For logging into a secure server the correct algoritmm is Secure Remote Password (SRP).

This uses a little crypto magic to produce STRONG security from weak passwords. It is a bit like using a nounce, but it does not give a man in the middle any way to brute force guess the password.

If the user tries to log into a phished website the attempt simply fails. The phisher learns nothing. And there is no need for all the PKI certificate signing trusted third party nonsense.

It is not just dumb end users. What do you do when an SSH session says "new certificate". Check its finger print? Of course not, nobody does. With SRP this would be completely unnecessary.

It does not work for sites upon which you have no account. But for banking etc. it is the obvious way to go. But somehow the PKI mob and their expensive certificates got all the press. And no patents on SRP.

(There are a number of similar algorithms known as PAKE. But SRP is the latest and greatest incarnation.)

If the string breaks you can always hire another Mexican. But you would have to Buy another robot.

(Hear in Oz they often just abseil down the buildings on a climbing rope. Can bounce all over the place, would be fun to do ... once. (They do use a second backup rope as well.) )

Pumping water up a hill and then produce hydro power at peak times. This is an established technology, maybe 60% efficient. There is one setup here near Brisbane AU. Things do not have to be exotic.

(You do need a hill, Denmark may need to rely on its neighbors.)

In IBM "Watson" appears to just be a vacuous marketing term for anything vaguely related to Artificial Intelligence. Any technical details are very sparse.

Sure there was the very clever program that won Jeopardy!. But then IBM is saying that they want to use "Watson" for medical diagnosis. That is about as different a problem as you can get. And if the term "Cognative Computing" means anything at all it suggests the use of perceptron networks, which are not generally used for either the Jeopardy Watson or medical diagnosis.

So it is a bit like asking "Will software related stuff save IBM?". I don't know whether IBM can be saved, but it is pretty likely that if it can that it will have something to do with software.

Do you have any reliable reference for the Calculation Error?

If it were true then it would add weight to the stupidity of dropping the bomb on Japan, and thus telling the Soviets to build one too.

Anthony

I'm pretty sure that your history is wrong. The Germans were on the trail of building an atomic bomb without help from Szilzard. The problem was that by they time the realized it might be feasible it was too late to develop one before the war would end, so it was not actively pursued.

That's who polices policemen.

Certainly the TFA is junk, and recognizing a traffic light would be relatively easy to do. But why is there no real information on the Google Car that is public? All I ever find is vague marketing blurbs and misleading statistics.

It would be very interesting to know what it really can and cannot do. And how the software was put together. Do they build a full scene graph or just use 2 1/2 D modelling? How do they go about the planning issues? Etc.

But nothing. Just marketing hype. So TFA is actually good if it flushes out some real info.

The new dialogs will be dumbed down so they are useless. The old dialogs will remain but have zero development effort to maintain them. So in order to find things you need to know when the OS features were added, and thus what type of dialog to use. Or know the third party apps to use, like Sysinternals used to be.

Remember that sys admins and slash dot readers are less that 1% of PC users. They are irrelevant to Microsoft. Be like Apple iPhones, that is the key to success.

I'd say that the fear is being managed remarkably well. For a small threat it has been raised into a major issue, with the promise of additional funding for homeland security. Fear is good for business.

+1. I'm surprised we have not seen this already. Given that people filing personal patents are likely to already be experts in the field, and therefor employed in that field. Just make absolutely sure that you have plenty of written evidence that your employer asked you to implement what violates your patent.

As an employer, I would not employ anyone that had a personal patent. Red sign. Anyone that self interested is not going to be my puppy. And he will keep any good ideas he has while working for me to himself so that he can patent them later.

The original purpose of copyright was to *promote* creativity. The current purpose is to protect mickey mouse, 70 years after production.

Legally it is pretty obvious that an API is copyrightable. If Google had used the same ideas in the API, but expressed them differently with different function names, arguments etc. then fine. But this is an exact copy.

The law is, of course, bullshit. It is the SCOTUS job to defend the law. Fortunately we can rely on our elected representatives to improve laws as circumstances change ... not.

IBM and others have a long history of patenting pointless aspects of plugs and interfaces to prevent competition.

(I always thought that it was dumb of Google to copy the API. Why risk everything on a legal case?)

SRP enables strong security from weak passwords. It does NOT rely on Certificates Authorities at all.

Never heard of it? Then have a look at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Instead of spending billions for NASA to maintain the ISS and other dubious enterprises, why not just pay ISRO some of our small change to do it for us. I bet you they could have put a rover on Mars for less than the cost of the wheels on Curiosity. For the cost of Curiosity we could have a rover on Pluto.

There are no doubt a small minority of Muslims in Australia that just might commit violence. The sort of unreasonable, widespread and unjustifiable arrests and other attacks by the Federal Police might just be enough to push them off over the edge.

Remember, that terrorists do not just kill people "because they are evil" as we are told. It is because they are fighting for a (mad) cause which they are willing to die for. With this sort of action the police might just push a few of them over the edge. Plus our recent attempts to stop them going to Syria, which means that the Australian government is essentially supporting the truly evil regime of Bashar al-Asshard.

If a bomb does go off that is great news for the Federal Police and Asio. Much more funding, even more powers, happy days.

That was the effect of the Sydney Hilton Bombing back in 1978. Despite the fact that it is almost certain that in that case the police planted the bomb! (It was not meant to explode.)