23855150
submission
crutchy writes:
I was reading in an IEAust (http://www.engineersaustralia.org.au/) magazine about the case for thorium as a fuel for nuclear power generation. While I generally support nuclear power for base load power generation, I'm aware of its risks and obstacles to widespread use particularly in Australia. On face value there appears to be a lot of promise in Thorium. There will always be those that oppose it of course (vested interest is a powerful motivator), but a quick Google search reveals that tehre doesn't seem to be that much negative publicity surrounding it yet; a story by The Guardian received many comments debunking the article (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/23/thorium-nuclear-uranium). For those that have never heard of it, have a squiz at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium#Thorium_as_a_nuclear_fuel). Keeping in mind the huge projected demand for energy in the future and that carbon is a naturally occurring substance (so treehuggers who think it should be illegal to fart need not reply, although NOx & SOx emissions should definitely be on the environmental agenda regarding current energy generation technologies), I'm interested to help get some debate/discussion about Thorium going on slashdot to see what arguments there are. No doubt there will be many armchair experts out there with strong opinions both ways, but as an engineer working in the power industry I want to hear both sides. This may well be flamebait, but the future of electricity generation is topical lately and important, so I don't think this sort of discussion is irrelevant. Who knows; maybe there is the odd politician reading that may have the balls to speak up (not likely but we can only hope).
23139232
submission
crutchy writes:
"GOOGLE stepped up its assault on Apple by buying Motorola's smartphone business for $US12.5billion."
"The acquisition of Motorola Mobility is Google's biggest purchase to date and a deliberate move to bolster the adoption of its Android software, which is used in millions of mobile phones."
"The deal gives Google access to Motorola's patent trove — thought to be about 17,000- at a time when the fight for dominance in the highly lucrative smartphone market has descended into a patents war, with Microsoft and Apple suing Motorola and Google over a string of alleged patent infringements relating to Android."
22972342
submission
crutchy writes:
Why should we be limited to booting a PC with "real" devices such as usb sticks or hard drives with conventional operating systems on them? Could a GPL'ed IDE driver be modified to sort of work in reverse? Take an old PC, configure the bios to boot from IDE, strip out everything but the power supply, mobo, ram and processor, connect an IDE ribbon cable (long one) between this stripped down machine to another fully functioning machine (running Linux obviously), install a customised IDE driver, and boot the stripped down machine by tricking it into thinking its booting off a real bootable IDE hard disk. Wham bam thankyou ma'am you have access to another CPU and more ram without the bottleneck of ethernet. I'd also need a customised Linux kernel on top of the customised IDE driver because I don't just want to use another computer as a bootable storage device; I actually want to harness the stripped down machine's cpu and ram as if I was running my program on it locally.
21421350
submission
crutchy writes:
When I was setting up my secure website I got really paranoid about SSL encryption, so I created a certificate using OpenSLL for SHA-512 encryption. I don't know much about SHA (except bits that I can remember from Wikipedia), but I figure that if you're going to go to the trouble (or expense) of setting up SSL, you may as well go for the best you can get, right? Also, what would be the minimum level of encryption required for say online banking? I've read about how SHA-1 was "broken", but from what I can tell it still takes many hours. What is the practical risk to the real internet from this capability? Would a sort of rolling key be a possible next step, where each SSL-encrypted stream has its own private/public key pair generated on the fly, and things like passwords and bank account numbers were broken up and sent in multiple streams with different private/public key pairs? This would of course require more server grunt to generate these keys (or we could take a leaf from Google's book and just have separate server clusters designed solely for that job), but then if computing performance was a limiting factor, the threat to security of these hashes wouldn't be a problem in the first place. I guess with all security infrastructure, trust becomes a more important factor than technical abilities. Can I trust that my SSL provider hasn't been hacked (or at least snooped)? How do I know some disgruntled IT admin hasn't sold the private key of his company's root CA to the same organisation that developed the conficker virus? It would certainly make for a more profitable payload. I've read some of Bruce Schneier's work (I'm subscribed to Cryptogram) and he tends to highlight the FUD that surrounds internet security, and I agree that there is a lot of FUD, but complete ignorance and blase attitude toward security can also be taken advantage of. Where is the middle ground?
