Comment Without C? (Score 1) 406
What's the C# runtime written in?
Comment Obvious question from their perspective (Score 5, Insightful) 1307
Why does a server that is not owned or managed by the IT department exist inside the firewall?
In my workplace that's a sacking offence.
Comment We'd never do such a thing (Score 5, Insightful) 196
Would the Chinese or other governments take the opportunity to create back doors into western IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?
Would the US or other Western governments take the opportunity to create back doors into Chinese IT networks? Wouldn't they be crazy not to?
Comment Surely it's a rising demand for brains (Score 2) 622
If the article is explaining how lawyers are being replaced with programmers. Someone's got to create and maintain the software that replaces these "educated" people. Surely these are just a different set of educated people? That really does sound similar to the Luddites. It's not that there's no longer any demand for skills, it's that there's a demand for different skills.
And just to take an (only half joking ) swipe at lawyers, surely this means an increase in demand for brains?
Scientists Advocate Replacing Cattle With Insects
760
rhettb writes "Scientists in the Netherlands have discovered that insects produce significantly less greenhouse gas per kilogram of meat than cattle or pigs. Their study, published in the online journal PLoS, suggests that a move towards insect farming could result in a more sustainable — and affordable — form of meat production."
Comment Separating Fact From Fantasy (Score 0, Offtopic) 111
Surely they're not trying to suggest that my l33tness *doesn't* make me more attractive to women?
Comment Usable by humans (Score 4, Interesting) 243
New tech is all good, but if this is now (supposedly) even more higher res than the human eye compared to Retina, is there any point?
Can you tell the difference?
Meet NELL, the Computer That Learns From the Net 272
bossanovalithium writes "Carnegie Mellon University has taught a computer how to read and learn from the internet.
According to Dennis Baron at the Oxford University press blog, the computer is called NELL and it is reading the internet and learning from it in much the same way that humans learn language and acquire knowledge. Basically by soaking it all up and figuring it out.
NELL is short for Never Ending Language Learner and apparently it is getting brainier every day."
Comment "That's the great thing about evercookie" (Score 3, Insightful) 332
From TFA:
That's the great thing about evercookie
I disagree. Strongly.
I guess it's good that this is out in the open so we know about it, and hopefully the major browsers can all do something to help prevent it. But still: don't like, don't like at all.
Introducing the Invulnerable Evercookie 332
An anonymous reader writes "Using eight different techniques and locations, a 'security' guy has developed a cookie that is very, very hard to delete. If just one copy of the cookie remains, the other locations are rebuilt. My favorite storage location is in 'RGB values of auto-generated, force-cached PNGs using HTML5 Canvas tag to read pixels (cookies) back out' — awesome."
Comment Units (Score 4, Funny) 255
How much is that in terms of the size of a more standard unit of measurement ?
Adding Some Spice To *nix Shell Scripts 411
An anonymous reader writes "Developing GUI script-based applications is time-consuming and expensive. Most Unix-based scripts run in a CLI mode or over a secure ssh session. The Unix shells are quite sophisticated programming languages in their own right: they are easy to design and quick to build, but they are not user-friendly in the same way the Unix commands aren't (see the Unix haters books). Both Unix and bash provide features for writing user friendly scripts using various tools to build powerful, interactive, user-friendly scripts that run under the bash shell on Linux or Unix. What tools do you use that spice up your scripts on the Linux or Unix platforms?"
Volcanic Ash Heading Towards North America 338
chocomilko writes "St. John's International Airport, the easternmost airport in Canada, has begun canceling flights due to worries of ash from Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano, leaving travelers stranded after the weekend's Juno awards festival. Early reports stated that there was a 30% chance ash would reach the island by early Monday; Air Canada has issued an all-day travel advisory. A thick blanket of fog currently covering the city isn't helping matters, either."
Comment Why not all electronic? No really, why not? (Score 2, Interesting) 494
I mean this as a genuine question: why is the US so far behind Europe in this?
I haven't seen a cheque in years. Is it too expensive to move everyone over to electronic transfers (surely it's cheaper to get rid of cheque processing)? Too difficult to change the habits of a large population quickly? Concerns about fraud? Plain unwillingness to change? It can't be the recent banking crisis because we had that too...
Deposit Checks To Your Bank By Taking a Photo 494
Pickens writes "The Mercury News reports that consumers will soon be able to deposit a check by snapping a photo of it with a cell phone and transmitting an encrypted copy to their bank. Although some critics contend paperless deposits are an attempt by the banking industry to eliminate 'float,' the standard one- or two-day waiting period between the time someone writes a check and the time the money is actually taken out of their account, actually remote-deposit capture started out as a way for big companies and financial institutions to process huge numbers of checks without having to ship them around the country. 'Our customers are becoming more and more tech-savvy,' said an SVP for mobile banking at Citibank. 'We're trying to support those people on the go.' Although the process adds a new wrinkle to concerns about fraud and the privacy of financial data, banks and the technology companies helping them say they have largely overcome these concerns. Another bank SVP said, 'For many institutions struggling to raise deposits and differentiate, this is an outstanding offering they can roll out inexpensively [note: interstitial]. It's a sticky product.'"
