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Comment Wusses (Score 1) 614

by MunkieLife (#37182620) Attached to: 5.8 Earthquake Hits East Coast of the US
Oh please... I live in Indonesia. A 5.9 earthquake barely even makes the news. A 5.9 is like, "Uhhh, hrmm, something feels strange, am I feeling a bit dizzy? Oh no, it's just a small earthquake."

Seriously though, the depth of the earthquake makes a big difference and this one seemed to be shallow, so I can imagine most people clearly felt it. However, the shake map looks pretty tame. http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/shakemap/global/shake/c0005ild/

Comment Compromised by worm or trojan? (Score 1) 62

by MunkieLife (#35069926) Attached to: DDoS Attacks Exceed 100 Gbps For First Time
Assuming most of these DDOS attacks come from from botnets; I wonder what percent of these DDOS attacks are made up of computers that were infected/compromised because they were left unpatched out in the open verses computers that were compromised because the user installed a pirated copy of some software that contained a virus or rootkit.

Given the reports I've heard of China and many other countries pirating 90% of their software http://slashdot.org/story/11/01/21/2217248/Ballmer-Says-90-of-Chinese-Users-Pirate-Software, I'd imagine there's got to be botnet makers who make software piracy the foundations of some big botnets. Anyone know?

Comment It must be authorized first... (Score 1) 71

by MunkieLife (#35005636) Attached to: Amazon Bulk-Email Service Could Lure Spammers
From their website:
http://aws.amazon.com/ses/#functionality

"Verify Email Addresses: Before you can send email via Amazon SES, you need to verify that you own the email address from which you’ll be sending email. To verify an email address, make an API call with the email address as a parameter. This API call will trigger a verification email, which will contain a link that you can click on to complete the verification process."

So, what's all this talk about Amazon needing great content filters etc? Sounds to me if anyone is getting an email through this service, they approved it and they can unsubscribe anytime. Am I missing something?
Businesses

Submission + - IRS Nails CPA for Copying Steve Jobs, Google Execs 1

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Silly rabbit, $1 salaries are for super-wealthy tech execs! The WSJ reports that CPA David Watson incurred the wrath of the IRS by only paying himself $24,000 a year and declaring the rest of his take profit. It's a common tax-cutting maneuver that most computer consultants working through an S Corporation have probably considered. Unlike profit distributions, all salary is subject to a 2.9% Medicare tax and the first $106,800 is subject to a 12.4% Social Security tax (FICA). By reducing his salary, Watson didn't save any income taxes on the $379k in profit distributions he received in 2002 and 2003, but he did save nearly $20,000 in payroll taxes for the two years, the IRS argued, pegging Watson's true pay at $91,044 for each year. Judge Robert W. Pratt agreed that Watson's salary was too low, ruling that the CPA owed the extra tax plus interest and penalties. So why, you ask, don't members of the much-ballyhooed $1 Executive club like Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt get in hot water for their low-ball salaries? After all, how inequitable would it be if billionaires working full-time didn't have to kick in more than 15 cents into the Medicare and Social Security kitty? Sorry kids, the rich are different, and the New Global Elite have much better tax advisors than you!

Submission + - Netsuite CEO says Microsoft cloud is “fake&r (crn.com.au)

Submitted by sholto
sholto writes: This week Netsuite CEO Zac Nelson decided not to get involved in the tiff between Oracle CEO Larry Ellison and Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff over the definition of cloud computing. Instead in this blunt Q&A he divided IT vendors into real clouds and fake clouds.
Who is selling fake clouds? “Microsoft is famous for saying 'all our applications are in the cloud'. No they're not. They're their existing applications hosted someplace. That failed back in 1999 — how's it going to succeed in 2010?”
The Media

$200B Lost To Counterfeiting? Back It Up 283

Posted by kdawson from the pulled-from-some-orifice dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Over the weekend, the NY Times ran a story about how the recession has impacted product counterfeiters. In it, the reporter regurgitates the oft-repeated claim that counterfeiting 'costs American businesses an estimated $200 billion a year.' Techdirt's Mike Masnick asks the Times reporter to back up that assertion, noting two recent reports (by the GAO and the OECD) that suggest the actual number is much lower, and quoting two reporters who have actually looked at the numbers and found (a) the real number is probably less than $5 billion, and (b) the $200 billion number can be traced back to a totally unsourced (read: made-up) magazine claim from two decades ago."
Transportation

Boeing's Hybrid Electric Airliner of the Future 152

Posted by Soulskill from the flying-rice-burner dept.
fergus07 writes "Borne out of the same NASA research program that gave birth to MIT's D 'double bubble,' Boeing's Subsonic Ultra Green Aircraft Research (SUGAR) Volt concept is a twin-engine aircraft design notable for its trussed, elongated wings and electric battery gas turbine hybrid propulsion system — a system designed to reduce fuel burn by more than 70 percent and total energy use by 55 percent. The goal of the NASA supersonic research program is to find aircraft designs that will significantly reduce noise, nitrogen oxide emissions, fuel burn and air traffic congestion by the year 2035."
NASA

The Sun Unleashes Coronal Mass Ejection At Earth 220

Posted by Soulskill from the return-fire dept.
astroengine writes "Yesterday morning, at 08:55 UT, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory detected a C3-class flare erupt inside a sunspot cluster. 100,000 kilometers away, deep within the solar atmosphere (the corona), an extended magnetic field filled with cool plasma forming a dark ribbon across the face of the sun (a feature known as a 'filament') erupted at the exact same time. It seems very likely that both eruptions were connected after a powerful shock wave produced by the flare destabilized the filament, causing the eruption. A second solar observatory, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, then spotted a huge coronal mass ejection blast into space, straight in the direction of Earth. Solar physicists have calculated that this magnetic bubble filled with energetic particles should hit Earth on August 3, so look out for some intense aurorae — a solar storm is coming."
Science

The Possibility of Paradox-Free Time Travel 421

Posted by kdawson from the fire-up-the-delorean dept.
relliker writes in with word of a paper up on the ArXiv by Seth Lloyd and co-workers, exploring the possibility that "postselection" effects in non-linear quantum mechanics might allow paradox-free time travel. "Lloyd's time machine gets around [the grandfather paradox] because of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics: anything that this time machine allows can also happen with finite probability anyway... Another interesting feature of this machine is that it does not require any of the distortions of spacetime that traditional time machines rely on. In these, the fabric of spacetime has to be ruthlessly twisted in a way that allows the time travel to occur. ... Postselection can only occur if quantum mechanics is nonlinear, something that seems possible in theory but has never been observed in practice. All the evidence so far is that quantum mechanics is linear. In fact some theorists propose that the seemingly impossible things that postselection allows is a kind of proof that quantum mechanics must be linear."
Media

Sony's Blue-Violet Laser the Future Blu-ray? 260

Posted by timothy from the ever-more-bits dept.
JoshuaInNippon writes "Japanese researchers from Sony and Tohoku University announced the development of a 'blue-violet ultrafast pulsed semiconductor laser,' which Sony is aiming to use for optical disks. The new technology, with 'a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers in the blue-violet region' and a power out put 'more than a hundred times the world's highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers,' is believed to be capable of holding more than 20 times the information of current Blu-ray technology, while retaining a practical size. Japanese news reports have speculated that one blue-violet disk could be capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles, easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24. When the technology may hit markets was not indicated."

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