"...the winter in temperate climates due to artificial heating."

Is anyone else missing the lower humidity we generally have in the winter -outside- in temperate climates due to it, you know, being cold?

If I'm concerned about the data, I either encrypt it before transmitting or encrypt the pipe, both things you SHOULD BE DOING ANYWAY, regardless of who owns the last mile that happens to connect to your house/business.

Yeah, it still might not stop the NSA, but Google is NOT the NSA.

Post++.
Whatever cool things you may do are infinitely less /. worthy than SHARING them in an entertaining, useful, and inspiring fashion.

It's fallout from the recent idiotic Supreme Court decisions, to wit:
1) Corporations and "groups" deserve the same free speech rights as actual human beings.
2) How you spend money politically is "speech".

Go back and seriously re-assess either one of those and we're 90% on the way back to sanity.

As long as your system uses milliseconds since the epoch internally, daylight savings (and leap years, and leap seconds) are all simple problems of translation for human-readable display and will not effect functionality.

It's the difference between what we "call" a particular point in time and how much time has physically elapsed.

That said, I'm completely not sure how to properly deal with computers in highly accelerated reference frames who will have experienced a different quantity of elapsed time than their stationary compatriots...

I found an "amusing" bug in a software deployment system recently that will break horribly on Jan 1, 2022. (Much sooner than the usually announced doom-dates of 2038 and such).
It's a fairly simple cock-up, so I wouldn't be surprised to find it elsewhere.

Step 1: Make decisions based on a datestamp.
Step 2: Define that datestamp as "YYMMddHHmm".
Step 3: Somewhere along the line, shove that string into a 32bit signed integer.

The maximum value we can store is thus "2147483647", so the "2201010000" of Jan 1, 2022 will overflow to a negative value. Hooray!

Completely stupid. Completely avoidable. Using the standard "milliseconds since the epoch" we're still only at "181825596", and would have made it all the way into 2038 before running into a similar failure. My only solace is that we'll have abandoned this particular software by then. YOU may not be so lucky...

There's a hard upper bound on "expensive" organs (those that require more energy to function) based on the amount of energy a creature can consume and process.

Some creatures (like cows) spend more on having a larger and more efficient digestive tract so that they can extract more nutrition and energy from a simple diet.
Others (bears, us) spent more on this thinking organ so that we can selectively pick out more energy-dense foods to eat and get by with a simpler digestive system.

In any case, if you're an animal with an average caloric intake of 2000 kcal/day, you can't sustain 500kcal/day of muscle, 1000 kcal/day of brain, AND 1000 kcal/day of digestive system. The totals need to add up - or you die. So yeah, I guess you COULD select for a big brain and big guts, but you still need to give up something else somewhere...

[Repost due to expired login.]

HAhahahahahahahahahahhahahaah....

Ow, my sides.

Agreed-ish, in general, on the thankfulness at least.

I've starting reading /. back in the mad mid-90's, eventually overcame my fear-of-registration, and have been a (semi) contributing member ever since.

Oddly, my only request these days would be to find a way to post -fewer- stories. I can't keep up with the current deluge and the "themes/tags" don't help because my actual interests don't break down cleanly into existing tags and I can't spend the time to be the first person to curate a new tag and filter it out. In the beginning, /. itself WAS that filter... if it made it in I could be assured that it was probably worth a few minutes of my time. The problem now isn't /., it's that there's just TOO MUCH STUFF happening all the time, and we know about ALL OF IT.

I do (and will continue to) keep /. in my RSS reader (with all my other visited blogs, internet entertainment, and newsy sites), but it has been becoming increasingly less attractive and somewhat redundant compared to other (more or less) curated news sources like TheRegister or ArsTechnica. I don't know what might be done differently, and I certainly don't know if those changes would make advertisers and investors happier, but I'm just throwing that out there as the sad, lone datapoint that it is.

Carry on Slashdot. Carry on.

As an opposing view... hundreds or thousands of people wil see that window sticker.
When you get a new car you can either got a new sticker (easy enough) or let your loved ones move on. Your choice.

I don't see anything sad about honoring a passed loved one in any way.

Whatever mayhem a "cyber-atttack" might cause, it is almost inconceivable that it could rival the destruction and loss of life of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
It is insulting to those who died to imply otherwise.

My Grandfather served in the navy during the war, but was not at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked.
He was, however, briefly assigned to the detail that had to help clean out the dead, bloated bodies from the ships that were sunk in the attack.

Leon E Panetta, you are an asshole. Unless we do something insanely stupid like hooking gas valves, electrical substations, or their like directly to the Internet, the possibility of a "cyber-Pearl Harbor" is a fllat zero. Respect those who lost their lives for our freedom and temper your fucking hyperbole.

"Wasn't a lot of anything except a lot of forest."

So only...
Old growth trees (extremenly valuable at the time for shipbuilding).
Vast tracts of untilled arable land.
"Easily displaced" indiginents.

Not to mention the coal and oil deposits discovered later.

We know a lot more about what's on the moon than Columbus (or the Spaniards) did about North America, but what we know is that it's not all that.
The moon, sadly, is kind of crappy resource-wise. It is, on the other hand, really handy for causing tides, which helped a lot of life proliferate down here, so go moon! (but don't necessarily go TO the moon)

+1 Tow truck theft

That's how I lost my first car (a VW Beetle that would stall at any stop light unless you gently caressed the gas pedal with your toe while keeping the brake down with your heel). Security guard didn't pay any attention to the seemingly legit tow truck that hauled it away...

No.

It's a very, very different thing to get a computer to:
a) Do something it's programmed to do (like start up and drive around safely), but for the wrong person.
b) Do something it has NOT been programmed to do (drive unsafely).

You can't just conflate the two with "hacking the system", as they are COMPLETELY different physically, electronically, logically and mathematically.

Just because you have some patents doesn't mean that they are valid or enforceable.
Just because you've convinced some companies to license your patents and pay you royalties doesn't mean that they are valid or enforceable.

The android phone manufacturers that pay MS royalties simply decided that just paying the royalty would be less expensive than fighting the legal battle to (possibly) prove the patents in question invalid. This means that there is, so far, no evidence that the patents in question have any value at all. Given that the SCotUS has been more strongly nudging things in the direction of "You can't patent software processes, stupid", there's a pretty good chance that they are, in fact, worthless. Unfortunately, proving that will require a company with a reason to take a stand, the funds to follow it through, and a top-notch team of patent lawyers.