Comment Re:I think.. (Score 1) 395
unittests also serve as documentation - show how stuff is used.
Comment Re:Maybe they did it wrong... (Score 1) 395
The key message behind that principle is: "Don't deliver working software that has no more purpose for business". If you can deliver a well QA'd and developed software that is obsolete by the time it is shipped then that is money wasted. If the development overall objective is always slipping, but along the way useful software modules are delivered to the users and they make money, then it is a success.
Badgers Digging Up Ancient Human Remains 172
One of England's oldest graveyards is under siege by badgers. Rev Simon Shouler now regularly patrols the grounds of St. Remigius Church looking for bones that the badgers have dug up. The badger is a protected species in England so they can not be killed, and attempts to have them relocated have been blocked by English Nature. From the article: "At least four graves have been disturbed so far; in one instance a child found a leg bone and took it home to his parents. ... Rev. Simon Shouler has been forced to carry out regular patrols to pick up stray bones, store them and re-inter them all in a new grave."
Comment Re:Challenge response or custom hardware (Score 1) 1155
I think it is important to make sure no trickery occurs - the system has to be reasonably secure even if all implementation details are known.
Encryption key could be stored in self-destructing HSM. And forgetting a passphrase/password or PIN is a common thing. You could try to perform trickery and say "I am confused and these are my likely guesses". Then watch as police type pin 3-5 times wrong and HSM self-destruct. Proving that you intentionaly misled police would be very difficult, I believe (IANAL).
Encryption key could be stored in self-destructing HSM. And forgetting a passphrase/password or PIN is a common thing. You could try to perform trickery and say "I am confused and these are my likely guesses". Then watch as police type pin 3-5 times wrong and HSM self-destruct. Proving that you intentionaly misled police would be very difficult, I believe (IANAL).
Comment Re:Only 16 weeks? (Score 1) 1155
Here's a simple option that might very well work. Design a simple challenge response device with LCD which requests PIN code and then provides the long password. Have one PIN that opens and another, say 0000 that unloads a lot of energy into the simple memory chip frying it. Then, when police come, let them guess the PIN or give thre incorrect attempts saying that all this stress caused me to forget exact combination.
Comment Re:Good SQL design books: (Score 1) 291
I think it should be mandatory reading for any DB designer. One thing I miss not taking from my last job was Celko's books I had ordered.
Submission + - Prius problems possibly a hoax (wsj.com)
colin_faber writes: After last weeks exciting news that there might actually be a verified case of a Toyota Prius going out of control due to the mysterious accelerator control problems discussed here many times. It appears that the drive may have faked the incident. In the recent investigation of the Toyota Prius involved in a dramatic incident federal officials along with engineers from Toyota Motor Corp. found a particular pattern of wear on the car's brakes that doesn't seem consistent with the driver's story.
This does not surprise the submitter at all, as these types of cases have been going on for years now, especially when you factor in the driver being 61 years young.
This does not surprise the submitter at all, as these types of cases have been going on for years now, especially when you factor in the driver being 61 years young.
Submission + - Sun's Great Conveyor Running at Record Speed (msn.com)
rubycodez writes: The scarcity of sunspots in the last three years might be explained by the Great Conveyor belts of the Sun moving at never before seen speed. It was until recently thought that faster motion of the plasma streams would cause higher solar activity, but instead this has coincided with a deep solar minimum. Even more puzzling is a second abnormality, that the bottom of the conveyor is moving at a record slow speed. Though not at all addressed in the article, if we understand so very little about the Sun, and have been so horribly wrong about predicting peak and weak cycles, what does that say about our ability to model climate, which after all is driven by the Sun?
Submission + - Worker Threatened to be Fired Over Web Site Visits (abovetopsecret.com)
SpicyBrownMustard writes: A poster going by the pseudonym of "Misoir" reports that his supervisor has threatened to fire him over a web site he visits on his personal time. He writes: "I work weekends at a grocery store called Win Dixie. Yesterday I was on a lunch break and the store supervisor walked up to me while I was sitting on a bench and on Above Top Secret via my laptop and he walked over and leaned against the wall. Then he leaned forward and told me that he doesn't want me visiting these websites because they lie and distort facts. I was stunned and did not reply, and then he started to walk away and told me if he catches me on this website again I will be fired." His full story is related here which brings up a number of interesting questions, including; can an employer rightfully control the online access of workers during break time?
Submission + - SpaceX Conducts First On-Pad Test-Fire Of Falcon 9 (spaceflightnow.com)
FleaPlus writes: On Saturday SpaceX successfully conducted a launch dress rehearsal and on-pad test firing of their completed Falcon 9 rocket, with the 15-story tall rocket held down to prevent launch (Videos). SpaceX is one of several likely competitors (ranging from the upstart Blue Origin to the more experienced Boeing) in NASA's new plans for commercial crew transportation to low-Earth orbit. SpaceX has been cleared by Cape Canaveral for the Falcon 9's first orbital launch next month, carrying a test model of the company's Dragon cargo/crew capsule, although CEO/CTO Elon Musk has cautioned that they're still in the equivalent of 'beta testing' for the first few flights.
Submission + - New unit proposed for energy efficiency (lbl.gov)
tugfoigel writes: Pioneering French physicists Marie and Pierre Curie have the curie, a unit of radioactivity, named after them. Renowned inventor Nikola Tesla is honored with the tesla, which measures a magnetic field. And now, the Rosenfeld, proposed as a unit for electricity savings, will be named after the man seen by many people as the godfather of energy efficiency, Arthur Rosenfeld.
Courtesy California Energy Commission
“In keeping with the tradition among scientists of naming units in honor of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scientific principle in question,” a group of scientists propose today in a refereed article in Environmental Research Letters to define the Rosenfeld as electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year, the amount needed to replace the annual generation of a 500 megawatt coal-fired power plan
Courtesy California Energy Commission
“In keeping with the tradition among scientists of naming units in honor of the person most responsible for the discovery and widespread adoption of the underlying scientific principle in question,” a group of scientists propose today in a refereed article in Environmental Research Letters to define the Rosenfeld as electricity savings of 3 billion kilowatt-hours per year, the amount needed to replace the annual generation of a 500 megawatt coal-fired power plan
Submission + - Opera Mini 5 Beta Launched On Google Android (eweekeurope.co.uk)
jee4all writes: Opera Software released a beta of Opera Mini 5, the next version of its mobile web browser, for Google Android on 11 March. The announcement comes exactly a week after Opera announced it would release the same application for Windows Mobile 5.x and 6.x smartphones, indicating that the company is committed to maintaining its mobile-browser market share in the face of ever-increasing competition.
Submission + - Attack of the Killer Electrons 1
Hugh Pickens writes: "At the peak of a magnetic storm the number of highly energetic 'killer electrons' strong enough to damage electronics and human tissue can increase by a factor of more than ten times and they can be dislodged, posing a danger to spacecraft, satellites, and astronauts. Killer electrons can penetrate satellite shielding, so if electrical discharges take place in vital components, a satellite can be damaged or even rendered inoperable. For many years, the mechanism by which killer electrons are produced has remained little understood, in spite of physicists’ attempts at solving this puzzle. Now Astrobiology Magazine reports that data shows that the increase in the creation of a substantial number of killer electrons is due to a two-step process. First, the initial acceleration is due to the strong shock-related magnetic field compression. Immediately after the impact of the interplanetary shock, Earth’s magnetic field lines began wobbling at ultra low frequencies. In turn, these ULF waves effectively accelerate the seed electrons provided by the first step, to become killer electrons. “These new findings help us to improve the models predicting the radiation environment in which satellites and astronauts operate. With solar activity now ramping up, we expect more of these shocks to impact our magnetosphere over the months and years to come,” says Philippe Escoubet, ESA’s Cluster mission manager."
Submission + - No More Front Page For Digg? (oreilly.com)
blackbearnh writes: Before he moved on to start SimpleGeo, Joe Stump was the Chief Architect for Digg. He recently talked to O'Reilly Radar, and in the course of the interview, revealed a little of what he knows about Digg's future. If you've ever felt frustrated by the arbitrary gaming of what gets on Digg's front pages, you should like what Stump says, which is that the ubiquitous front page is likely to go away. "If all you're going to do is bury Palin stories or Obama stories, maybe the answer isn't to figure out that you're a Palin or an Obama hater and to not count your buries, but maybe the better answer is to give you a tool where you can say, 'Screw that Obama guy. I don't want to see anything about him.' Or, 'Screw Palin. I don't want to see anything about her.' I think that at some point in the future, you'll probably see where those negative votes carry a much more personal connotation as opposed to a group connotation."
Submission + - New, cheaper Solar-Hydrogen catalytic process (arstechnica.com)
Nefarious Wheel writes: "A group of researchers has taken another step towards directly converting solar energy into fuel, in this case, hydrogen. A new system that converts light and water into hydrogen is less expensive than many others, and the photoelectrochemical platform it uses is more reactive, efficient, and has a much longer lifetime."
