Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×

Comment Huh? (Score 1) 237

by Black Parrot (#48920405) Attached to: Gamma-ray Bursts May Explain Fermi's Paradox

GRBs clearly haven't prevented life in *our* galaxy, so the Fermi Paradox still stands.

The caluculations probably rule out life in the core of our galaxy, but systems further out would be exposed even less often than ours is. And even though GRBs can periodically sterilize a planet, their directionality means that one burst would not likely sterilize all the planets in an intercellar civilization simultaneously.

So, to modify what someone said above, we can add another term to the Drake equation, but this doesn't do much to answer Fermi.

Comment Re:Heartbleed (Score 1) 211

by dissy (#48918877) Attached to: Serious Network Function Vulnerability Found In Glibc

How many years was Heartbleed around before anyone noticed? Apparently "many eyes" were not reading that bit of code.

Even you admit heartbleed *WAS* around (not *IS* around) and thus was found and fixed.
Clearly at least two eyes reviewed the code, found the bug, and it is now fixed as a result.

That is two more eyes than is searching through closed source code.
Two is still greater than zero so it is still a net positive.

Comment Re:Not surprising.-- Universal Service Fee (Score 1, Flamebait) 94

by mc6809e (#48917879) Attached to: FCC Fines Verizon For Failing To Investigate Rural Phone Problems

If this was a Libertarian Paradise, you probably would pay $500 dollars a month for landline service while someone in a densely populated urban area would pay $5 a month.

Why would that be so bad?

People that want rural living should pay for rural living and should not force urbanites to subsidize their quiet, peaceful life on the farm away from the noise of the city.

The US government has spent the past 50+ years using subsidies and regulations encourage people to get out of the cities.

What has it accomplished except to gut cities and spread asphalt everywhere?

Comment Price (Score 1) 4

by gmhowell (#48915235) Attached to: Is the Touch UI irredeemable?

No, it all came down to price, not multitasking. There was never an argument that CLI was better than a GUI except from neckbeards and bean counters. Average slobs knew the GUI was better. It took from 1984 until the early 90's for the hard to get cheap enough to tolerably run a GUI OS.

Submission + - What Makes a Great Software Developer? (dice.com)

Submitted by Nerval's Lobster
Nerval's Lobster writes: What does it take to become a great—or even just a good—software developer? According to developer Michael O. Church’s posting on Quora (later posted on LifeHacker), it's a long list: great developers are unafraid to learn on the job, manage their careers aggressively, know the politics of software development (which he refers to as 'CS666'), avoid long days when feasible, and can tell fads from technologies that actually endure... and those are just a few of his points. Over at Salsita Software’s corporate blog, meanwhile, CEO and founder Matthew Gertner boils it all down to a single point: experienced programmers and developers know when to slow down. What do you think separates the great developers from the not-so-fantastic ones?

Submission + - Kim Dotcom offers up secure 'Skype Killer' voice chat (networkworld.com)

Submitted by colinneagle
colinneagle writes: Kim Dotcom, the controversial German expat living in New Zealand whose file-sharing site was busted by U.S. federal agents, has launched an end-to-end encrypted voice and video chat service that operates through the browser called MegaChat, which will now be available for free to the 15 million registered users of his file-sharing service Mega.

MegaChat aims to provide an alternative to the current voice and video chat services which Dotcom himself has accused of cooperating with government snooping. "No U.S.-based online service provider can be trusted with your data," Dotcom once claimed. "Skype has no choice. They must provide the U.S. government with backdoors."

However, Dotcom has also claimed that there are backdoors in Chrome and Firefox, so if you are using them to browse, how can he guarantee end-to-end encryption? And while Mega is great for file sharing, its track record for security is a little dubious. Right after its launch, there was criticism of the implementation of the site's security, from cross-site scripting flaws to poorly implemented encryption, and later it was found that Mega passwords could be extracted with basic hacking tools.

Submission + - Opera founder unveils feature-rich Vivaldi power browser. (gigaom.com)

Submitted by cdysthe
cdysthe writes: Almost two years ago, the Norwegian browser firm Opera ripped out the guts of its product and adopted the more standard WebKit and Chromium technologies, essentially making it more like rivals Chrome and Safari. But it wasn’t just Opera’s innards that changed; the browser also became more streamlined and perhaps less geeky.

Many Opera fans were deeply displeased at the loss of what they saw as key differentiating functionality. So now Jon von Tetzchner, the man who founded Opera and who would probably never have allowed those drastic feature changes, is back to serve this hard core with a new browser called Vivaldi.

Submission + - Why Screen Lockers On X11 Cannot Be Secure (martin-graesslin.com)

Submitted by jones_supa
jones_supa writes: One thing we all remember from Windows NT, is the security feature requiring the user to press CTRL-ALT-DEL to unlock the workstation (this can still be enabled with a policy setting). The motivation was to make it impossible for other programs to mimic a lock screen, as they couldn't react to the special key combination. Martin Gräßlin from KDE team takes a look at the lock screen security on X11. On a protocol level, X11 doesn't know anything of screen lockers. Also the X server doesn't know that the screen is locked as it doesn't understand the concept. This means the screen locker can only use the core functionality available to emulate screen locking. That in turn also means that any other client can do the same and prevent the screen locker from working (for example opening a context menu on any window prevents the screen locker from activating). That's quite a bummer: any process connected to the X server can block the screen locker, and even more it could fake your screen locker.

Submission + - CIA source of NY Times reporter James Risen convicted on circumstial evidence (nytimes.com) 2

Submitted by webanish
webanish writes: The New York Times reports:

Jeffrey A. Sterling, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer, was convicted of espionage Monday on charges that he told a reporter for The New York Times about a secret operation to disrupt Iran’s nuclear program.

The case revolved around a C.I.A. operation in which a former Russian scientist provided Iran with intentionally flawed nuclear component schematics. Mr. Risen revealed the operation in his 2006 book, “State of War,” describing it as a mismanaged, potentially reckless mission that may have inadvertently aided the Iranian nuclear program.

While this comes as no surprise given the Obama administration's record on going after whistleblowers releasing secrets in public interest, the ramifications of these building cases could be twofold.

  • Legitimate issues which should be discussed in public are withheld out of fear
  • Leakers might not always act so benevolently to go to reputed press institutions

To an outsider, it seems there is widespread support for Snowden and responsible whistleblowing laws. Why is there no momentum for this in the government?

Submission + - The Koch brothers political network plans to spend almost $1B in 2016 elections (nytimes.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: The Koch brothers revealed plans to spend $889M during the 2016 election cycle . The money would be spent on both congresisonal and presidential races. This level of spending will require commitment from both the Koch Brothers themselves and about 300 other donors. The money will put considerable pressure on Democratic supporters and candidates who will likely be at a considerable funding disadvantage in 2016.

Slashdot Top Deals

Always draw your curves, then plot your reading.

Close