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Government

FAA Device Rules Illustrate the Folly of a Regulated Internet 449

Posted by samzenpus from the hands-off-the-tubes dept.
First time accepted submitter cathyreisenwitz writes "The New York Times' Bits blog has a great piece on the FAA's inconvenient, outdated and unhelpful rules regarding electronic devices on planes: 'Dealing with the F.A.A. on this topic is like arguing with a stubborn teenager. The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane's avionics, but it still perpetuates such claims, spreading irrational fear among millions of fliers.' The rules illustrate why we shouldn't let the government regulate the internet: Government regulations are nearly always outdated and too cautious."
EU

EU Working On Most Powerful Laser Ever Built 83

Posted by samzenpus from the that's-no-moon dept.
kkleiner writes "On the coattails of CERN's success with the Large Hadron Collider, Europeans and the world at large have another grand science project to be excited about: the Extreme Light Infrastructure project to build the most powerful laser ever constructed. These lasers will be intense enough to perform electron dynamics experiments at very short time scales or venture into relativistic optics, opening up an entirely new field of physics for study. Additionally, the lasers could be combined to generate a super laser that would shoot into space, similar to the combined laser effect of the Death Star in the Star Wars trilogy, though the goal is to study particles in space, not annihilate planets."

Comment Re:Still relevant? (Score 1) 510

by loxosceles (#41813745) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: How Do SSDs Die?

20GB is not enough.

A fairly clean Windows 7 Pro VM I have (basic Word/Excel/Outlook/PP office, firefox, chrome, acrobat reader) takes up over 20G, mainly because of winsxs.

I don't do much with that VM. IOW, it's not pristine, but it's a lot cleaner than most win7 systems.

Windirstat reports 22.9GB in C:\windows with 13GB of that in C:\windows\winsxs

Some of that might be ntfs's equivalent of symlinks, but properties on C: reports 24.1GB used, 4.5GB free (I need to resize the VM disk eventually). I don't believe the C: space usage is a lie, even if C:\windows is slightly overreported by windirstat.
The Military

Designing DNA Specific Bio-Weapons 227

Posted by samzenpus from the poison-just-for-you dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Atlantic reports that experts in genetics and microbiology are convinced we may be only a few years away from the development of advanced, genetic bio-weapons able to target a single human being based on their DNA. The authors paint a scenario of the development of a virus that causes only mild flu in the general population but when the virus crosses paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, the sequence would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that would trigger a fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that produces memory loss and, eventually, death. The requisite equipment including gene sequencers, micro-array scanners, and mass spectrometers now cost over $1 million but on eBay, it can be had for as little as $10,000. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President's Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. However no amount of Secret Service vigilance can ever fully secure the president's DNA, because an entire genetic blueprint can now be produced from the information within just a single cell. How to protect the President? The authors propose open-sourcing the president's genetic information to a select group of security-cleared researchers who could follow in the footsteps of the computer sciences, where 'red-team exercises,' are extremely common practices so a similar testing environment could be developed for biological war games. 'Advances in biotechnology are radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology,' write the authors. 'In light of this coming synbio revolution, a wider-ranging relationship between scientists and security organizations—one defined by open exchange, continual collaboration, and crowd-sourced defenses—may prove the only way to protect the president.'"

Comment Re:Post bigotry here (Score 5, Insightful) 1113

by loxosceles (#41571455) Attached to: US House Science Committee Member: Evolution Is a Lie From Hell

People do not live in a vacuum. People who believe in imaginary friends and believe those imaginary friends have sent facts and instructions for how to live, usually want to make everyone else believe those facts and live according to those instructions.

evolution, or lack thereof
foreign policy with countries dominated by other religions
the legal status of a fertilized embryo - stem cell research and abortion
contraception, sex education
porn
many other social policies

Comment Re:TRWTF (Score 2) 93

by loxosceles (#40865823) Attached to: Yahoo Sued For Password Breach

"It is always possible to recover a password."

This is not true. If a password has more entropy than the hash being used, there will be collisions that make it impossible to tell what the original password is.

This is a basic consequence of the fact that hash functions are irreversible and have fixed size. If you consider the space of all passwords of any length, there are infinitely many passwords (even if you limit passwords to those made of long strings of english words) that hash to a particular value.

For the vast majority of passwords in use, the entropy is lower than the entropy of the hash, so it's feasible to construct mappings of possible passwords to hashes and determine the most likely password that way. It is not *always* possible to recover a password, however.
Medicine

Study Finds Alcohol, Not Marijuana, Is the Biggest Gateway Drug For Teens 459

Posted by Soulskill from the can-of-worms dept.
An anonymous reader writes with news of a study out of the University of Florida which found that alcohol is the biggest "gateway" drug, the use of which increases the likelihood of other drug use. Quoting: "In the sample of students, alcohol also represented the most commonly used substance, with 72.2 percent of students reporting alcohol consumption at some point in their lifetime. Comparatively, 45 percent of students reported using tobacco, and 43.3 percent cited marijuana use. In addition, the drug use documented found that substance use typically begins with the most socially acceptable drugs, such as alcohol and cigarettes, then proceeds to marijuana use and finally to other illegal, harder drugs. Moreover, the study showed that students who used alcohol exhibited a significantly greater likelihood — up to 16 times — of licit and illicit substance use."

Comment Re:Well...not so much (Score 1) 2416

by loxosceles (#40488173) Attached to: Supreme Court: Affordable Care Act Is Constitutional

Doesn't matter if you're not for it, you're getting subsidized anyway.

No health insurance company has an insurance class for vegans or paleo dieters who do 30+ minutes of cardio a day, because until there are cheap tech means of measuring compliance, implementing that would cause the insurers to hemorrhage profits due to cheaters claiming healthy habits, getting the discount, then having diabetes/etc when they eat sugar 24/7 and don't exercise.

The Ins companies tend to only screen for pathological conditions, so trying to be healthy has negligible immediate monetary benefit over being average or slightly below average.

I strongly believe that society needs to tackle the problem of convincing people to be healthy first, THEN move to a public healthcare system (for-profit insurers making money off of people's need/desire to be covered against catastrophic medical problems doesn't seem ethical to me).
Microsoft

Red Hat Will Pay Microsoft To Get Past UEFI Restrictions 809

Posted by timothy from the one-low-low-price-but-still dept.
ToriaUru writes "Fedora is going to pay Microsoft to let them distribute a PC operating system. Microsoft is about to move from effectively owning the PC hardware platform to literally owning it. Once Windows 8 is released, hardware manufacturers will be forced to ship machines that refuse to run any software that is not explicitly approved by Microsoft — and that includes competing operating systems like Linux. Technically Fedora didn't have to go down this path. But, as this article explains, they are between a rock and a hard place: if they didn't pay Microsoft to let them onto the PC platform, they would have to explain to their potential users how to mess with firmware settings just to install the OS. How long before circumventing the secure boot mechanism is considered a DMCA violation and a felony?" Note that the author says this is likely, but that the entire plan is not yet "set in stone."
Space

Milky Way's Black Hole Wasn't Always Such a Wimp 83

Posted by Soulskill from the you-wouldn't-like-me-when-i'm-angry dept.
scibri writes "Sagittarius A*, the dormant supermassive black hole that lies at the center of our galaxy, was much more active not that long ago. Astronomers using the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope have picked up some faint gamma-ray signals that suggest Sagittarius A* was emitting a pair of powerful gamma-ray jets like other galactic black holes as recently as 20,000 years ago (arXiv paper). If our black hole was more active in the past, it could explain why Sagittarius A* seems to be growing about 1,000 times too slowly for it to have reached its current mass of about four million solar masses since the Galaxy formed about 13.2 billion years ago."

Comment Re:Note to all governments (Score 1) 274

by loxosceles (#39830821) Attached to: Amazon To Pay Texas Sales Tax

I thought all states technically require that.

However, it's unenforceable in most cases, so the only cases where someone usually pays it are:
a) They're a goodie-two-shoes.
b) They itemize the purchase when reporting to government. For instance, itemizing something to deduct it from taxes, without paying a use tax, could theoretically be noticed by the State.

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