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Comment There's one problem (Score 5, Informative) 519

by Siener (#23625123) Attached to: Bye Bye Bananas — the Return of Panama Disease
Unfortunately none of those dozens of varieties have the attributes that make the Cavendish banana by far the most successful and important fruit crop in the world:

1. Long shelf life
2. Very uniform and predictable ripening times

That is why you can get bananas cheaply, even though they might be grown thousands of miles from where they are eventually sold.

Most, if not all the other varieties are only viable crops when they are sold very close to where they were grown.

Comment Re:Uh (Score 5, Informative) 395

by Anonymous Coward (#23620027) Attached to: MediaDefender Explains Itself
Both government facilities and hospitals both rely on BT for a number of things. The government's idea of a database file is many gigabytes in size. Moving those around is MUCH cheaper and easyer with BT. Hospitals that are affiliated with universities usually do some sort of medical research on-site and also send/receive data to the campus. BT is used a lot with sending around things like DNA maps and decoded genomes; that sort of thing.

BitTorrent is a legitimate method of distributing data, no matter what kind of data. It just happens to be a great way to send your entire mp3 collection to 12 friends in very little time and that's why people associate it with piracy and the like.
Biotech

Submission + - Vaccine for Cocaine (discovery.com)

Submitted by phantomfive
phantomfive writes: Two Baylor college of Medicine researchers are working on a vaccine for cocaine. The immune system has trouble recognizing the cocaine molecules because they are so small, so the researches attached inactive cocaine molecules to inactive cholera molecules. This allowed the body to recognize and defend against both entities. In the future, these vaccines may be required for addicts.
The Internet

Submission + - New Jersey Denies Internet from Sex Offenders (nytimes.com) 3

Submitted by
eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: "New Jersey just passed legislation making it illegal for sex offenders to use the internet. NJ congresswoman Linda D. Greenstein said, "When Megan's Law was enacted, few could envision a day when a sex offender hiding behind a fake screen name would be a mouse-click away from new and unwitting victims. Sex offenders cannot be given an opportunity to abuse the anonymity the Internet can provide as a means of opening a door to countless new potential victims." While they still can search for jobs, this is a major expansion over the prior legislation which barred them from social networking sites like facebook or myspace."
The Matrix

Submission + - Can Time Slow Down? 2

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "Does time slow down when you are in a traffic accident or other life threatening crisis like Neo dodging bullets in slow-motion in The Matrix? To find out, researchers developed a perceptual chronometer where numbers flickered on the screen of a watch-like unit. The scientists adjusted the speed at which the numbers flickered until it was too fast for the subjects to see. Then subjects were put in a Suspended Catch Air Device, a controlled free-fall system in which "divers" are dropped backwards off a platform 150 feet up and land safely in a net. "It's the scariest thing I have ever done," said Dr. David Eagleman. "I knew it was perfectly safe, and I also knew that it would be the perfect way to make people feel as though an event took much longer than it actually did." Subjects were asked to read the numbers on the perceptual chronometer as they fell (video). The bottom line: While subjects could read numbers presented at normal speeds during the free-fall, they could not read them at faster-than-normal speeds. "We discovered that people are not like Neo in The Matrix," Eagleman said. "The answer to the paradox is that time estimation and memory are intertwined: the volunteers merely thought the fall took a longer time in retrospect,""
Security

Submission + - Google results lead to massive malware attack (computerworld.com.au)

Submitted by Arashtamere
Arashtamere writes: A large-scale, coordinated campaign to steer users toward malware-spewing Web sites from Google search results is under way, according to security researchers. Users searching Google with any of hundreds of legitimate phrases — from the technical "how to cisco router vpn dial in" to the heart-tugging "how to teach a dog to play fetch" — will see links near the top of the results listings that lead directly to malicious sites hosting a mountain of malware. Security researchers say they have found 27 different domains, each with up to 1,499 malicious pages, meaning some 40,000 pages are spewing out the malware. Dodgy tactics such as "comment spam" and "blog spam" have allowed the criminals to boost their Google rankings, and attackers may be using bots to plug links into any web form that requests a URL. According to the report there is no evidence that the criminals bought Google search keywords, however, nor that they've compromised legitimate sites. Instead, they've simply played Google's ranking system and registered their own sites.
Databases

Submission + - Half a million database servers have no firewall (networkworld.com)

Submitted by BobB
BobB writes: Think your database server is safe? You may want to double-check. According to security researcher David Litchfield, there are nearly half a million database servers exposed on the Internet, without firewall protection. Litchfield took a look at just over 1 million randomly generated IP addresses, checking them to see if he could access them on the IP ports reserved for Microsoft SQL Server or Oracle's database.
Privacy

Submission + - videos on upcoming massacre on youtube, kills 3 (youtube.com)

Submitted by
partypoopa
partypoopa writes: "An 18 year old high school senior in Jokela, Finland (30 miles from the capital Helsinki) posted first a Just testing my gun video on youtube, where he tests a pistol on an apple. A day later he posts a video titled Jokela High School Massacre. And the very next day, he shoots 3 and wounds at least 1 in Jokela High School (Finnish only, sorry).

I bet fascists all over the world will have a field day over monitoring the internet to prevent such random occurrences of violence"
The Internet

Submission + - Wikipedia begets Veropedia

Submitted by
Ponca City, We Love You
Ponca City, We Love You writes: "October saw the launch of Veropedia, a collaborative effort to collect the best of Wikipedia's content, clean it up, vet it, and save it in a quality stable version that cannot be edited. To qualify for inclusion in Veropedia, a Wikipedia article must contain no cleanup tags, no "citation needed" tags, no disambiguation links, no dead external links, and no fair use images after which candidates for inclusion are reviewed by recognized academics and experts. One big difference with Wikipedia is that Veropedia is registered as a for profit corporation and earns money from advertising on the site. Veropedia is supposed to help improve the quality of Wikipedia because contributors must improve an article on Wikipedia, fixing up all the flaws, until a quality version can be imported to Veropedia. To date Veropedia contains about 3,800 articles."
Space

Submission + - Unexpectedly bright comet appears in night sky

Submitted by swordgeek
swordgeek writes: Comet 17P/Holmes, a relatively obscure and dim object has suddenly flared to be literally a million times brighter than it was two days ago, going from below magnitude 14 to 2.8 in less than 24 hours. It is just outside of the constellation Perseus, which puts it high in the sky and ideal for viewing at this time of year. The comet is now readily visible with the naked eye, and remarkable in binoculars or a telescope. This is a completely unexpected once-in-a-lifetime event, so get out your finest optics (even if it's just your eyes) and go comet watching! No one knows how long this will last, so grab the chance while it's there.
Security

Submission + - 50% of AV products detect less than 75% of viruses (qnetlabs.com)

Submitted by
Marnix de Bil
Marnix de Bil writes: "Research by Netherlands-based company Qnetlabs shows that 50% of the tested antivirus products detect only as little as 75% of the viruses offered to them. One of the products tested scored as low as 22% !

A daily Current Threat top 3 is published at www.qnetlabs.com. This ranking aims to show which antivirus products react well to current often-seen threats. The tests show that the first three usually score over 85%, and the first five rank at 80% or better. The rest of the field fails to exceed 75% detection rate, with the latest virus definitions.

On average, the antivirus products outside the first three detect only 50% of these recent viruses — within this group, the big players in the consumer market are found as well."
Networking

Submission + - Selling a domain name

Submitted by mikeraz
mikeraz writes: Today I received Yet Another email asking if I'd like to see a domain name I have registered. I've been getting these requests since 1998 or so. As usual I replied with "No, not interested." Moments later I received another, higher, offer from the same individual. We exchanged emails and left it at "if you're ever interested please contact me."

I'm being offered enough to put a serious dent in my mortgage or a serious boost in retirement savings. So it is tempting.

Have you sold a domain name? How did the process work out for you? What pitfalls should I be aware of? What's the best practice for selling off a domain name.
Software

Submission + - Why are you so dismissive of x86_64? (slamd64.com)

Submitted by Chemisor
Chemisor writes: 64 bit processors have been around for a while now, but on the software side the transition to 64 bit is curiously avoided. Whenever people hear I run a 64 bit OS, their reaction is incredulous; "What, you have more than 2G of RAM?" or "What are you running that you need 64 bit?" as if using software native to the processor were not sufficient justification. Even the 64 bit Linux distributions like Slamd inexplicably put 64 bit libs into /usr/lib64, instead of /usr/lib, where native stuff ought to go. Very few packages are shipped with a 64 bit version, on Linux or Windows, and 64 bit Windows drivers are frequently missing. It is as though everyone is covertly hoping that 64 bit will just go away.

As a programmer, I find this attitude difficult to understand. Of course I want 64 bit; it's the architecture of my processor, for one. The increased register set and the cleaner x86_64 ABI could be adequate justification all by themselves. Then there is the fact that 64 bit is the last upgrade we'll ever need. While 2^32 is still within human limits, being smaller than the world population, 2^64 of anything is nearly impossible to imagine. 2037 is far away yet, but not nearly as far away as the death of our Sun, which is much closer than 2^64 seconds. Finally, there is the fact that the newer processors are all 64 bit; Intel Core 2 Duo and Athlon 64 are where the future lies. So why aren't we embracing x86_64 instead of grudgingly and condescendingly allowing it to coexist with our legacy 32 bit applications?

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