If you go to Amsterdam and speak Dutch (with an international accent), the Dutch will answer you in English, almost always. Trying to be helpful, but hard for people who genuinely want to learn Dutch.

Yeah the early days of Slashot were great. I lurked on slashdot since the late 90's, it was many years before I made an account. But for the best part of a decade I read slashdot every day. In the early days it was THE site for Linux/open source news. I still look at it occasionally, and logged in to post this for the first time in a few years. I have nothing else to add beyond what has been said, but want to post anyway. RIP Roblimo.

If Congress wanted Constellation, then they would have funded it. That was one of Obama's options. The status quo was ridiculous. The options were fund it, or kill it.

There have also been suggestions that they planted child porn in order to get the $500 bounty.

And if someone flips the meaning of TRUE and FALSE, then you have much bigger problems on your hands. The whole basis of comparison operations in C is based around zero versus non-zero. The value '1' has no significance whatsoever.

Argh, in C, comparisons against true (TRUE) or false (FALSE) are even worse style. Indeed, in C, defining TRUE == 1 is erroneous, because in C anything that is zero is false, anything that is non-zero is true. So in C, code such as

if (a == TRUE)

is a bug. Any non-zero value represents true, but this comparison only tests for a == 1.

Comparisons against FALSE are OK, but flawed logic. It is anyway a boolean, so why not just test directly?

if (a)

In C, you should *never* do a comparison against TRUE. If you really want to do a comparison against a boolean value (which is never necessary, but perhaps, in some cases, might be a useful form of documenting your intent), compare against FALSE. eg,

if (a == FALSE)

if (a != FALSE) // the proper way of comparing a == TRUE

That kind of code indicates some rather flawed logic. Why would you ever want to compare something against a boolean? Better to write simply If !Field.IsCleverlyHiddenByAPhisher ...

Sorry, the rate of natural oil production is actually about 10 barrels per day.

http://chem.tufts.edu/answersi...

I was going to reply, but logging on half-way through writing the reply caused the edit box to clear and I lost it. But nevermind, the comment from haruchai sums up what I was going to say anyway. Trying to store biomass doesn't work, it decomposes and releases the CO2 anyway. Trying to 'plug' it is basically impossible, it amounts to basically artificially reproducing the same effect that happens in the production of coal or oil. The natural rate of fossil fuel production, across the entire planet, is something like 1 barrel of oil per day. (yes that fits - the rate of oil usage currently about 20 million barrels per day; it formed over the course of 300 million years).

Ignoring all other points but just focusing on one: The 'corrections' in this data set are, at most, 0.06 degrees C. That is only a couple of pixels on the XKCD comic. Do you know what a pixel is? Hint: it is really small. If you looked at the original comic, and the 'corrected' comic, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference, unless you looked very very closely.

So the solution that ends up getting implemented is that the autonomous car will take whatever course of action that will minimize costs, which will typically be crash into whichever car contains the occupants with the least total wealth.

They're never going to fix this. It isn't just a matter of publishing source code, it affects the hardware too. It needs hardware protection on the flash, for example, so that you can control, at a hardware level (eg by a button on the device) whether the flash is writable.

But by now, all of the manufacturers are so infiltrated by other agencies, the NSA, foreign governments, and business interests (having the user in control of their own security directly contradicts the aims of DRM, not to mention marketing companies); this all conspires against ever having any security over your own firmware.

Build it yourself is probably the best bet. And the nice thing is that this is becoming more practical. The biggest problem is that there is no way to verify the hardware at the chip level, but with careful design it is possible to get reasonably good security without 100% trust in all of the individual components.

But for the overwhelming majority of people, who are not motivated or able to build their own, their tech is doomed to be compromised. I don't think there is anything that can be done about that. It is a political issue, rather than technical. And in all "democracies" that I can think of, the political will is against it.

The reason why Gtk was written is because at the time that GIMP was starting out, there wasn't a good alternative. Nowdays there are.

DoD, DHS, CIA, NSA, etc will all require that you keep your research secret. They do fund cryptographers, but they are all in-house and not part of the academic community.