Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

[ Create a new account ]

MichaelSmith (789609)

MichaelSmith
  (email not shown publicly)
http://slashdot.org/
by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 08, @08:03AM (#24093871)
Attached to: Hans Reiser Leads Police To Nina's Body

I don't want to sound like I'm defending murder here, but not I nor you nor anyone else know what Nina did to make him kill her.

Murder is illegal. That is a good thing. He got caught after killing someone, he pays the price. That is well and good.

But I don't think we should be saying things like "evil" and "I hope he dies of AIDS in jail" until you know the facts of the situation, and what she did to make him kill her. Sure, maybe it was nothing, and he's just a psychopath - but maybe it was years of abuse, in which case I have quite a lot of difficulty blaming him completely.

I've seen marriages so sick and dysfunctional I almost wish one of the parties would kill the other. Everyone's life would get better if one of them just did it. Some people lead such sick, disgraceful lives that I have little guilt in thinking the world would be better of without them in it.

Killing someone because you want their money, or you don't like the colour of their skin, is a crime against humanity itself and anyone who does that's life is forfeit, in my opinion. But killing someone after they inflict years of mental abuse? The matter is far less black and white. Illegal, yes. Wrong, too .. maybe. Certainly not optimal. But evil?

Some people have it coming. I'm not saying one way or the other here, OK. I don't know Mr Reiser, nor have I any emotional investment one way or the other. I just don't believe murder is always the heinous evil crime some might think. Sometimes, it's the wheel of karma turning. Sometimes, it's a public service.

Of course, we don't know, and will likely never know, what caused the murder. But have we all decided anyway?

Maybe Reiser is a sick psychopathic fuck who kills for kicks. Maybe Nina had it coming. Who knows? Not you or I. So let's lay off the fire and brimstone, what do you say?

+ -
 [+] comment
by Frosty Piss on Sunday July 06, @08:03AM (#24073205)
Attached to: AVG Backs Down From Flooding the Internet

I was looking at alternatives to AVG because of this. Good to know I don't have to keep looking.

Maybe you should keep looking. A company in the business that AVG is in should have seen this coming, what makes you think more of the same "quality" is not in the future? It shows a serious lack of foresight for a company that should have top-drawer management and programmers considering their business. Frankly, this kind of crap reflects badly on what consumers should assume for the quality of their product.

+ -
 [+] comment
by damburger on Thursday July 03, @10:03AM (#24041051)
Attached to: ISPs to Ban P2P With New European Telecom Package?

You can't steal data. Its a physically nonsensical concept. The only way I can see actual theft working is if you were to use quantum teleportation to extract the electrons from one persons computer and place them in your own.

Distribution of trash media is part of what helps level the playing field. It means that people used to getting their data through conventional means now get it through the new medium, and thus are looking in the right place to find user generated content.

+ -
 [+] comment
by afidel on Monday June 16, @10:03AM (#23807909)
Attached to: GE Microbes Make Ersatz Crude Oil From Many Sources
If they are right then they are instant Billionaires, if the process really worked they would be commercializing it and completely destabilizing OPEC. I'll believe it when I see it and the world will be rejoicing.
+ -
 [+] comment
by s4m7 on Monday June 02, @07:03AM (#23620703)
Attached to: Huge Leap Forward In Robotic Limb Replacement

If he was in the military, why is he dealing with insurance carriers at all?

Yes because VA hospitals are great and there's always room in them. They just hand out whatever care you want because you Served Your Country.

No seriously the republicans just blocked the expansion of VA benefits.

+ -
 [+] comment

  XO Laptops Perform Quantum Key Distribution[->] 2008-01-02 20:36 I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property

Submitted by I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property on Wednesday January 02 2008, @08:36PM
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "At the National University of Singapore, two XO Laptops were hooked together to do some entanglement based quantum key distribution over a free space channel. It took some tinkering, and they had to write some custom software for the XO, but it worked. The only bad news is that you can't really do this at home without a rather complex, USB-accessible device to do the entangling — you can't do many quantum operations in software just yet."
http://lwn.net/Articles/263542/
+ -
 [+] submission, hardware, portables, interesting

  Science: Riding the Failure Cascade 2007-12-14 19:43

Posted by Zonk on Friday December 14 2007, @07:43PM
from the wreck-you-with-maths dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Escapist has up an article looking at a curve that represents the dissolution of large social groups, like online guilds. Called the Failure Cascade, it's essentially a way of examining the dissociation of members of an organization predicated on a culture of success. They primarily explore this phenomenon using descriptions of EVE corporate alliances. 'These are the two forces at work in [an] alliance's failure cascade: the individual and the guild ... This happens because the failure cascade is the inverse of a network effect. Websites like MySpace define their value by the people that use the service just as guilds define their quality by their members. As bad events cause players to leave or become inactive, the quality drop leads others to do the same in a spiral that rarely stabilizes, until no one is left.'"
+ -
 [+] story, science, math, rpg, resonancecascade, lame, maths

  Asus Eee sold out in Australia[->] 2007-12-05 06:18 MichaelSmith

Submitted by MichaelSmith on Wednesday December 05 2007, @06:18AM
MichaelSmith writes "After two days on sale in Australia the Asus Eee Linux based laptop has nearly sold out. According to the article some families have bought two or three units and some schools have made multiple purchases. A scan of the Eee user forums suggests that installations of windows are not the hottest topic of conversation about this device."
http://www.theage.com.au/news/technology/australias-cheapest-laptop-sells-out/2007/12/05/1196812808404.html
+ -
 [+] submission, linux, portables

  US seeks mini-Imperial Walker mule-bots[->] 2007-07-16 07:28 MichaelSmith

Submitted by MichaelSmith on Monday July 16 2007, @07:28AM
MichaelSmith writes "The Register has an article about a prototype military walking robot which I think looks totally creepy. A bit like the bottom halves of two people built into a metal chassis and powered by a chainsaw motor. This is a direct link to the embedded video."
http://www.theregister.com/2007/07/16/quadruped_droid_pork_dog/
+ -
 [+] submission, science, robot
Bookmark by MichaelSmith on Monday July 16 2007, @07:19AM
+ -
 [+] bookmark, mulebots

  Yet another security hole in Orkut 2007-06-24 07:11 Louis Benette

Submitted by Louis Benette on Sunday June 24 2007, @07:11AM
Louis Benette writes "Susam Pal, Vipul Agarwal and Gaurav Mogre have disclosed a session management problem on full-disclosure in which they claim that if an attacker can steal the Orkut session cookies from a user's browser, he can hijack and misuse the user's account. The problem turns out to be particularly serious because the attacker can misuse your account even after you have logged out of Orkut. Unfortunately, Orkut keeps your session alive for 24 hours even after you have logged out which can be taken advantage of by an attacker.

Earlier some XSS vulnerabilities were discovered in Orkut which allowed an attacker to steal your session cookies and Orkut preferences. On December 12, 2006 Orkut fixed these vulnerabilities. The users of Orkut have escaped narrowly from massive attacks because the session management problem was disclosed after the XSS vulnerabilities were fixed. If both types of vulnerabilities are present at the same time, then an attacker can exploit XSS flaw to steal cookies and hijack sessions by taking advantage of the session management problem. Within a span of 24 hours, hundreds and thousands of accounts can be hijacked. We are fortunate that such a threat of massive attacks doesn't exist right now. However, if an XSS flaw is discovered again and the session management problem is not fixed massive attacks can take place.

Orkut is not the only site that has to deal with such vulnerabilities. Such vulnerabilities have also been discovered in the leading social networking site, Myspace. One such vulnerability was exploited by Sammy worm to hijack several pages. There are hundreds of millions of users registered on such social networking sites. With such serious vulnerabilities being discovered time and again on these sites, we need to ponder over a disturbing question: Is it safe to create your online identities on social networking sites?"
+ -
 [+] submission, security
Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2007, @06:52AM
We highly doubt LumiGram's Luminous Fiber Optic Tablecloth was designed with power outages in mind, but why hook up a boring string of lamps or fiddle with half melted candles when you can plug this bad boy into the generator? The cloth, which has fiber optics woven throughout, cotton borders, and a Europlug mains adapter, proves most useful when the lights are dimmed, and should prove quite the centerpiece at your next get-together. The illuminating device is available in a trio of sizes, comes in a variety of color schemes.
+ -
 [+] , it, scifi

  Is Yahoo Censoring Open Source ?[->] 2007-06-24 06:16 Peter_JS_Blue

Submitted by Peter_JS_Blue on Sunday June 24 2007, @06:16AM
Peter_JS_Blue writes "According to avid Yahoo'er, Amanda Kerik, Yahoo seems to have developed a policy of censoring answers in their "Yahoo! Answers" service, if that answer contains a suggestion to use Open Source alternatives to Microsoft software.

The gist of it is, that a fellow Yahoo'er posted a question about what to do with a PC that had run into unsolvable Windows problems, since that user did not have a Windows install disc. Amanda suggested, quite amiably, that the hapless user should simply install Ubuntu Linux, since it looked like they'd need to start over from scratch anyway. Amanda was subsequently rewarded with a warning from Yahoo that her answer was "in violation of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service.", and they promptly deleted her answer."

http://slated.org/yahoo_censoring_open_source
+ -
 [+] submission, yro, yahoo
Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2007, @06:09AM
Google is threatening to shut down the german version of its Gmail service if the german Bundestag passes it's new Internet surveillance law. Peter Fleischer, googles german privacy representative says the new law would be a severe blow against privacy and would go against Googles practice of also offering anonymous e-mail accounts. If the law is passed then starting 2008, any connection data concerning the internet, phone calls (With position data when cell phones are used), SMS etc. of any german citizen will be saved for 6 months, anonymizing services like Tor will be made illegal.
+ -
 [+] , it, censorship

  Secrets of Successful Software Requirements 2007-05-24 04:30 Igor Jese

Submitted by Igor Jese on Thursday May 24 2007, @04:30AM
Igor Jese writes "Although most companies do some form of requirements, there is often a lack of understanding as to exactly why the requirements need to be created and how. This article looks at some secrets to improve your requirements process even under tight deadlines. Read more..."
+ -
 [+] submission, developers, programming