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Comment Re:Please be good... (Score 2) 254

In reading an interview with Verhoeven about the movie, Verhoeven believed both the book and Heinlein to be pure fascist, never understanding the concept of meritocracy and citizenship responsibility RAH was pushing. Just don't think Verhoeven grasped the book, and therefore the movie was skewed accordingly.

Comment Ditto (Score 1) 254

Heinlein was at his best with that story (zombies referring to the blithelessly ignorant, if I recall correctly). It was a flashback to his old self, when he was a progressive and before he became a righwing libertarian type, and Goldwater supporter.

Best time travel story I've read recently, The Revisionists, by Thomas Mullen (while comparisons are odious as Voltaire once opined, his writing style is a combination of Robert Silverberg, John Varley on his best day, and Graham Greene).

Submission + - Seismological Society of America Claims Fracking Reactivated Ohio Fault (seismosoc.org) 1

eldavojohn writes: There have been suspicions that fracking has caused minor earthquakes in Ohio but last year seismic data recorded by the Earthscope Transportable Array was analyzed by the Seismological Society of America using template matching and has resulted in a new publication and press release making the statement that Hilcorp Energy's fracking in Poland Township in March of 2014 "did not create a new fault, rather it activated one that we didn’t know about prior to the seismic activity." The earthquakes occurred in the Precambrian basement and lead the researchers to posit that further unknown faults may be activated by fracking. The press release ends with urging for "close cooperation among government, industry and the scientific community as hydraulic fracturing operations expand in areas where there’s the potential for unknown pre-existing faults."

Comment Early Soviet Computing? (Score 4, Interesting) 80

Alexander Stepanov, I have never had a chance to ask someone as qualified as you about this topic. I grew up on the opposite side of the Iron Curtain and have constantly wondered if (surely there must have been) alternative computing solutions developed in the USSR prior to Elbrus and SPARC. So my question is whether or not you know of any hardware or instruction set alternatives that died on the vine or were never mass fabricated in Soviet times? I don't expect to you to reveal some super advanced or future predicting instruction set but it has always disturbed me that these things aren't documented somewhere -- as you likely know failures can provide more fruit than successes. Failing that, could you offer us any tails of early computing that only seem to run in Russian circles?

If you can suggest references (preferably in English) I would be most appreciative. I know of only one book and it seems to be a singular point of view.

Comment Re:people are idiots (Score 1) 463

I've been reading for 20+ years about these things called Macs that are far safer than Windows, and yet, somehow, nobody actually uses them.

"Nobody"? Even in the enterprise?

The rest of your comment misses my point: Perhaps in theory, OS X is "just an vulnerable," and maybe the OS X market share means malware authors don't bother. But whatever the causes, in the real world today, the results are undeniable: less malware on Macs.

Comment Re:people are idiots (Score 3, Informative) 463

The mechanisms of Cryptowall work under any OS.

Except, as the AC said, it doesn't presently work under OS X. I've been reading for 20+ years how "Macs are just as vulnerable as Windows," and yet, somehow, that malware parity never seems to happen. Sure, every now and then there's a headline about Mac malware, but when you read the article it's either a theoretical vulnerability or, at worst, something that happened to a handful of people. You can claim it's because malware authors don't want to bother with Macs or whatever, but the end result is the same: Windows users are always dealing with more malware than Mac users, and, I'll bet, always will. So the modded-down-to-oblivion poster above is not wrong: getting a Mac would have prevented this attack, and many others.

Bitcoin

Fraud, Not Hackers, Took Most of Mt. Gox's Missing Bitcoins 108

itwbennett writes Nearly all of the roughly $370 million in bitcoin that disappeared in the February 2014 collapse of Mt. Gox probably vanished due to fraudulent transactions, with only 1 percent taken by yet-to-be-identified hackers, according to a report in Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper, citing sources close to a Tokyo police probe. The disclosure follows months of investigations by police and others into the tangled mess surrounding the disappearance of the 650,000 bit coins.

Comment Re:Ugh, WordPress (Score 1) 31

Seriously, though: aren't WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal the three free open source CMSs? I think Joomla is far more powerful than WordPress in many ways, avoids at least some of the failings of WordPress listed by the OP, and is easier to use than Drupal. I'd like to hear what you and others have to say about the three of them.

Comment Are You Joking? (Score 3, Interesting) 182

> It is not known how the US government has determined that North Korea is the culprit

Of course it's known. The same way they established that Iraq had chemical weapons. The method is known as "because we say so".

Are you joking? I thought it was well established that there were chemical weapons in Iraq we just only found weapons designed by us, built by Europeans in factories in Iraq. And therefore the US didn't trumpet their achievements. In the case of Iraqi chemical weapons, the US established that Iraq had chemical weapons not because they said so but because Western countries had all the receipts.

The Almighty Buck

Julian Assange Trying To Raise Nearly $200k For a Statue of Himself 171

Rei writes Julian Assange, from his refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy, has recently taken to Twitter to try to raise nearly $200,000 for a life-size bronze statue of himself. The statue would have him standing front and center between Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning (with Manning pictured as male); the art piece would be then shipped around the world on tour.

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Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?

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