Forgot your password?

Close
typodupeerror

Comment: Re:well if this pans out (Score 1, Insightful) 413

by DuBois (#38166188) Attached to: Climate May Be Less Sensitive To CO2 Than Previously Thought
Nobody rational denies climate change. Many rational people deny human caused climate change. If there were empirical evidence for blaming humans, we'd have a debate. Lacking such evidence is the reason why there is merely a shouting match between irrationalists of all sorts.

Comment: RAH comments (Score 1) 390

by DuBois (#33170196) Attached to: US Military 'Banned' From Viewing Wikileaks
“I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy . . . censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, ‘This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,’ the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives.” — John Lyle in "Revolt in 2100" by Robert Heinlein
Wine

Wine 1.2 Released 427

Posted by Soulskill
from the pop-the-cork dept.
David Gerard writes "Stuck with that one Windows app you can't get rid of? Rejoice — Wine 1.2 is officially released! Apart from running pretty much any Windows application on Unix better than 1.0 (from 2008), major new features include 64-bit support, bi-directional text, and translation into thirty languages. And, of course, DirectX 9 is well-supported and DirectX 10 is getting better. Packages should hit the distros over the weekend, or you can get the source now."
Security

Sun Pushes Emergency Java Patch 90

Posted by timothy
from the emergency-shot-of-soy-latte dept.
Trailrunner7 writes "In a sudden about-face, Sun has rushed out a Java update to fix a drive-by download vulnerability that exposed Windows users to in-the-wild malware attacks. The patch comes less than a week after Sun told a Google researcher it did not consider the issue serious enough to warrant an out-of-cycle patch and less than a day after researchers spotted live exploits on a booby-trapped Web site. The flaw, which was also discovered independently by Ruben Santamarta, occurs because the Java-Plugin Browser is running 'javaws.exe' without validating command-line parameters. Despite the absence of documentation, a researcher was about to figure out that Sun removed the code to run javaws.exe from the Java plugin. The about-face by Sun is another sign that some big vendors still struggle to understand the importance of working closely with white hat researchers to understand the implications of certain vulnerabilities. In this case, Google's Tavis Ormandy was forced to use the full-disclosure weapon to force the vendor into a proper response."
Science

The Fruit Fly Drosophila Gets a New Name 136

Posted by timothy
from the hope-you-used-pencil dept.
G3ckoG33k writes "The name of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster will change to Sophophora melangaster. The reason is that scientists have by now discovered some 2,000 species of the genus and it is becoming unmanageably large. Unfortunately, the 'type species' (the reference point of the genus), Drosophila funebris, is rather unrelated to the D. melanogaster, and ends up in a distant part of the relationship tree. However, geneticists have, according to Google Scholar, more than 300,000 scientific articles describing innumerable aspects of the species, and will have to learn the new name as well as remember the old. As expected, the name change has created an emotional (and practical) stir all over media. While name changes are frequent in science, as they describe new knowledge about relationships between species, these changes rarely hit economically relevant species, and when they do, people get upset."

Comment: Overweight, or too much CO2? (Score 1) 1093

by DuBois (#30425408) Attached to: The Limits To Skepticism
'This man is too heavy,' said the doctor who had been called in to see a patient in the Land of Fools, 'and his ailment will undoubtedly become worse unless something is done about it.'

He went home, leaving his knowledge and expected some action to be taken.

When he returned to see the patient, he was met by sorrowing relatives.

'Doctor,' they said, 'the man was sicker than we knew. Even after his weight had been reduced, he died.'

'Perhaps he did not get his weight down fast enough.'

'No, it couldn't have been that. We decided that the best way to take off weight was to cut his head off. We had that done in five minutes.'

—Idries Shah, "Reflections"

It's a good thing we don't get all the government we pay for.