spirituality" (Score 1) 226
The whole concept of "duplicate you" just smacks of new age bullshit "spirituality" which suckers in the weak-minded and ill-educated with baffle gab and fancy words.
Nine out of ten mes agree!
Comment Re:FDA APPROVAL MEANS ITS SAFE (Score 2) 265
FDA...? Do they consider mosquitos food or drugs?
Why Screen Lockers On X11 Cannot Be Secure 375
jones_supa writes: One thing we all remember from Windows NT is the security feature requiring the user to press CTRL-ALT-DEL to unlock the workstation (this can still be enabled with a policy setting). The motivation was to make it impossible for other programs to mimic a lock screen, as they couldn't react to the special key combination. Martin Gräßlin from the KDE team takes a look at the lock screen security on X11. On a protocol level, X11 doesn't know anything of screen lockers. Also the X server doesn't know that the screen is locked as it doesn't understand the concept. This means the screen locker can only use the core functionality available to emulate screen locking. That in turn also means that any other client can do the same and prevent the screen locker from working (for example opening a context menu on any window prevents the screen locker from activating). That's quite a bummer: any process connected to the X server can block the screen locker, and even more it could fake your screen locker.
Comment Huh? (Score 1) 237
GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.
The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.
So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.
Comment I feel sorry for rich people, (Score 2) 339
what with the rabble's concerns boiling over and impinging on the fringes of their attention.
Davos 2015: Less Innovation, More Regulation, More Unrest. Run Away! 339
Freshly Exhumed writes: Growing income inequality was one of the top four issues at the 2015 World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland, ranking alongside European adoption of quantitative easing and geopolitical concerns. Felix Salmon, senior editor at Fusion, said there was a consensus that global inequality is getting worse, fueling overriding pessimism at the gathering. The result, he said, could be that the next big revolution will be in regulation rather than innovation. With growing inequality and the civil unrest from Ferguson and the Occupy protests fresh in people's mind, the world's super rich are already preparing for the consequences. At a packed session, former hedge fund director Robert Johnson revealed that worried hedge fund managers were already planning their escapes. "I know hedge fund managers all over the world who are buying airstrips and farms in places like New Zealand because they think they need a getaway," he said. Looking at studies like NASA's HANDY and by KPMG, the UK Government Office of Science, and others, Dr Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, warns that the convergence of food, water and energy crises could create a "perfect storm" within about fifteen years.
Comment Re:We Really Don't (Score 1) 153
Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.
As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)
Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.
Comment Re:"Fraudulent" (Score 1) 468
And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.
Comment Re:I have an idea.. (Score 1) 468
It's like the old Texan saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, can't get fooled again."
I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."
And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".
(Is this really a regional saying?)
Comment Re:We Really Don't (Score 2) 153
This is the comic book version of what happened.
Like all esoteric fields of study, we outsiders can't understand it because we don't have The Right Stuff.
(Presumably that's something they smoke.)
Comment Re:Other than the obligatory security theatre... (Score 1) 110
My first cynical thought was "shoot them down if they blow up". But one bomber claimed to be on board, so they could have reasonably been concerned that the planes would be hijacked and used as missiles.
Comment Re:we don't do credible here (Score 2) 110
Yeah. If you make threats on Slashdot you get picked up by men in white coats instead of black helicopters.
Ask Slashdot: Best Anti-Virus Software In 2015? Free Or Paid? 467
CryoKeen writes: I got a new laptop recently after trading in my old laptop for store credit. While I was waiting to check out, the sales guy just handed me some random antivirus software (Trend Micro) that was included with the purchase. I don't think he or I realized at the time that the CD/DVD he gave me would not work because my new laptop does not have a CD/DVD player.
Anyway, it got me wondering whether I should use it or not. Would I be better off downloading something like Avast or Malwarebytes? Is there one piece of antivirus software that's significantly better than the others? Are any of the paid options worthwhile, or should I just stick to the free versions? What security software would you recommend in addition to anti-virus?
Anyway, it got me wondering whether I should use it or not. Would I be better off downloading something like Avast or Malwarebytes? Is there one piece of antivirus software that's significantly better than the others? Are any of the paid options worthwhile, or should I just stick to the free versions? What security software would you recommend in addition to anti-virus?
Comment Re:I`ll be the pessimist (Score 1) 130
``the number of escapees was so small as to be undetectable``.
This doesn`t exactly sound encouraging.
It means no one had died yet, as far as they know.
