A black hole would dissipate via Hawking radiation only if it doesn't absorb more energy than it emits. Large blackholes absorb more energy (cosmic background radiation) than they would emit and hence will not necessarily dissipate. From wikipedia:

"A black hole of one solar mass has a temperature of only 60 nanokelvins; in fact, such a black hole would absorb far more cosmic microwave background radiation than it emits. A black hole of 4.5 × 1022 kg (about the mass of the Moon) would be in equilibrium at 2.7 kelvin, absorbing as much radiation as it emits. Yet smaller primordial black holes would emit more than they absorb, and thereby lose mass."

Not cocaine or ecstacy, but Switzerland allows you to buy heroine. Apparently the same referendum that legalized medicinal heroin use for addicts made marijuana illegal for medicinal purposes.

Our planet has a very energetic core. Any civilization having that kind of technology could be interested in harvesting it (They also get a huge core made of solid iron as a bonus!)

Except that in the context of this discussion the OS running in the virtual environment is the same kind as the host OS.

It used to work better when there were fewer stories on slashdot. These days the front pages gets updated at such a rapid rate that I suspect a big chunk of readers with mod points going past just a few comments in any one story. If they keep jumping from story to story then faulty moderations are bound to go uncorrected for relatively long times.

Give it a while though; residents of the internet wake up at different times :)

I think he was saying that the choice was between being a developer or switch to management. I don't think he is worried about being unemployed.

You are an idiot. Any research available to a chinese scholar (any non-citizen for that matter) would be publicly - or for a small fee - available to anyone. It is not called stealing; that's how research is done.

Then you might want to go see a doctor.

Do you have a link to the presentation? The linked article doesn't really get into any technical details and the language made me think that what you said was the case.

The whole point of TFA is that if even one computer gets infected on the network then it can be used to infect other machines without requiring the admin password on the remote machine. All it would take is one malicious person with physical access to one mac, or one careless click from someone who does has admin access to their own mac in the building.

Academic libraries frequently already have a big portion of their catalogue in digital form: mostly theses and journals. So my guess would be that someone starting out with a goal of digitizing all books would naturally start with the academic libraries.

The only person quoted in TFA, Katie Moussouris is a senior security strategist in Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing Group. So I'd say that you might not be way off the mark here.

Even if this competition was about developing secure operating systems - which it is not - there are operating systems out there (though not in popular use) that are way more secure that Linux in implementation, design, or both.

Hey Bob, no talk of subluxation this time? Getting subtler in your trolling, eh?

Your email address is not worth even a full dollar, let alone 600.