Comment Lego Mindstorms Projects (Score 1) 77
If there's one thing Mars doesn't have enough of, it's Legos.
Comment Re:The Fifth Element comes to mind (Score 1) 188
I was going to go with the Aliens reference, but 5th Element works too.
Comment Re:Game industry alumni (Score 1) 86
Derek Smart and Battlecruiser 3000AD.
Now there's a fellow that brings back memories.
Comment Re:Daikatana failed because it was too Japanese. (Score 1) 86
Daikatana was about as Japanese as the Teenage Mutant Turtles.
Gameover ZeuS Re-Emerges As Fast-Fluxing Botnet 62
New submitter tylke (621801) writes: "Brian Krebs is reporting that the Gameover ZeuS botnet recently taken down by the U.S. Justice Department in June has re-emerged. The new variant of the Trojan is "stripped of the P2P code, and relies instead on an approach known as fast-flux hosting," a kind of round-robin technique that lets botnets hide phishing and malware delivery sites behind a network of compromised systems. Krebs says, "[T]his variant also includes a 'domain name generation algorithm' or DGA, which is a failsafe mechanism that can be invoked if the botnet’s normal communications system fails. The DGA creates a constantly-changing list of domain names each week (gibberish domains that are essentially long jumbles of letters).
In the event that systems infected with the malware can’t reach the fast-flux servers for new updates, the code instructs the botted systems to seek out active domains from the list specified in the DGA. All the botmasters need to do in this case to regain control over his crime machine is register just one of those domains and place the update instructions there." (Disclosure: I work for Malcovery Security, the company credited with identifying the new variant.)
Comment Re:Absurd (Score 3, Insightful) 181
same way they always have.
first by force.
then by tradition.
otherwise known as "possession is 9/10's of the law".
the only reason we haven't (yet) seen it in Antarctica and the treaty there has yet been observed and maintained, is there hasnt yet been a big push to produce or obtain resources down there (it's bloody cold, and the resources are under a very thick layer of ice). just wait til they decide it's time to get the oil or other BigMoneyItem out of the gruond down there, and then see how long that treaty lasts.
Comment Re:I hate to imagine it (Score 1) 126
the problem is thats not exactly what happened.
this child was not continually observed and studied.
the mother is apparently not only been bad (and im not passing judgement in saying that) about maintaining the treatment, but also about maintaining any contact or followup with the doctors who did the treatment.
its like walking in and out of a movie every few minutes for minutes at a time, and trying to figure out what happened while you wre out.
Comment Re:Idiots (Score 4, Insightful) 147
What the hell they are complaining about now? If court ruled that how Aereo previously defined itself was illegal, then obviously it has to change it. First they win now they complain about it?
As best I can tell, they are whining because they preferred the imaginary world where the lawsuit against Aereo was actually over whether the filthy, disruptive, upstarts shoudl be burned to the ground and have the earth beneath them salted, rather than whether they were more like an antenna rental service or more like a cable company.
Aereo obviously didn't want to be a cable company, hence its ongoing defense; but the tone of the rhetoric against them was never "Yeah, because of a raft of tedious reasons, Aereo ought to be classified as a cable company for regulatory purposes"; but rather a bunch of fire and brimstone nonsense about the signal-stealing piratepocalypse.
Comment Re:Tannenbaum's predictions... (Score 1) 136
X86 went away fifteen years ago. Every "x86" COU built since the last 1990s runs an x86 layer, but underneath is a very different bear.
Comment Re:Aaaaahahaha ... gotta love it: (Score 1) 136
At the time, the closest the DOS world had to multitasking was TSRs. Beside my first PC was my CoCo 3 with OS/9 level 2 with 512k of RAM with a true preemptive multitasking kernel running on an 8 but 6809 CPU. Microsoft's dominance at the time meant in many ways the most common 16 bit opposing system in the world was only marginally better than a CPM machine from 1980.
Comment I found this article to be more informative (Score 3, Interesting) 219
Retaliation for Spying: Germany Asks CIA Official to Leave Country
Initially, there had been talk of a formal expulsion of the CIA employee, who is officially accredited as the so-called chief of station and is responsible for the US intelligence service's activities in Germany. A short time later, the government backpedalled and said it had only recommended that he leave. Although it cannot be compared with a formal explusion, it remains an unfriendly gesture.
On a diplomatic level, it is no less than an earthquake and represents a measure that until Thursday would have only been implemented against pariah states like North Korea or Iran. It also underscores just how deep tensions have grown between Berlin and Washington over the spying affair.
The USA's response has been something along the lines of "you expected us not to conducting traditional spying activities?"
Comment yes let's all have opinions on AI (Score 1) 285
This is nonsense. Computers generate programs they weren't designed to produce all the time.
There's a very beginner-approachable book on the topic called "Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI."
This "challenge" was passed by Claude Shannon in the 60s.
Comment Re:Stop throwing good money after bad. (Score 1) 364
The F18 is 30 years old, which is like 120 in fighter aircraft years. We flew the F-86 Saber only 20 years, the F-4 phantom flew 20 (as a fighter), and these are the grey beards of the fighter world from the past. The F-18 is a fine platform, to be sure, but like it or not, it's getting really old for what it does.
Is your claim that the airframes are reaching their service life and need to be replaced by new builds, or are you claiming that an aircraft design undergoes some sort of senility independent of remaning service life?
Please explain why, for example, a new build F-15 or F-18, with 21st century enhancements, would be in adequate to do its job today if that is your argument.
Comment Re:Stop throwing good money after bad. (Score 2) 364
I see your point, but I don't think we have time to develop anything else.
OK - I'll bite. Why not?
Is there a major war scheduled we don't want to be late for?
Is there an enemy superpower that will outstrip us militarily in a meaningful way if we don't get this plane fielded ASAP?
We really have no viable choice but to fly the F-35 for now so we need these planes in production.
It was already argued that we could buy other NATO aircraft that are in production. This option is "viable" even if the U.S. Senators prefer to keep the pork at home.
Comment Re:A legend of OS design (Score 4, Interesting) 136
Minix was really the first of its kind; a Unix-like OS that you could run on cheap (relatively speaking at the time) commodity hardware and that you could get the source code for. A lot of the computing we take for granted now comes from Tanenbaum's work.
My first Minix install was on a 386-SX with a whopping 4mb of RAM I borrowed from work back in the early 1990s. I quickly abandoned Minix for Linux once it came out, but for several years I had Minix running on an old 386 laptop just for fun.
