Comment Welcome to Salem 2012 (Score 1) 630
Where instead of witches we have shooters, and bombers.
Where shall we erect the gallows?
Submission + - BuzzFeed tells awesome story of Pong with GIFs (buzzfeed.com)
An anonymous reader writes: BuzzFeed tell the story of the creation of Pong with first-person interviews and awesome animated GIFs. Must read!
Comment Re:gov just destroyed the cloud business (Score 2) 531
In their eyes, they do need to shut the whole thing down to preserve chain of evidence.
Comment Re:What about networks (Score 1) 234
Unless, you permit connectivity between the clients on your vlan'd public WIFI and Doc HolierThanThou has his laptop connecting to the public WiFi.
Comment Re:What about networks (Score 1) 234
Bah... The data was encrypted! I used a substitution cipher along with this "ASCII" table I found.
Submission + - Fermilab prepares for a future of muons (nature.com)
ananyo writes: At Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, protons were always the primary particles, coursing through the circular tracks of the the Tevatron, which until 2009 was the highest energy collider in the world. But there's a new particle making the rounds at the Batavia, Illinois campus: the muon, a heavy but short-lived cousin of the electron — interesting both for its usefulness in testing the Standard Model, as well as potentially being used someday in a powerful colliderLink text.
On 19 September, the lab announced that the US Energy Department (DOE) had granted the $40 million experiment “mission need” approval, a first step towards eventual funding. Last month, a second muon experiment, called Mu2e and priced at $200 million, received a second stage blessing from the DOE.
The g-2 experiment will focus on an anomaly in the spin rate of a muon within a magnetic field, which some theorists believe is evidence that supersymmetry could resolve problems in the Standard Model. Meanwhile, the Mu2e experiment, which aims to begin taking data in 2019, will sift through many trillions of muons to see if any happen to spontaneously morph into their cousins, the electron — something that is almost entirely forbidden under the Standard Model.
On 19 September, the lab announced that the US Energy Department (DOE) had granted the $40 million experiment “mission need” approval, a first step towards eventual funding. Last month, a second muon experiment, called Mu2e and priced at $200 million, received a second stage blessing from the DOE.
The g-2 experiment will focus on an anomaly in the spin rate of a muon within a magnetic field, which some theorists believe is evidence that supersymmetry could resolve problems in the Standard Model. Meanwhile, the Mu2e experiment, which aims to begin taking data in 2019, will sift through many trillions of muons to see if any happen to spontaneously morph into their cousins, the electron — something that is almost entirely forbidden under the Standard Model.
Radioactive Tool Goes Missing In Texas 163
Hugh Pickens writes "Oil-field service companies lower radioactive units into wells to let workers identify places to break apart rock for a drilling process known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, which frees oil and natural gas. Now Bloomberg reports that Halliburton workers have discovered that a lock on the container used to transport one such device has gone missing, along with the unit, after employees drove a truck from a site near Peco to a well south of Odessa and while the loss of radioactive rods occurs from time to time, it has been years since a device with americium-241/beryllium, the material in Halliburton's device, was misplaced in Texas. NRC spokeswoman Maureen Conley says the material would have to be in someone's physical possession for several hours for it to be considered harmful as teams comb the route between the two wellsites searching for the seven-inch tube, which is clearly marked with the words 'DANGER RADIOACTIVE' as well as a radiation warning symbol, "Halliburton strongly cautions members of the public that if they locate this source, they should not touch or handle it, stay a minimum of 25 feet away," and contact local law enforcement or the company's emergency hotline if they find the cylinder, says the company which is also offering a reward for information about the tube's whereabouts."
Comment On the other hand... (Score 1) 186
If you were paying your way to a PhD working at McDonalds, would you have the spare change to get tech certs?
Comment Re:med school gives you real knowledge (Score 2) 186
Since when do IT Trade/Tech schools give you real knowledge? Nearly every applicant I've met who's been to one thinks he has real knowledge until you ask him to answer a real world question. The few who know the right answers generally knew the answers before they went to school for the paper.
Submission + - Rover fuel came from Russian nuke factory (slate.com)
gbrumfiel writes: The Curiosity rover will soon start rolling, and when it does, it will be running on gas from a Russian weapon's plant. Slate has the story of how the plutonium-238 that powers the rover came from Mayak, a Sovit-era bomb factory. Mayak made the fuel through reprocessing, a chemical process used to make nuclear warheads that also polluted the surrounding environment. After the cold war ended, the Russians sold the spare pu-238 to NASA, which put some of it into Curiosity. Now, the Russian supply is running low and Nasa hopes to restart pu-238 production on US soil (They're planning on making less of a mess this time).
Comment Re:Guilty of Negligence (Score 1) 93
I was just about to post the same thing. This guy should be suing himself. Now that's a trial I'd follow.
Comment Re:Only Open Source routers have hope of being sec (Score 1) 126
You should have worded your subject "You Can Only Really Know if Open Source Routers are Secure". For the sake of discussion, say I were to create the world's first 100% secure, completely unhackable router and not release its source code. It is secure, but you're assuming it isn't because you can't see that it is. At the same time you can't prove that it isn't. You could spend your entire life trying to find holes in it without ever knowing there was one. (You can't prove a negative)
Now with that said, If I were to scour the source of every open source router, I may or not find holes. Even if I didn't, does that mean that none exist? No. That just means that I was only able to validate the lack of holes within the confines of my own experience, short attention span, and ability to grasp the complexity. Sure, you have more eyes on things with Open Source solutions, but that doesn't make them immune to stupidity, lack of knowledge and complacency.
Comment Thinking Rationally (Score 1) 820
Let's look at the facts..
In their press release (http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml12/12234.html), the CSPC states "Since 2009, CPSC staff has learned of more than two dozen ingestion incidents, with at least one dozen involving Buckyballs. Surgery was required in many of incidents."
Let's do the math. If the number of children, 14 years of age or younger, in the United States was approximately 60,000,000 in 2010, then the probability of any one of them requiring surgery if all 24 known incidents required surgery would be 1 in 2,500,000. If the probability of being struck by lightning were 1 in 1,000,000 (estimates seem to between 1 in 500,000 and 1 an 1,000,000 depending on where you look), that would mean a child is 2.5 times more likely to be struck by lightning than swallow 2 or more buckyballs and require surgery. (http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=kf7tgg1uo9ude_&met_y=population&idim=country:US&dl=en&hl=en&q=population+of+the+united+states#!ctype=l&strail=false&bcs=d&nselm=h&met_y=population&fdim_y=country:US&scale_y=lin&ind_y=false&rdim=age_group&idim=age_group:3:2:1&ifdim=age_group&hl=en_US&dl=en&ind=false)
According to asktheodds.com, your chance of dying in a car accident in any given year are between 1 in 4000 and 1 in 8000. Dying in a tornado? 1 in 60,000. If you go skydiving once a year, the odds you'll die are 1 in 100,000.
Now of those of us that have children, I'd wager that most (including me) expose our kids to the death trap that is an automobile quite often, and at times when we could walk instead. I also hear that there are people who expose their children to a higher risk of death by tornado by living in those areas where tornadoes are more common.
My point here (I almost forgot I had one) is that we do many things that are far more likely to kill our children than purchase buckyballs. It is completely irrational to blow taxpayer money to take a product that has injured somewhere around 24 kids over a 3 year period off the market.
I'm sorry, my probability was a little off. I lumped all 24 reports in one year rather than distributing it among the three, so it'd actually be 1 in 7,500,000.
Comment Why not read before posting? (Score 1) 820
That recall you are citing was in 2010.
Comment Re:First my beloved Viper fighter, now this (Score 1) 820
I say we ban H20 and all products containing it. According to the CDC (http://www.cdc.gov/HomeAndRecreationalSafety/Water-Safety/waterinjuries-factsheet.html), an average of 3,533 people drowned each year between 2005 and 2009. Of those, one in five was "14 and younger". While I'm not sure how a child can be both 14 and younger at the same time, this is certainly a much larger issue.
