That is the most objective statement I've ever seen on Slashdot. Not "we'll all die, and that's that", but a far greater perspective where our loss is immeasurably tiny.

Yup. You don't need to go further back in literature than "Cryptonomicon" to see that use of the word. Many other words have gone the same way, from esteemed title to unthinking machine ... "dish washer", "navigator", hey even "senator".

Yes! How odd that it took this long to get mentioned -- what with the movie adaptation bringing it back into current relevance.

I read these many years ago and found them quite entertaining: The story is quite good, and the quaint ancient-science-finction-before-it-was-even-called-that just adds to the enjoyment. Of course the 8th colour is lighter than air and can be stored in tanks to make ships fly...!

(Also, you don't have any problems with "disturbances in the avidyne fusion converter", so no need to "neutralize the electroplasma pattern with adaptive matter stream". :-)

I would very much like a knowledgeable person to explain how it can be that a telescope can be used to find molecule-size phenomena, when we have so often heard that we can't use a telescope to verify if there actually is NASA hardware on the moon "because it's too small to detect".

I once read a very good article (link long lost) about optical mirror angles, focus, and relative sizes of stuff in distant nebulae and on the moon surface. I wonder if a similar explanation exists for detecting these molecules.

Well, in the meantime, I'd better go RTFA!

+1 Informative -- Thank you.

THIS! This is the core problem! Everybody knows email, and most people know that you shouldn't share your password with others, but nooobody knows about proper signatures and how to work with them.

If each and every digital signature out there was useless, how much of our total bandwidth would be compromised?
The painful answer is, at most the percentage that is signed in the first place, which is a drop in the proverbial ocean.

Cory Doctorow has a statement about obscurity being a far bigger threat to authors than piracy, and I posit that an analog can be drawn for obscurity of security practices, the population at large, and privacy/security.

It's hopeless to encrypt all your email unless your peers (including granny and junior) knows how to process such email, and knows to be suspicious of unsigned communications. If only some of the globally popular communications services would have the guts to enable, and indeed, enforce this. (Google and Facebook, I'm looking at you.) Yeah I know, they wouldn't be able to stay in *business* if they did that (which nicely highlights what, or rather who, the "product" really is).

Please help me understand this bit. It sounds as if you would prefer urandom over random. I'm not skilled in randomness on Linux, so I checked Wikipedia (emphasis mine):

That, to me, sounds as if one should not use urandom if random is as all feasible.

So what's the deal here?

There's an Android app as well...
https://market.android.com/details?id=biz.lakin.android.apps.tricorder

They go on to say "Sorry about that" but I'm not convinced they are. Anyway, you might want to update you sig.

Voted up. Glad to see you again and hope you make it.

I'm far away from all this (geographically, politically, probably not effectively) but I wonder ... if this would allow anyone to shut down anything on the grounds of a mere complaint, then what's to stop the general public from complaining about a long list of .gov and .com domains on the same day this takes effect, and keep doing that?

The Big Bang.

Ooh, but that doesn't work. I must admit: I haven't tried this in Linux, but that is certainly the case on the BSDs.

Interesting. It shows how much I have still to learn, a number of years hence. But also shows how utterly chanceless it is for a newbie to know how to do proper research. Ah well, all the more "Getting Started With..." books sold... :-)