Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment I'm sorry but (Score 1, Interesting) 57

by zygotic mitosis (#47421333) Attached to: Homestar Runner To Return Soon
instead of -abandoning- their creation, I never understood why these guys didn't sell the rights a decade ago and let adult swim or w/e run with it. They had offers. It would be alive and surely people would surely enjoy it....though of course there would be purist sourpusses at by whom to be yelled. (? english)

And as someone who has played in horrible bands, I say, screw artistic integrity, it's 'merica. Get paid. These guys had kids, right?
Japan

Yokohama Accidentally Tweets That NK Missile Is Inbound 131

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the just-a-drill dept.
ForgedArtificer writes "Earlier today, the Crisis Management Office Affairs Bureau for the city of Yokohama, Japan had some startling news for its followers; to wit, a North Korean missile was on its way to Japan. The tweet stayed up for about 20 minutes before being removed and replaced with an apology. The city reports that a pre-written tweet was released due to a malfunction in the 'mechanism' that would have released the tweet at the appropriate time."
Networking

Cyberoam Packet Inspection Devices Open Traffic To Third Parties 29

Posted by Unknown Lamer from the security-through-oh-screw-it dept.
New submitter jetcityorange tipped us to a nasty security flaw in Cyberoam packet inspection devices. The devices are used by employers and despotic governments alike to intercept communications; in the case of employers probably for relatively mundane purposes (no torrenting at work). However, the CA key used to issue fake certificates so that the device can intercept SSL traffic is the same on every device, allowing every Cyberoam device to intercept traffic that passed through any other one. But that's not all: "It is therefore possible to intercept traffic from any victim of a Cyberoam device with any other Cyberoam device - or, indeed, to extract the key from the device and import it into other DPI devices, and use those for interception. Perhaps ones from more competent vendors."

Comment Re:Found at 125 GeV (Score 4, Informative) 396

by zygotic mitosis (#40541239) Attached to: LHC Discovers New Particle That Looks Like the Higgs Boson
What the hell, people??? Parent has binding energy right. The particles alone are heavier. This goes for chemistry, as well as nuclear chemistry, as well as nuclear physics. For example, helium: Wolfram Alpha tells me that 2n + 2p = 6.695E-24 g

The mass of helium is 4.002602 g/mol. Divide by Avogdro's number, and a single atom of helium weighs 6.646E-24 g. The difference in mass is what powers the sun. Parent is simply making the same argument on the scale of a proton split into its parts.

(disclaimer: I know, blabla deuterium, not protons and neutrons. However, see the definition of a state function.)

Comment Troll headline? (Score 3, Informative) 300

by zygotic mitosis (#37023366) Attached to: Drought-Stricken Texas Town Taps Urine For Water
Urine? Well, yes, but also the feces and the nasty water from industry. As someone has pointed out already, if your WTP collects from the river, you are already drinking treated sewage water.

At our plant, we have a water reclamation facility at the end of our process, the same type of facility used at the water treatment plant upstream. A WRF is common, iirc, in CA, but is, afaik, the first of its kind here in MN. It is far more common to discharge without the additional filtering and contaminant removal provided by a WRF.

The water we discharge is tested biweekly for ammonia and phosphorus and daily for total coliforms and biological oxygen demand. Ammonia and coliforms are non-detectable ~99% of the time. We are doing a very good job turning sewage into drinking water for the next town on the river.

/lab intern at a WWTP
Communications

Phone Customers Pay $2B Yearly In Bogus Fees 220

Posted by samzenpus from the fine-print-on-the-fine-print dept.
Hugh Pickens writes writes "CNN reports that a one-year study by the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee shows about $2 billion a year in 'mystery fees' show up on the landline phone bills of Americans. Known as cramming, the extra charges include:long distance service, subscriptions for Internet-related services, access to restricted websites, entertainment services with a 900 area code, collect calls, and club memberships. The Commerce Committee's report says phone companies receive a small fee — often just a dollar or two — for allowing charges from third-party vendors to appear on their bills but due to the large number of customers the charges eventually add up. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan told the panel people are unaware their phone numbers can be charged almost like a credit card and her investigations indicate customers are not even getting services in return. 'My office has yet to see a legitimate third-party charge on a bill,' says Madigan, who added most customers don't detect the charges on their bills. Senator Jay Rockefeller says Congress needs to pass legislation to protect customers from unauthorized third-party charges on their phone bills because the telephone industry has failed to prevent the practice. 'It's pretty obvious at this point that voluntary guidelines aren't solving this problem,' says Rockefeller. 'It's time for us to take a new look at this problem and find a way to solve it once and for all.'"
Hardware

Preserving Great Tech For Posterity — the 6502 290

Posted by timothy from the double-secret-reverse-engineering dept.
trebonian writes "For great old hardware products like the MOS 6502 (used in the Apple II, the C64, the Nintendo NES), the details of the designs have been lost or forgotten. While there have been great efforts to reverse engineer the 6502 from the outside, there has not been the hardware equivalent of the source code — until now. As Russell Cox states: 'A team of three people accumulated a bunch of 6502 chips, applied sulfuric acid to them to strip the casing and expose the actual chips, used a high-resolution photomicroscope to scan the chips, applied computer graphics techniques to build a vector representation of the chip, and finally derived from the vector form what amounts to the circuit diagram of the chip: a list of all 3,510 transistors with inputs, outputs, and what they're connected to. Combining that with a fairly generic (and, as these things go, trivial) "transistor circuit" simulator written in JavaScript and some HTML5 goodness, they created an animated 6502 web page that lets you watch the voltages race around the chip as it executes. For more, see their web site visual6502.org.'"

Slashdot Top Deals

In every non-trivial program there is at least one bug.

Close