Comcast frustrates the hell out of me though. I know they've got a team working this, but if you try and contact customer support it's like talking to a wall. Questions like, "Is IPv6 available in my area?", "When will IPv6 be available in my area?", "Can I get a static IPv6 assignment?", "Can I be put on a list or something to get IPv6 enabled on my connection?" and "Do you know what IPv6 is?" are met with hours on hold while the tech asks the next level tech who also doesn't know. I appreciate that Comcast has a team working through deploying IPv6 but I'm frustrated they seem to have no interest in supporting the people who actually want to use it! (I'm running business cable so this isn't even the home support guys.)

There's a fundamental error in how steve's doing this. It assumes either the attacker knows the key space you're using or searches all smaller key spaces first. Instead, an attacker is more likely to use a word list with a set of permutations. that may mean that Password1! breaks even though it has a nice key space. On the other hand, passssword may not break because it's simply too computation intensive to check adding the entire key space into the middle of the dictionary in every location. You'd have to search every number, letter (upper/lower), and character inbetween every other letter in the word and then do it again with combinations of two characters for every word in your dictionary. (BTW, I can't take credit for this insight. It was presented at defcon a few years ago. As a sidenote, at the presentation, I believe someone indicated some password crackers will try characters inbetween the sylables. To generalize this, you can use a pattern to create your password with a very small keyspace and unless the pattern and keyspace is known to your attacker (either because you leaked it or you chose a common pattern) your password can be safe.

+1. I haven't yet seen an empirical argument (as opposed to an argument from first principles) that biodiversity is necessary. I wouldn't want to throw it away, but in this world everything is a tradeoff, and the value of warm fuzzy feelings diminishes rapidly when lives—or simply ways of life—are on the line. When scientists warn of catastrophic species loss, the wooey green types are invited to imagine Bambi and her friendly woodland friends rather than the lichens and cockroaches with different colored dots on them that are what's being discussed. We can lose as many species as it takes to keep this species alive; an Earth without humans is absolutely meaningless and absurd. Let's see the proof, rather than conjecture and assumption founded on essentially religious notions of the "earth mother," that it actually matters before we decide to halt human progress in its tracks.

If a system has a password maximum length, it probably means it's neither hashing nor salting your password since the main reason to minimize length would be to fit it into a database field. Food for thought.

Most programmers doing these kinds of calculations are using floating point numbers, which already have interesting rounding error failure modes that most programmers don't understand. This is going to exacerbate the problem.

Decreasing hardware intelligence and counting on programmers to make up the difference hasn't been a winning proposition in a long time.

They work equally well, but only one of them extends your life and reduces your stress level.

I'm sure your anger and ranting has been a tremendous political boon to wherever it is you live. It seems to be working just as well over here.

Make sure to read "Travels in Siberia" first. If the thought of most of your travel expenses going towards bribes bothers you, reconsider it.

The Americans have thrown in the towel on theirs because they'd rather spend money on wars in the middle east and handouts to mismanaged corporations.

You must have missed the "Let's not start any mudslinging" portion of the parent post.

I can think of another use:
Temporary in-room networking where security or bandwidth conjestion are a concern. I could envision a server room issue where you needed to understand what was happening at multiple points in your network that aren't normally tapped. You use something like a vampire tap and a raspberry pi to get copy off the data, analyze, and send back to something like splunk. However, rather than running temporary wires all over, instead send them by laser to the central monitor. Then when you're done, you can easily back out your taps.

Juries have zero power and one responsibility: to determine based on the facts and testimony they've seen, whether or not the law has been broken. They may make a sentencing recommendation, which the judge is then free to ignore. They are not wielding some kind of absolute power. Additionally, death penalty cases are a rounding error compared to the bulk of cases.

That is absolutely the most harebrained scheme I've ever seen floated on Slashdot, possibly the entire internet, and I've been here a while. Think harder. How exactly are juries supposed to remain impartial if they're on the hook for their decisions? Their purpose is not to invent the law or implement it. It is simply to decide, fairly, whether some party has violated the law. Punishing them for the outcomes of their decisions amounts to punishing 12 randomly selected people for making the mistake of having a public address, or the mistake of living in the wrong country.

The answer's in the article (actually in the Slashdot summary). Take itunes, turn it into a platform for 'apps'. The iphone is a physical platform. itunes is a software platform. There can be music, pictures, video, etc, etc, etc apps. The itunes platform can manage the sync'ing of different apps with other platforms and the cloud.

It's a model everyone understands. It's strait forward. It's consistent with their other products. Plus it provides a new market. Apple could have an app store for apps that run on it's itunes windows platform.

As your average white guy, I tend to bristle when I feel the race card is being played, and you're right, the media is definitely intentionally making things worse, because it's better for ratings. But on the other hand, I have seen a lot of insane "I'm not a racist, but <insert racist thing>" going on lately, and not just racism, but sexism and all kinds of other bigotry. Even if there isn't as much outright racism in the country now, there is still a lot of unnecessary, unhelpful fear based on racial stereotyping, and that fear is great for escalating situations that really shouldn't be that serious.

It sounds very similar to the phenomenon Malcolm Gladwell discusses in Blink where both sides were primed to expect trouble, so trouble happened. In the book he describes a situation in which some cops gunned down an unarmed black kid because they thought he was reaching for his own gun, and not his wallet. In that situation, there was no reason to assume this kid was dangerous, it was just that the kid was black and it was late at night in a bad part of town.

Whoever is determined to be at fault for this death, it's clearly working as a great proxy for the overall distrust and discomfort between black and white America that most of us are aware of but don't like to talk about and like to pretend went away in the 80's. Depending on how it all shakes out, it could improve the situation, or it could just widen the divide.

...but maybe it's time to get off the fucking cloud.