Comment Re:I really wish they named the ship something els (Score 1) 75
Pfft! We can still be disappointed.
Comment Re:I really wish they named the ship something els (Score 1) 75
You and me both. Let's spread the tag !nuclearpulsepropulsion to show our dismay!
NASA's Orion Spaceship Passes Parachute Test 75
An anonymous reader writes The spacecraft it is hoped will take man to Mars has passed its first parachute tests. Nasa's Orion spacecraft landed gently using its parachutes after being shoved out of a military jet at 35,000 feet. "We've put the parachutes through their paces in ground and airdrop testing in just about every conceivable way before we begin sending them into space on Exploration Flight Test (EFT)-1 before the year's done," Orion program manager Mark Geyer said in a NASA statement. "The series of tests has proven the system and will help ensure crew and mission safety for our astronauts in the future."
Comment Re:Great deal! (Score 2, Interesting) 365
It's more brilliant than you think—now the Microsoft employees who came up with this idea can get MacBooks without getting their boss's signature! In theory, anyway.
Comment Re:No winners economically (Score 1) 268
Well... there's the beachfront property market.
Comment Re:Slashdot (Score 1) 197
See also: Slashdot and unicode support.
Comment If any questions about the original Xbox come up.. (Score 1) 58
...and Andrew/bunnie doesn't answer them, I can. I'm very briefly mentioned in the book under a different Internet name that I'd rather not say here.
I was the person who figured out how to dump the second version of the MCPX's secret boot ROM without having to repeat the HyperTransport bus tap craziness that Andrew did in the first place. Namely, the A20M# attack, which was much easier to do. (If Andrew hadn't done his original attack, though, we wouldn't have had the knowledge necessary to pull off my attack. <3 Andrew)
We kept the A20M# attack secret until the 360 was released, in case another MCPX silicon revision was released. It turned out that Microsoft had, in fact, coded a new MCPX ROM to defeat many of the exploits used to hack Xboxes - they just never released it, probably because it would've cost a fortune for what was then a console in its late stages. We didn't find out about this MCPX ROM update until some people looked into how the Chihiro arcade boards worked in 2014, which showed the new MCPX code in the debug ROMs. The A20M# attack still would have worked on this design - it was an attack on entire secret boot ROM design, not the MCPX ROM's code =)
Myria
Comment Re:Yeah, right (Score 1) 231
Hey, definitely. I'm all for this sort of interest piece; I've done some truly worthless statistical analyses purely for the geek value. But it shouldn't be mislabeled, much less sitting on Arxiv. I guess maybe this happened because the lead author is a physicist? Assume a spherical cow, etc.
Comment Re:Yeah, right (Score 2) 231
Exactly. The results of this study could not be more bullshit. It's the kind of "why would you even bother doing that" study that should make people double over laughing.
Submission + - Xanadu Is Finally Released — After 54 Years In The Making (businessinsider.com)
redletterdave writes: “Project Xanadu,” designed by hypertext inventor Ted Nelson to let users build documents that automatically embed the sources they’re linking back to and show the visible connections between parallel webpages, was released in late April at a Chapman University event. Thing is, development on Xanadu began in 1960 — that’s 54 years ago — making it the most delayed software in history.
Comment Re:Russia (Score 1) 417
We'd deal with them the same way we dealt with Denmark. Simple.
Comment Re:Russia (Score 1) 417
develop nuclear weapons.
As another commenter said already, Canada went through nuclear disarmament in 1984. (The US wasn't pleased.) "Develop" is definitely the wrong word.
Submission + - YouTube Suspends Massive Archive of Information Security Conference Videos (pastebin.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Adrian Crenshaw, also known as Irongreek, is a regular face at Information Security conferences. He records many talks, processes them, and puts them online for all to learn from. His YouTube channel is one of the the largest archives of Information Security knowledge out there. In many cases, it's the only record of the research and knowledge presented at the small to medium sized security conferences in the United States. Tonight, Google decided to suspend his YouTube channel with no reason given. Our industry is reeling from this loss of collective knowledge. We ask if this is the beginning of censorship against security content? We hope not and we hope that Google will repeal its decision and bring back Irongeek's channel.
Submission + - Are hurricanes more deadly than himmicanes? (theguardian.com)
grrlscientist writes: A recently published paper claims that the gender of the name given to individual hurricanes is linked to the public's perception of the risk posed by that storm. In short, this study claims that hurricanes given female-sounding names are perceived to be less dangerous than those given male-sounding names (which we refer to here as "himmicanes"). This public underestimation of risk apparently results in hurricanes causing significantly more deaths than himmicanes. We reanalyse the data and find there is no relationship between hurricane name-gender and deaths caused.
Comment Re:Do you give up higher cerebral function (Score 1) 211
Alas, they also noted differences in brain activation when the subjects were shorn pornographic imagery, so that joke doesn't quite work, unless they were secretly controlling their muscles for the elbow and wrist in the MRI tube. But we can pretend it does!
