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Comment Re:Nope. (Score 1) 201

Dune is full on doable, but you have to make the politics, and the story gaps easy to understand. Dune is a political thriller about Afghanistan caught between the Russians and the US with spice instead of heroin, set in a dystopian anti-technology future. The Afghani. err. Fremen (ahem) get ahold of nukes, which is everyone's worst fear, and hold EVERYONE hostage.

Sounds like a pretty easy story to tell, but, the Fremen are the heroes. So how do you make them relatable in a movie? That was the problem with Lynch's movie, (beside the wooden acting, the white-savior complex, and the Weirding Modules). Somehow you have to afflict the hero with terrible purpose, AND make people still remember that he is a hero, while making believable the idea that the native people would follow Lawrence of Arabi. errrr. Dances with. err. Paul Muad'Dib.

Or go full on anti-hero. Its hard to relate to someone who does what he has to and agonizes and hand wrings about it, while then committing atrocities. The atrocities weren't even visible in the Lynch version. Somehow the new one has to tell a tale that's relatable, and then does the Ten Years Later sequence from Spongebob, and that somehow be adequate to explain the transformation of Paul to Muad'Dib, a being of terrible purpose who is willing to destroy the entire universe for his vision. Just give him some infinity stones and a huge purple chin and we have a deplorable and utterly relatable character. Or embrace the suck, and sell it. But its impossible to enjoy the fall from grace on film. Why does everyone hate the Star Wars Prequels (other than Jar Jar?) Precisely for this reason. Muad'Dib is an utterly human, ruthless bastard who goes from a likeable kid to a vicious killer, and we are watching the fall from grace. Its a great read, but its hard to watch and empathize with. Hope they can pull it off in this adaptation, but I suspect it will remain difficult to manage without some significant character development that is just too hard to do in a 2 hour film.

Comment Why Tape? Its harder to encrypt. (Score 1) 165

So in order for ransomware to spread to a tape archive, one would have to overwrite the whole tape archive. Using a model like of Towers of Hanoi, I am unlikely to backup the encrypted version in an unrecoverable way. The same is not true for disk backup, which is likely mounted as a volume in a *NIX like system is susceptible to the same environmental constraints as any other *NIX like system on the network. If the mounted volume is accessible to the systems that are infected by a worm, then the backup system may also be compromised, and your stored backups are also encrypted. While tape is more prone to failure, and far slower to write and restore, the safest solution is to backup to disk, and retain a tape archive in the event of an unrecoverable failure of the backup. As a security geek, you will have to pry my tape from my cold dead fingers. While I certainly recognize the efficiency gains of disk, disk is an operational recovery solution. Tape is a Disaster Recovery solution.

Comment Re:For the hundred and first time... (Score 1) 182

So, given the history of leaks from LEO and IC, the likelihood of a universal key being misallocated is high. The likelihood of someone stelaing the secret is high. We can't encrypt the key, so its impossible to protect the key, and we can't keep someone else from discovering the key, therefore the likelihood of the illicit application of the key is high. In short, a backdoor by having multiple key signings is a risk to the entire encryption infrastructure. Didn't we do this back in 1993 with the Clipper chip?

Submission + - SPAM: Why data, not privacy, is the real danger 1

schwit1 writes: "Privacy as we normally think of it doesn’t matter,” said Aza Raskin, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. "What these companies are doing is building little models, little avatars, little voodoo dolls of you. Your doll sits in the cloud, and they'll throw 100,000 videos at it to see what’s effective to get you to stick around, or what ad with what messaging is uniquely good at getting you to do something.”

Raskin was a successful engineer and entrepreneur, leading teams at Mozilla and Jawbone before realizing that his work had directly shaped human behavior in ways he couldn’t tolerate. He invented the infinite scroll — the now-ubiquitous design standard in which your feed never ends at the bottom of the page — and then did the math on how much time people were wasting by virtue of his creation. "Infinite scroll at the very minimum wastes 200,000 human lifetimes per day,”

Link to Original Source

Submission + - Windows 10 Enterprise Getting 'InPrivate Desktop' Sandboxed Execution Feature (bleepingcomputer.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A recent Windows 10 Insider Feedback Hub quest revealed that Microsoft is developing a new throwaway sandboxed desktop feature called "InPrivate Desktop". This feature will allow administrators to run untrusted executables in a secure sandbox without fear that it can make any changes to the operating system or system's files. This quest is no longer available in the Feedback Hub, but according to it's description, this feature is being targeted at Windows 10 Enterprise and requires at least 4 GB of RAM, 5 GB of free disk space, 2 CPU cores, and CPU virtualization enabled in the BIOS. It does not indicate if Hyper-V needs to be installed or not, but as the app requires admin privileges to install some features, it could be that Hyper-V will be enabled.

Submission + - A Material Found To Carry Current In a way Never Before Observed (phys.org)

An anonymous reader writes: Scientists at the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have discovered a behavior in materials called cuprates that suggests they carry current in a way entirely different from conventional metals such as copper. The research, published today in the journal Science, adds new meaning to the materials' moniker, "strange metals." Cuprates are high-temperature superconductors (HTS), meaning they can carry current without any loss of energy at somewhat warmer temperatures than conventional, low-temperature superconductors (LTS). Although scientists understand the physics of LTS, they haven't yet cracked the nut of HTS materials. Exactly how the electrons travel through these materials remains the biggest mystery in the field.

For their research on one specific cuprate, lanthanum strontium copper oxide (LSCO), a team led by MagLab physicist Arkady Shekhter focused on its normal, metallic state—the state from which superconductivity eventually emerges when the temperature dips low enough. This normal state of cuprates is known as a "strange" or "bad" metal, in part because the electrons don't conduct electricity particularly well. Scientists have studied conventional metals for more than a century and generally agree on how electricity travels through them. They call the units that carry charge through those metals "quasiparticles," which are essentially electrons after factoring in their environment. These quasiparticles act nearly independently of each other as they carry electric charge through a conductor. But does quasiparticle flow also explain how electric current travels in the cuprates? At the National MagLab's Pulsed Field Facility in Los Alamos, New Mexico, Shekhter and his team investigated the question. They put LSCO in a very high magnetic field, applied a current to it, then measured the resistance. The resulting data revealed that the current cannot, in fact, travel via conventional quasiparticles, as it does in copper or doped silicon. The normal metallic state of the cuprate, it appeared, was anything but normal.

Comment Fun with Logic (Score 1) 264

Argument inspired by gaseous dinosaurs:
1) Methane is a greenhouse gas
2) Eating fibrous vegetation creates methane
3) Creation of methane increases your carbon footprint.
.: If one eats less fibrous vegetation, then one produces less methane, and therefore has a reduced carbon footprint.
+ 1) Livestock eat much fibrous vegetation.
.: Livestock have high carbon footprints
++ 1) Decreasing carbon footprint is good.
++ 2) Killing livestock that have high carbon footprints decrease carbon footprint.
++ 3) Waste is bad.
++ 4) Eating livestock that have been killed to decrease carbon footprint does not waste the livestock.
++ 5) Vegans do not eat or kill livestock.
.: Vegans are bad, because they waste livestock and increase carbon footprint.
Conversely: Carnivores are good for the environment because they do not eat fibrous vegetation, and they do not waste livestock, which they kill, thereby reducing carbon footprints.
1) Some people are carnivores
2) Some carnivores eat vegans.
3) Vegans increase carbon footprint which is bad.
4) A person who eats people is a cannibal
.: A cannibal that eats vegans and is a carnivore is improving the environment by reducing carbon footprint.

Comment Re:Bureaucrats Not Officers (Score 4, Insightful) 1059

Is there a difference anymore? Do they have enforcement authority? Half of the regulators have some sort of enforcement authority that they self-authorized in the federal register. Don't cooperate, let them do whatever they're going to do, and when they don't find anything, sue for false imprisonment. There is an ambulance chaser somewhere interested in making a buck...

Comment Re:well... (Score 1) 428

It took me a long time, and three colleges to finally understand that college is for the license to get a job. Education is for the skills. Education and college don't have to be mutually exclusive, if you intend to be a professor. Otherwise, get the degree to be competitive, and training to be proficient.

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