Comment Apps bigger than Hollywood (Score 1) 135
And they use more burp and fart sound effects than all of Hollywood!
Comment Re:iPad is a luxury? (Score 1) 307
These are really another iteration of the PDAs of the 90s. Remember how dorky those PDA users looked fiddling with their small screens?
Comment Re:Not really. (Score 1) 237
There's a bit more to it than that. My tops would be two points.
First, we're memetically infectuous. Plant a new idea here, and someone will run with it, most likely in some direction you never wished for. Many of our memetic infections are downright dangerous, lethal, destructive, etc. Contact might well be considered irresponsible, no matter how well intended.
Second, there's the thing I mentioned about our reverse-engineering technology. They might accidentally give us more capability than they wanted to. Not that we'd be any threat to them, but we've been sitting here for however long with the Doomsday Clock close to midnight. Give us something new that can be weaponized, (We've been able to turn just about everything into a weapon, perhaps the most resistant invention was the "death ray", the laser - it's had so darned many peaceful uses and has been very hard to make into aweapon.) and we will do so. Perhaps that weapon might be what tips the scale, ticks the clock, or whatever metaphor you like.
Comment My experience is different. (Score 3, Insightful) 29
The truth is that many firms simply don't have the staff and budget needed to support an internal SOC. They also don't have the budget for an MSSP. With that, Mike Rothman of Securosis noted that these firms are "trapped on the hamster wheel of pain, reacting without sufficient visibility, but without time to invest in gaining that much-needed visibility into threats without diving deep into raw log files".
In my experience it is not the budget but the politics.
Is your company's security worth the expense of an additional tech? Or are office politics the reason you cannot get an additional tech?
Does whomever is in charge of your technology have the authority to say "no" to requests from other departments? And the political capital to make it stick?
I've seen too many examples of companies "suffering" from the problems their own decisions/environment created.
Retrofitting security is not the answer.
Comment Re:Who eats doughnuts with the doughnut men? (Score 1) 468
That's not the case here, and it's irrelevant. When I noticed the discrepancy between my camera's reported speed and my speedometer, I then compared it with a GPS-based speedometer app in my iPhone. The iPhone and car speedometer were in perfect sync. The camera-indicated speed was indeed extremely low, and so low that I have to think it was made deliberately wrong in order to provide misleading information in court, to fight in jurisdictions where such things are overlooked.
Let's say I was in court for some kind of accident, and I was going 70 MPH in a 60 MPH zone. The video recording of the crash shows the camera says 60 MPH, so it never comes up that I'm partially at fault because I was speeding. The other party in the crash is screwed by faulty evidence.
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 Re: just put a motor on the elevator itself (Score 1) 248
No, you could use a conductive rail, like a subway, and rack and pinion system to move the elevator. The rack and rail would add a fair bit more total weight to the building compared to a cable. But more importantly, the motors would have to be much much more powerful! Modern elevator systems have a counter-weight balanced on the other side of that cable, which means the motor only has to overcome friction and the small difference in weight between the elevator and counterweight (which varies depending on current payload). The motor on an elevator like Noah is suggesting would have to provide enough force to counteract the entire weight of the elevator + payload + motor + friction, which is at least an order of magnitude more than a traditional elevator.
Let's not forget that rack and pinion elevator cars are significantly noisier, slower, and have much more vibration compared to traditional cable or hydraulic elevators. Rack and pinion is great for portable elevators but a poor choice for a short building, and an awful choice for a tall building.
Comment Re:just put a motor on the elevator itself (Score 1) 248
i would do away with the motor at the top of the shaft, and instead electrify each individual elevator so it has motive power. seems like the best solution to me.
The only benefit to doing this is to eliminate the cable. That leaves you with rack and pinion drive as basically the only realistic* option for moving the car up and down. Rack and pinion elevator cars are slower, noisier, and have substantially more vibration than hydraulic or cable elevator cars.
*Another option is a pneumatic elevator, but those are even slower and less suited for tall buildings.
Submission + - New Micro-Ring Resonator Creates Quantum Entanglement on a Silicon Chip (gizmag.com)
Zothecula writes: The quantum entanglement of particles, such as photons, is a prerequisite for the new and future technologies of quantum computing, telecommunications, and cyber security. Real-world applications that take advantage of this technology, however, will not be fully realized until devices that produce such quantum states leave the realms of the laboratory and are made both small and energy efficient enough to be embedded in electronic equipment. In this vein, European scientists have created and installed a tiny "ring-resonator" on a microchip that is claimed to produce copious numbers of entangled photons while using very little power to do so.
Submission + - We May Have Jupiter To Thank For the Nitrogen In Earth's Atmosphere (nature.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Nitrogen makes up about 78% of the Earth's atmosphere. It's also the 4th most abundant element in the human body. But where did all the nitrogen on Earth come from? Scientists aren't sure, but they have a new theory. Back when the solar system was just a protoplanetary disk, the ice orbiting the early Sun included ammonia, which has a nitrogen atom and three hydrogen atoms. But there needed to be a way for the nitrogen to get to the developing Earth. That's where Jupiter comes in. During its theorized Grand Tack, where it plunged into the center of the solar system and then retreated outward again, it created shock waves in the dust and ice cloud surrounding the sun. These shock waves caused gentle heating of the ammonia ice, which allowed it to react with chromium-bearing metal to form a mineral called carlsbergite. New research (abstract) suggests this mineral was then present when the Earth's accretion happened.
Comment Not bad (Score 1) 2
Not bad, but I think Barb's was actually pretty good.
Comment Re:Price (Score 1) 4
I dismissed them as neckbeards and accountants.
I'd argue/debate/discuss it with you, but I find it an issue for the history books. Besides, I think I'm stuck in meetings for five of the next eight hours
Comment Re:Tax (Score 5, Informative) 534
They are paying 26% tax. It's right there in the filing.
Comment Re:This doesn't sound... sound (Score 1) 328
Comment Re:Not all code is vulnerable - getaddrinfo() is f (Score 2) 211
As pointed out in the article, the program must use gethostbyname() on a name supplied by the attacker.
A much more mitigating factor is that the bug is only exercised if the name looks like a numerical id, and according to their search most software first checks this using inet_aton() and only calls gethostbyname() if this fails, thus avoiding the bug.
