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Comment Re:Were Denisovans really a DIFFERENT SPECIES? (Score 2) 133

That's an outdated definition. Species is flexible in that regards.

Species A can breed with Species B and Species B can breed with Species C but species A can't breed with Species C. (and by breed, I mean produce fertile offspring). Rut Roh.

Remember that species is also a convenient moniker for what something is/was at a particular moment in time. Given enough time and isolation, perhaps our different human races could diverge enough to have similar issues with breeding. For Denisovans, they remained isolated enough to condense their gene pool (and add their own mutations) to be considered a distinct species, but still capable of interbreeding back into the main branch, so to speak. Hrm, there's gotta be a git analogy here that is too early for me to formulate.

Comment Re:Touch Server (Score 1) 681

It's OK, this version will change all those commands to equally long but completely different commands. According to their internal surveys, that should help sales out by giving administrators a sense of accomplishment in learning a new command set. What could go wrong?

              -Charlie

Comment Re:Touch Server (Score 2) 681

Ha! I get the joke there, you made a funny. Windows in the datacenter, har har.

          -Charlie

P.S. For those who don't get my joke, you should look up the marketshare data of Windows in the datacenter. No not the BS "Sales of OSes on servers" that MS commissions from Gartner, Forrester, and all the others who know where the checks come from, but share by installed socket. If you have access, look at it over the last 6-7 years, it is brutal. Make sure you get installed rather than sales, MS keeps commissioning reports that somehow manage to not count Google, Facebook, Baidu, Tencent etc etc's servers. Not sure why though. :)

Comment Re:Question... -- ? (Score 1) 215

Yes, there is a workaround you can use, if you know about it and remember it every time, to enable the safe behaviour. That does *not* count as 'problem solved'. To solve the problem, the safe behaviour needs to be the default, with the funky and unsafe behaviour of treating filenames as extra switches being the one you have to enable specially. Really - what are the odds that the user or programmer *intends* for a file called --foo to be treated as an option specifier when they expand a wildcard? Conceptually the fix is not hard. Each element in argv gets an associated flag saying whether it is a filename - and if it is marked as a filename, getopt() or whatever does not treat it as an option specifier even if it begins with the - character. Alternatively, filenames beginning - could simply be disallowed.

Comment Re: Have 2 keys with different uses (Score 1) 560

This kind of thing is where having 2 different keys for an encrypted volume would be good, like a key for personal usage, and another key for usage when under duress.

The normal key would unencrypt the volume for you to use as normal, and the "duress" key would cause the volume to automatically do a secure data wipe of the volume file.

What ever you do, if you think you are under legal duress, DO NOT DO THIS!

The first thing even the local cops are trained to do is to make an image of a volume. They do this for two reasons. The first is the legal: don't destroy evidence that the defense may call into question, and keep a chain of custody. The second is because people have tried exactly what you suggest. If you gave them a password that destroyed evidence, then even if they still had the original drive you have "attempted to destroy evidence" and interfered with the investigation, and probably a few other things that will add to your sentence and provided the evidence of the crime just by doing it in front of the police!

The TrueCrypt 'two encrypted areas in a single visible area' is fine if the police can not prove, through digging through windows, that you regularly keep two encrypted drives mounted (say X and Y). If you always mount both as drive X: and don't have other OS signs that it is used for multiple objects (drive UUIDs are unfortunately telling) then you are safer. But if you normally keep X and Y mounted, they'll want proof of what Y is; saying it's a USB stick, letting them plug it in and seeing it automount to G and not having other ids match would be . . . unpleasant.

Comment Re:I lost the password (Score 1) 560

Destruction of evidence, hindering a police investigation, and so on. And unless it is done at the flash memory chip level, they could get an image of the data.

What might be useful is something like an old article I read on randomly changing 'root's password on a *nix system, so it was next to impossible to log in as root. A user with permission could still use sudo to do what was needed, and "sudo -i" would be available for a single admin. Or the practice of changing the encryption key to /tmp or the swap partition on reboots; the user has no way to recover the data from those locations once a reboot has occurred. A secure encryption method that keeps even the intended user from using it would be a very had thing to sell, unfortunately.

Comment There've been quite a few procedural games (Score 3, Informative) 100

Frontier Elite 2, for instance. Ken Musgrave literally wrote the book on procedural generation and is the brains behind MojoWorld, a procedural world generator that's great fun. If you liked Bryce back in the day, MojoWorld is Bryce on steroids.

Not knocking these guys at all, btw, it looks great. Just giving some background.

Comment Re:That's not what I took away from this... (Score 1) 347

Franson's idea, as I understand it, is that during the small window between creation and annihilation, the massive particles are under the influence of gravity, which bleeds off energy. When the pair recombines, it results in a reduced velocity of the photon.

I read it as just barely changing the vector of the light, not the velocity. All photons travel at c, but gravity could make the path of travel curve more than previously thought.

Comment Re:Light odyssey (Score 1) 347

Neutrinos have virtual particle interactions as well. Only low energy photons seem not to (that I remember diagrams for, maybe they do too).
So ALL THINGS are made by the devil except for infrared light and AM radio. Seems to explain why looking at things makes you question stuff (visible light is a lie!) and only AM radio tells the truth.

Comment Re:Is there a 'less nerdy version'? (Score 1) 347

I'd correct the photon "zig-zagging".
The guy is saying that we know photons can very quickly turns into an electron and it's friend a positron. They almost instantly turn back, but since the electron and it's friend are bigger and heavier than a photon of light they are affected by gravity more.
So, if the author is right, the light we saw took a different path to get to us. Just a little bit different, enough to add an hour over the course of 163,000 years.

Comment Re:What gets corrected? (Score 1) 347

Yup, it only affects a small percentage of photons for a very brief time. Schrodinger's equation and the rest of QED let you work out how many photons in a given burst over X amount of time. For most of our observations, in laser labs and other 'short' distances the effect shouldn't even be noticeable. But it might change astronomical measurements by a good bit. (well, 1.7 hours over 168,000 years, 1x10^-9; more or less, since light-years traveled and years traveled aren't identical at that distance due to expansion effects)

And if it affects photons, it will affect other particles as well. Maybe it explains the two neutrino bursts; if one burst traveled in a straight line and the other had a virtual particle interaction.

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