Comment Re:You? Why TF should they care about YOU? (Score 3, Interesting) 221
You know, that's all true. The only people who do believe that the parties are equally bad (geminidomino) don't actually pay attention to politics.
Comment Re:What do they exepect? (Score 1) 238
what if they're home on youtube because there simply aren't jobs available? Not sure what industry you're in, but in mine, if you're over 50 and unemployed right now, you are screwed.
In Case of Emergency, Please Remove Your Bra
123
An anonymous reader writes "Caught in a disaster with harmful airborne particles? You'd better hope you're wearing the Emergency Bra. Simply unsnap the bright red bra, separate the cups, and slip it over your head — one cup for you, and one for your friend. Dr. Elena Bodnar won an Ig Nobel Award for the invention last year, an annual tribute to scientific research that on the surface seems goofy but is often surprisingly practical. And now Bodnar has brought the eBra to the public; purchase one online for just $29.95."
Comment Re:What do they exepect? (Score 5, Insightful) 238
IBM is entitled to all the handouts they want - it's only the unemployed and welfare mothers that aren't entitled to handouts. Christ are you some kind of socialist?
Comment Re:To compute what? (Score 1) 238
are they actually brute forcing it, though? I always figured they had different, secret means of attacking the ciphertext. Possible ways that were designed into the algorithm to begin with... so it isn't so much a matter of brute computing power.
Comment Re:Obstruction of justice (Score 1) 597
that is a good question - it seems like prosecutors are also complicit in the "circling of the wagons" - they also seem to make an effort to protect bad or dishonest cops, and I don't understand why.
Comment A few bad apples (Score 5, Insightful) 597
A few bad apples making the other 1% look bad...
seriously, why do cops always circle the wagons to protect dishonest cops?
Ubuntu Will Switch To Base-10 File Size Units In Future Release 984
CyberDragon777 writes "Ubuntu's future 10.10 operating system is going to make a small, but contentious change to how file sizes are represented. Like most other operating systems using binary prefixes, Ubuntu currently represents 1 kB (kilobyte) as 1024 bytes (base-2). But starting with 10.10, a switch to SI prefixes (base-10) will denote 1 kB as 1000 bytes, 1 MB as 1000 kB, 1 GB as 1000 MB, and so on."
Comment A coincidence? (Score 1) 268
List of all open source iconoclasts --
Miguel de Icaza
Theo de Raadt
notice any similarities between the names?
Disputed Island Disappears Into Sea
460
RawJoe writes "India and Bangladesh have argued for almost 30 years over control of a tiny island in the Bay of Bengal. Now rising sea levels have ended the argument for them: the island's gone. From the article: 'New Moore Island, in the Sunderbans, has been completely submerged, said oceanographer Sugata Hazra, a professor at Jadavpur University in Calcutta. Its disappearance has been confirmed by satellite imagery and sea patrols, he said. "What these two countries could not achieve from years of talking, has been resolved by global warming," said Hazra.'"
Political Affiliation Can Be Differentiated By Appearance
262
quaith writes "It's not the way they dress, but the appearance of their face. A study published in PLoS One by Nicholas O. Rule and Nalini Ambady of Tufts University used closely cropped greyscale photos of people's faces, standardized for size. Undergrads were asked to categorize each person as either a Democrat or Republican. In the first study, students were able to differentiate Republican from Democrat senate candidates. In the second, students were able to differentiate the political affiliation of other college students. Accuracy in both studies was about 60% — not perfect, but way better than chance."
Apple Patches Massive Holes In OS X 246
Trailrunner7 writes with this snippet from ThreatPost: "Apple's first Mac OS X security update for 2010 is out, providing cover for at least 12 serious vulnerabilities. The update, rated critical, plugs security holes that could lead to code execution vulnerabilities if a Mac user is tricked into opening audio files or surfing to a rigged Web site." Hit the link for a list of the highlights among these fixes.
Comment Interesting! (Score 1, Informative) 360
A link to an old slashdot article, and 2 links to legal documents - one of which is 32-pages long!
Now THAT makes for some interesting reading... well, this is definitely one time that I will RTFA!
Astronomers Discover 33 Pairs of Waltzing Black Holes 101
Astronomers from UC Berkeley have identified 33 pairs of waltzing black holes, closing the gap somewhat between the observed population of super-massive black hole pairs and what had been predicted by theory. "Astronomical observations have shown that 1) nearly every galaxy has a central super-massive black hole (with a mass of a million to a billion times the mass of the Sun), and 2) galaxies commonly collide and merge to form new, more massive galaxies. As a consequence of these two observations, a merger between two galaxies should bring two super-massive black holes to the new, more massive galaxy formed from the merger. The two black holes gradually in-spiral toward the center of this galaxy, engaging in a gravitational tug-of-war with the surrounding stars. The result is a black hole dance, choreographed by Newton himself. Such a dance is expected to occur in our own Milky Way Galaxy in about 3 billion years, when it collides with the Andromeda Galaxy."
Simulation of Close Asteroid Fly-By 148
c0mpliant writes "NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory have released a simulation of the path of an asteroid, named Apophis, that will come very close to Earth in 2029 — the closest predicted approach since humans have monitored for such heavenly bodies. The asteroid caused a bit of a scare when astronomers first announced that it would enter Earth's neighborhood some time in the future. However, since that announcement in 2004, more recent calculations have put the odds of collision at 1 in 250,000."
