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Comment Re:Eritrea? (Score 1) 233

To be fair though, part the reason you probably hadn't heard about it is because the world's media was mostly too busy covering middle east stuff like Israel's war with Lebanon.

I think the reason for this is that its a lot less fun to be a reporter in Darfur then it is to be a reporter in Tel Aviv. If you are a reporter in Israel, it's only a 3 hour trip from Tel Aviv to the Gaza strip or to the north, you get your news story about the horrors of conflict between the Israelis or Palestinians or Lebanese, and then you drive back to Tel Aviv, send off your report, and then go partying in Tel Aviv all night. Rinse and repeat.

What the heck type of fun is there in Darfur?

Cheers
Ben

Comment Faraday cage? (Score 1) 392

I don't get it.

It the malicious circuity has to be triggered externally and it's unknown when it'll be used, that means that either:
(1) hackers have to get into a network linked to the hardware or
(2) there has to be an external radio signal which can disable the hardware or
(3) The hardware (radar in this case) doesn't validate it's input well enough and is open to buffer overflows/ bad execution based on invalid input.

From what I've read, the Israelis exploited (3) in order to disable the syrians radar systems.
It seems to me that the syrians bought just plain crappy radar systems and then never bothered to test or "fuzz" them.

However, the article seems to be going crazy over (2). However, a simple faraday cage should be good enough to defeat that kind of attack.
It'll create a barrier between the inside of the container and the outside. No EM radiation goes in, no EM radiation goes out.
Any kind of circuity triggered by EM would be defeated. And by definition, any circuity triggered by time is useless because it's impossible to determine when in the future, it'll be required.

And (1) is easily defended against by not connecting your critical defense hardware to any network of any kind. Or by using 3rd party firewalls which have not been made in China/Russia/Iran...

So this is much todo about nothing IMHO.

Comment Whats the relationship between smarts and ego? (Score 1) 555

I find this study to be wildly stupid.

The author merely asks the survey participates to rate their mathematical abilities without actually testing them.
I wonder about the correlation (probably negative) between people who rate their math skills highly and people who actually can do math.

This study should be titled "Correlation between people who have high self esteem and who thinks that this child pornography prosecution is stupid."

Comment Re:Back to the Future? (Score 1) 361

While service isolation is easy on Unix platforms, it's not on Windows.

I don't think it's even that easy on unix. I had to install a lot of custom packages on our Suse machines at work to get reviewboard up and running.
With that level of customization, I won't dare try to get another service running on that VM.
Also, another awesome benefit to VMWare's concept is that it's trivial for me to clone the machine and setup an identical machine to test doing an upgrade.
After that, I'm a fan of VMWare server. Of course, the service is not bandwidth intensive so the issues are different.

Comment Re:ha ha (Score 1) 466

The point is that Murdoch has revealed his true colors as a media giant and not as a respectable news business that'll protect it's journalists when they mess up.

Remind me to ignore news postings for News Corp because obviously they are biased. Especially ones relating to the effects of piracy on the economy, small artists, big artists and most importantly THEMSELVES!!!

Comment Re:If its really about lost telco money (Score 1) 174

Maybe AT&T and Verizon were worried that the VoIP providers would switch to other common carriers like MCI and Sprint if they only cut off the service.

Maybe they wanted to crush all of the businesses at once by grabbing as much expensive hardware as possible.

Wow, the FBI really do sound like a bunch of paid-off thugs in this scenario...

Comment Re:Favors (Score 1) 174

Here's a simpler conspiracy for you: AT&T and Verizon have very good working relationships with the FBI due to the wiretapping business. AT&T and Verizon aren't being paid for the bytes being sent over their wires. So instead of waiting for the real collection agents to try to collect and let the normal court system do the job, they tell the companies to pay up or they will send the FBI after them. The internet companies don't believe them and call their bluff. After a couple of months, AT&T and verizon go to the FBI and request a raid because of a "massive fraud scheme against" them. The FBI dutifully goes in, grabs all of their equipment (their standard modus operandi) and walks out. The customers are pissed but if they were smart, they had everything on backups in secret vaults. AT&T and Verizon have just lost a ton of paying customers and are about to be slapped with several large lawsuits. QWest, MCI, sprint and covad get a ton of new business.

Comment Re:High density = no digging (Score 2, Insightful) 257

So Verizon digging out their old copper wires and putting in fiber is a GOOD THING!

Imagine if only the cable company (Comcast here) could offer ultra hi-speed internet.

Since we (the US) don't require the cable companies to be common carriers (http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/27/1510219) then customers wanting hi-speed internet would have only one place to go.

So I say to verizon, dig baby dig!

Comment Re:Don't they want people to use Hulu? (Score 1) 281

I think large companies drift on inertia a lot.
No one wants to rock the boat or tell their manager that times are changing.

I bet that the head haunchos at the cable companies are trying to be exclusive with their content so they can charge a high premium for it.

I dont know. Most regular tv/movie media pisses me off and if its something that seems really interesting, I add it to my netflixs queue.

Comment Re:what? (Score 1) 87

I congratulate you, as you are clearly an intelligent audience

So did i, but that didn't prevent me from reading the book. Actually, It's my current bed-side reading. And so far, so good.
The author is funny and really seems to know his stuff. He writes from the heart.

Cheers
Ben

Comment Re:Return of the command line (Score 1) 360

CLI is faster the GUI but requires much more memorization and has no context which the user can start from.
Also, it's harder to control stateful programs using cli IMHO.

If ubiquity manages to reduce the memorization task (by making the options constrained and having a drop down to select from with help),
then it could be a big win. It still has the problem of being difficult to manipulate data in a stateful manner...

Comment KDE 4.2 rocks! (Score 1) 455

I know that a lot of people here are dissing 4.2 as buggy and unusable but on my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop, it rocks!

I have tons of graphical eye candy and it's super easy to add/remove plasmoids. Probably, the system bar icons should be movable to plasmoids seamlessly,
but mostly the whole package hangs together well. The audio worked out of the box and the volume setting is visible when you change it. (Note, I had to manually change the control to master, it defaulted to pcm)

The compositing eyecandy is great and adds a little more bling. And so is the screen switching.
Now I just need to stop reading /. and get back to hacking krita.

Comment Re:interesting data points (Score 1) 157

Israel's number one money maker is the ideas and developments of it's people, mostly in the form of software, more then tourism.

When your country doesn't have any significant natural resources and doesn't have friendly neighbors to trade with,
it tends to develop a very robust intellectual infrastructure.
Plus, most of it helps the defense industry. You'll notice that the entertainment industry in Israel is quite small.

Cheers
Ben

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