Comment Re:How nice (Score 1) 409
Helium has gained a lot of traction in recent years as the suicide vehicle of choice. It has progressively become more central in every update of Final Exit.
Comment Re:How nice (Score 1) 409
A self-inflicted 22LR to the head killed my mother in 1979. A friend of mine had a daughter that used a .38 on herself and is a vegetable in a nursing home. You never know.
Comment Raspberry Pi (Score 1) 264
In November the $25 Raspberry Pi computer will become available. Check it out.
Comment Re:Sure, send me an invite! (Score 1) 1223
Invite, please: rickyjames at gmail etc etc - Thx!!!
Submission + - New Android App Attack Requires No Permissions (arxiv.org)
cybrpnk2 writes: In this Arxiv paper, three German students present a novel,
highly critical attack that allows unprompted installation of arbitrary
applications from the Android Market. Their attack is based on a single
malicious application, which, in contrast to previously known attacks,
does not require the user to grant it any permissions.
highly critical attack that allows unprompted installation of arbitrary
applications from the Android Market. Their attack is based on a single
malicious application, which, in contrast to previously known attacks,
does not require the user to grant it any permissions.
Comment Hip hip hooray (Score 1) 205
VB6 is an American classic just like a 64 Mustang. Forget OOP and just git er done. Its back to the future and I couldn't be happier. Welcome back old friend!
Submission + - Satellite Sees Atmospheric Warming Before Quake (technologyreview.com)
cybrpnk2 writes: From Tech Review's arXiv Blog: "Dimitar Ouzounov at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Centre in Maryland and a few buddies present the data from the Great Tohoku earthquake which devastated Japan on 11 March. Their results, although preliminary, are eye-opening. They say that before the M9 earthquake, the total electron content of the ionosphere increased dramatically over the epicentre, reaching a maximum three days before the quake struck. At the same time, satellite observations showed a big increase in infrared emissions from above the epicentre, which peaked in the hours before the quake. In other words, the atmosphere was heating up."
Accidental Find May Lead To a Cure For Baldness 404
kkleiner writes "Science is full of stories in which great discoveries are made by accident: the discovery of radiation, the discovery of the universe's shape through x-ray detection, and now perhaps the cure for hair loss. At the time they returned to the cages to find that their bald mice had miraculously grown their hair back, the scientists at UCLA had no intention of curing baldness. Originally, theirs was in fact a study aimed at reducing the harmful affects of chronic stress. The unanticipated side effect of their treatment could prove a boon to balding men and women everywhere, not to mention to the drug company that delivers the cure to them."
Submission + - Phantom 15 Million-The Future That Never Happened (nationaljournal.com)
cybrpnk2 writes: The job machine called American Business has not only destroyed millions of existing jobs to create the highest sustained unemployment rate in decades, it has also mysteriously failed to produce 15 million jobs once projected for the first decade of the 21st Century. Now US businesses are sitting on close to $2 trillion in cash with no apparent intent to invest it in American jobs. Why should they — Apple, for example, doubled their profits on iPhone by assembling it with Asian workers and letting it be a $2 billion burden on the US trade deficit.
Comment Who's Gonna Sing "You Can't Take Alt U From Me" (Score 1) 392
Friday is where Fox sends top-notch SF like Firefly to die (sniff). Fringe is toast.
Comment Re:Applies to all movies (Score 4, Insightful) 170
It certainly applied to how the Borg were handled in the star Trek franchise.
Comment Re:Those Were The Days My Friends, We Thought... (Score 1) 330
Funny thing, I was reading an article on this just the other day, talking about how object oriented programming in general and Java in particular lacked the clarity ond straightforwardness of declarative languages like my all time favorite, Visual Basic 6. Laugh if you want, I don't care, with VB6 I understood what was going on and could Get Things Done.
Google "criticism object oriented programming" and dig in on the real problem.
Comment Re:Those Were The Days My Friends, We Thought... (Score 1) 330
Long before I was playing Super Star Trek in BASIC, I was playing nim on a Digicomp-1 that was my first computer. Wish I still had that thing. Maybe I'll rebuild it one day...
Comment Re:Those Were The Days My Friends, We Thought... (Score 2, Informative) 330
LOL, I see that Basic Computer Games was printed in 1978. In 1974, I was typing it in directly from an issue of David Ahl's groundbreaking mid-1970s magazine Creative Computing, which he compiled into the book several years later. David Ahl is the reason I became a geek, long before there was even a TRS-80 to play with and I had to IMAGINE what the CC program listings would do becasue I didn't have a computer to run them on. Thanks, Dave!!!
Comment Those Were The Days My Friends, We Thought... (Score 4, Interesting) 330
...they'd never end...
Sigh. I remember David Ahl's Basic Computer Games with such nostalgia, spending my first weeks in late 1974 as a freshman typing in SUPER STAR TREK onto paper punch cards to run on the IBM360 at University of Tennessee. As a county bumpkin coming into the land of Oz where there were Real Actual Computers I could work with for the first time, I though I had Entered The Future.
Little did I know that the future had only begun, and continues today. Probably will continue into tomorrow, too.
