lafiel - Slashdot User

Comment Re:Unrealistic? (Score 1) 247

by TheRaven64 on Friday February 26, 2010 @07:01AM (#31283302) Attached to: Virgin Promises 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes

I was a bit surprised by that claim too. Most of the people I know use Virgin, and I've not met anyone who couldn't get within a few percent of the advertised speed. There are lots of reasons to criticise Virgin - dire customer support, throttling policy, IWF collaboration, DNS breakage, deep packet inspection - but not providing the advertised connection speed is not one of them.

Comment Re:What's the point (Score 1) 100

by Teancum on Friday February 26, 2010 @05:34AM (#31282920) Attached to: Hollywood Stock Exchange Set To Launch In April

That particular experiment, to "buy out" HSX dollars, was tried back in the early days of HSX. I think the going rate at the time was 1 cent per 1m HSX bucks or something like that, with a minimum payment of $100 USD (presuming you were good enough to get into the "billionaires" club with HSX).

That particular experiment is dead and doesn't appear to be something to be revived.

No, we are talking about folks who invest real money into real movies that get spent on real actors and producers to be shown on real movie theaters. It is different here, not the virtual money.

Comment Re:What's with the stupid hat? (Score 2, Insightful) 120

by fuzzix on Friday February 26, 2010 @04:37AM (#31282610) Attached to: AIDS-Like Virus New Threat To Koala

It just irritates me Americans just seem to instantly think of a 30 year old movie as the first thing that comes to mind when they think of Australia

And that's the point, it's a useful piece of iconography on an American site to make 'em go "Australia". It's like having pictures on a menu so the unlettered folk can point at the food they'd like and grunt "four".

I don't think there's an icon for Ireland but if there was, what would it be? Text now and win a prize!

Text "A" for: A Leprechaun!
Text "B" for: A Shamrock!
Text "C" for: Government corruption and petty revenge!
Text "D" for: A bishop covering up a priest's sexual abuse of altar boys!

ENTER NOW!

Comment Missing words (Score 2, Informative) 247

by Rik Sweeney on Friday February 26, 2010 @04:16AM (#31282518) Attached to: Virgin Promises 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes

Virgin Promises Up To 100Mbps Connections To UK Homes

What you'll really get is something completely different

Comment Re:Exactly. Using open wifi is not stealing. (Score 1) 263

by mark-t on Friday February 26, 2010 @02:02AM (#31281934) Attached to: Passive-Aggressive Wi-Fi Hotspots

An AP labelled "Free WiFi" or "Public Internet" is like an open house sign on the front lawn. An unencrypted AP that isn't so labeled is far more likely indicative of somebody who doesn't know how to secure their connection more than an actual open invitation for anybody else to utilize it.

Comment Re:1988 (Score 3, Insightful) 97

by GodfatherofSoul on Thursday February 25, 2010 @03:53PM (#31276608) Attached to: Youtube Pulls Original "Rickroll" Video

Regardless of what everyone else says about that song, I've always liked it. Not sure how it became synonymous with crappy pop (and there's PLENTY of that to go around). Now, the comparison to Luther Vandross by the NYT? That is downright criminal!

Comment i miss the good old Atari 2600 also (Score 1) 480

by Nyder on Monday February 22, 2010 @09:43PM (#31239468) Attached to: Why Are There No Popular <em>Ultima Online</em>-Like MMOs?

I used to have fun back in those days.

but now? games look like shit and I have no idea how I played with the crappy controls.

Tell your friend to quit crying like a little girl and move on with tech, before it moves too far past you.

And quit telling me to get off your lawn, I'm standing in your driveway!

Nanocar Wins Top Science Award 175

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 22, 2008 @04:31PM from the more-than-meets-the-eye dept.

Lucas123 writes "A researcher who built a car slightly larger than a strand of DNA won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for experimental nanotechnology. James Tour, a professor of chemistry at Rice Univ. built a car only 4 nanometers in width in order to demonstrate that nanovehicles could be controlled enough to deliver payloads to build larger objects, such as memory chips and, someday, even buildings, like a self-assembling machine. Tour and a team of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers constructed a car with chassis, working suspension, wheels and a motor. 'You shine light on it and the motor spins in one direction and pushes the car like a paddle wheel on the surface,' Tour said. The team also built a truck that can carry a payload."

Security Flaws In Aussie Net Filter Exposed 182

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 22, 2008 @02:19PM from the let-your-government-do-your-thinking-for-you dept.

Faldo writes "There's a three-part interview with a computer security expert on BanThisURL that goes into the flaws in the Aussie net filtering scheme. In addition to SSH tunnels and proxies, more worrying problems like trojaning the boxes to set up man in the middle attacks (which the interviewee has done in his lab), cross site scripting and the Australian blacklist leaking are all discussed. Worrying and relevant, especially since Thailand's blacklist has just been leaked."

VirtualBox 2.1 Supports 64-Bit VM In 32-Bit Host 374

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday December 22, 2008 @12:15PM from the big-box-inside-a-little-box dept.

Stephen Birch writes "Following closely behind the mid-November 2.06 release of VirtualBox, Sun Microsystems has released version 2.1. This has a number of new features, but one of the most interesting is the ability to run a 64-bit VM inside a 32-bit host. Another useful feature is integrated host-based networking; no more fiddling around with network bridges. Sun is really giving VMWare a run for their money."

Australia To Block BitTorrent 674

Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday December 22, 2008 @10:56AM from the who-saw-that-coming dept.

Kevin 7Kbps writes "Censorship Minister Stephen Conroy announced today that the Australian Internet Filters will be extended to block peer-to-peer traffic, saying, 'Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial.' This dashes hopes that Conroy's Labor party had realised filtering could be politically costly at the next election and were about to back down. The filters were supposed to begin live trials on Christmas Eve, but two ISPs who volunteered have still not been contacted by Conroy's office, who advised, 'The department is still evaluating applications that were put forward for participation in that pilot.' Three days hardly seems enough time to reconfigure a national network."

EEStor Issued a Patent For Its Supercapacitor 603

Posted by kdawson on Monday December 22, 2008 @06:25AM from the if-it-sounds-too-good-to-be-true dept.

An anonymous reader sends us to GM-volt.com, an electric vehicle enthusiast blog, for the news that last week EEStor was granted a US patent for their electric-energy storage unit, of which no one outside the company (no one who is talking, anyway) has seen so much as a working prototype. We've discussed the company on a number of occasions. The patent (PDF) is a highly information-rich document that offers remarkable insight into the device. EEStor notes "the present invention provides a unique lightweight electric-energy storage unit that has the capability to store ultrahigh amounts of energy." "The core ingredient is an aluminum coated barium titanate powder immersed in a polyethylene terephthalate plastic matrix. The EESU is composed of 31,353 of these components arranged in parallel. It is said to have a total capacitance of 30.693 F and can hold 52.220 kWh of energy. The device is said to have a weight of 281.56 pound including the box and all hardware. Unlike lithium-ion cells, the technology is said not to degrade with cycling and thus has a functionally unlimited lifetime. It is mentioned the device cannot explode when being charge or impacted and is thus safe for vehicles."

The Slow Bruteforce Botnet(s) May Be Learning 327

Posted by kdawson on Sunday December 21, 2008 @11:30PM from the knock-who's-there-knock dept.

badger.foo writes "We've seen stories about the slow bruteforcers — we've discussed it here — and based on the data, my colleague Egil Möller was the first to suggest that since we know the attempts are coordinated, it is not too far-fetched to assume that the controlling system measures the rates of success for each of the chosen targets and allocates resources accordingly. (The probes of my systems have slowed in the last month.) If Egil's assumption is right, we are seeing the bad guys adapting. And they're avoiding OpenBSD machines." For fans of raw data, here are all the log entries (3MB) that badger.foo has collected since noticing the slow bruteforce attacks.

Submission + - New Spin on "Big Brother" database for UK

Submitted by POPE Mad Mitch on Sunday January 14, 2007 @03:41AM

POPE Mad Mitch writes: The BBC is reporting that in a move that both the opposition party and the Information Commission have condemned as another step towards a "Big Brother" society, Tony Blair is on monday going to unveil planas to build a single database to pull together and share every piece of personal data from all government departments, the claimed justification for which is to improve public services. Sharing information in this way is currently prohibited by the "over zealous" data protection legislation. An attempt to build a similar database was a key part of the, now severely delayed, ID card scheme.

Journal by Project_1993 on Sunday January 14, 2007 @02:53AM

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