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Comment Re:effectiveness in 2011 (Score 2) 271

by Quietust (#37832252) Attached to: Nationwide Test of the Emergency Broadcast System

EAS alerts have a distinctive noise they make before the announcement.

Specifically, that noise is a data burst which encodes most of the details of the alert (who sent it, what happened, where it happened, when it happened, etc.). Wikipedia provides a reasonably detailed description of the signal structure and the data encoding.
Transportation

Mazda Stops Production of the Last Rotary Engine Powered Car 359

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the ever-twirling-toward-speed dept.
Hugh Pickens writes "After a 45-year production run, Mazda Motor Corp announced that the latest edition of the Mazda RX-8 will end production in June 2012. The Japanese automaker ... introduced its first rotary engine car in 1967 and is the only automaker in the world that makes rotary engine vehicles, once the darling of the automotive industry. Such engines have fewer moving parts and are quieter than comparable piston engines but are more expensive to manufacture and consume more fuel. Cumulative sales of Mazda vehicles with rotary engines total about 1.995 million but Mazda sold only 2,896 RX-8 cars last year, with 1,245 of them in North America and 963 in Japan. 'Although R-X production is ending, the rotary engine will always represent the spirits of Mazda, and Mazda remains committed to its ongoing development,' says Mazda Chief Executive and President Takashi Yamanouchi recalling the victory of Mazda's rotary engine at Le Mans 20 years ago... Mazda does not have flashy green technologies in its lineup that its bigger Japanese rivals do — such as the hybrids at Toyota Motor Corp. or electric vehicles at Nissan Motor Co. The fading away of its prized rotary engine — although largely symbolic — is yet another blow."

Comment Re:Register as a developer (Score 1) 389

by Quietust (#37450830) Attached to: Microsoft Taking Apple's Walled Garden Approach For Metro Apps
Simple - make it so applications have to be signed by Microsoft, a certificate on your domain controller/equivalent (for enterprises), or a "test" certificate that's specific to your own system so you have to sign everything yourself.

To make it even more annoying, force the user to boot the system with a special option (which you can't set in boot.ini) in order to disable signature verification entirely (like you have to do when developing 64-bit device drivers, from what I recall).
Moon

Domino's Plans Pizza On the Moon 214

Posted by samzenpus from the extra-cheese dept.
It may be more PR stunt than a viable expansion plan, but the Japanese arm of Domino's Pizza is making plans for a lunar store. Construction firm Maeda Corp has drawn-up the plans for the dome shaped restaurant and figures it will take 70 tons of materials and pizza-making equipment. Even with the cost cutting measure or using mineral deposits on the moon to make the concrete, Domino's estimates the costs at Y1.67 trillion ($21.7 billion). In 2001 rival chain Pizza Hut made a delivery to the International Space Station, but Domino's hopes to become the preferred pizza of space with the moon store plan.

Comment Re:Placebo (Score 1) 117

by Quietust (#36677088) Attached to: Banks Faulted For Fake Antivirus Scourge
The term "homeopathic" specifically refers to medicines that are purported to be more effective the further they are diluted. Tapeworms aren't homeopathic - they're just one of many examples (another of which would be Radiation) of people using harmful things they didn't yet understand as if they were beneficial.

Comment Re:Still think Wikileaks knows what they're doing? (Score 2) 632

by Quietust (#36019514) Attached to: Leaked Doc May Have Forced US To Speed Up Bin Laden Raid

Killing Bin Laden does not weaken the terrorist threat and may well make all of this worse. Think Leia to Darth Vader "The tighter you clench your first, the more star systems will slip through your fingers like grains of sand."

Funny, I was thinking of an entirely different Star Wars quote - "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine." Martyrs are particularly difficult to deal with, after all.

Comment Re:I'll make you a deal (Score 5, Informative) 1073

by Quietust (#34778368) Attached to: The Continued Censorship of Huckleberry Finn
This sort of thing has already been done with other works, such as some of the DVD releases of certain Looney Tunes cartoons bearing a disclaimer along the lines of "The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed ."

Comment Re:examples... (Score 1) 179

by Quietust (#34775450) Attached to: Zynga and Blizzard Sued Over Game Patent
I don't think that game qualifies, since it's not a tournament system and it's not distributed. Besides, if it did qualify, there's no reason to single out my version of Promisance from the dozens of other versions that have been released over the years...

Comment Re:Sites sometimes limit passwords (Score 1) 277

by Quietust (#34643272) Attached to: Passwords Are the Weakest Link In Online Security
The answer is obvious enough - if the site restricts either the length or the content of your password, they obviously aren't hashing it (since hashes are always the same size no matter how much data you feed them) but are instead storing it in plaintext (and thus forbidding characters that would mess up their database queries or their actual data storage) or possibly doing some simple obfuscation on it, in which case you probably don't want to be using the site in the first place.
Security

Remote Exim Exploit In the Wild 90

Posted by kdawson from the be-careful-out-there dept.
An anonymous reader sends word of a remote exploit in the wild against the Exim mail agent. The news comes on the exim mailing list, where a user posted that he had his exim install hacked via remote exploit giving the attacker the privilege of the mailnull user, which can lead to other possible attacks. A note up at the Internet Storm Center reminds exim users how to set up to run in unprivileged mode, and a commenter includes recompile instructions for Debian exim for added safety. The security press hasn't picked up on this story so far.

Comment Re:why I'd pick 32 bit (Score 1) 401

by Quietust (#32877128) Attached to: Half of Windows 7 Machines Running 64-Bit Version

Did Microsoft even recompile notepad and paint to 64-bit?

Last I checked (which was a while ago), any 64-bit version of Windows has all of its bundled applications (notepad, paint, etc.) compiled as 64-bit, and some apps are also provided in 32-bit for compatibility (particularly Internet Explorer, since you can't load a 32-bit ActiveX control into a 64-bit process).

Comment Re:32 at work, 64 at home (Score 1) 401

by Quietust (#32877012) Attached to: Half of Windows 7 Machines Running 64-Bit Version

Other than the 16-bit apps, which 64-bit Windows 7 *finally* removed support for

Unless I'm mistaken, all 64-bit versions of Windows have been incapable of running 16-bit applications, since any version of Windows only provides one emulation layer - 32-bit versions have NTVDM+WOWEXEC for 16-bit apps, and 64-bit versions have WoW64 for 32-bit apps (which, if you're running Server 2008 R2 Core, can actually be uninstalled).

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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