Linux malware is hard to write, although the SCTP vulnerability last year would have allowed a worm that ran in kernelspace and didn't depend on any installed software. Ubuntu malware, or Android malware, however, are quite easy. That 0.1% figure for Android malware in comparison to Windows malware is probably just about true if you're counting all malware written for both platforms since they were introduced, irrespective of whether it works on recent versions, but it's nowhere near close if you're counting new malware. Take a look at this list and tell me that a widely deployed Linux distribution is hard to write malware for. For example, the CURL CVE-2013-2174 allows a remote attacker with a crafted URL to run arbitrary code, and CVE-2013-1697 in Mozilla allows HTML emails displayed with Thunderbird or web pages displayed with FireFox to execute JavaScript with a privilege level that allows it to make calls to native libraries, effectively meaning arbitrary code execution with ambient privilege. CVE-2013-1052 would allow either of these attacks to upgrade privilege and then install a rootkit.

That's not how government procurement is supposed to work! A company that has failed to deliver on multiple contracts in the past should be given priority, because it has significant experience in government contracting work!

No it isn't. It's supposed to strike a balance between benefit to society because creative works exist and balance to society because creative works are available to all. It grants individuals a temporary exclusive distribution license because that was seen as a good way of promoting the first objective, which is a prerequisite of the second (if no one is creating new works then that's a problem), but the financial success of individuals is a means that copyright uses, not a goal of copyright.

This makes sense to me. According to my publisher, the vast majority of the profit from any new book is made in the first three years. There are a few outliers, but these are the ones where both the publisher and author made so much money in the first three years that they'd still have a huge incentive to bring it to market even if they lost copyright after three years. If you're still making more than a token sum on any book (or piece of music or film) after 7-10 years, it was truly exceptional and you've already raked in a huge pile of cash.

There are some problems with this approach though, such as how do you deal with incremental changes? There are some FreeBSD source files that I've modified that still have original Berkeley copyrights going back to the early '80s. Would I need to pay several billion to copyright my changes, or would my changes be copyrighted separately and I'd only pay $1 (and would I pay $1 for FreeBSD, or $1 for each one of the several hundred source files I've modified)? If it's the latter, then it becomes very difficult for some third party to work out which parts of a file have lapsed copyright and which still have valid copyright.

The navy likes them because space is at a premium on a large warship, but with a nuclear power plant energy is not nearly as scarce. If your ammunition is 20% propellant, then a rail gun will let you carry 25% more ammunition for the same space, and that lets you engage in combat for longer between resupply runs.

It's very helpful that Slashdot has put little coloured Facebook / Twitter / G+ icons next to spammers. It makes it much easier to ignore their posts...

Indeed, but the ruling that it's a currency is odd. The fact that it can be exchanged for 'real cash' means that it's a commodity, and so well within the SEC's mandate. A commodities exchange where you can only trade commodities for other commodities, but have to make the exchanges to currency elsewhere is still an exchange that can be regulated by the SEC.

Flash has a number of problems. It's byte addressable, but only block erasable, which means that filesystems that deal with it directly are complex and for the rest you need complex logic in hardware to make it appear to be a block device and it then has performance characteristics that are hard to predict and optimise around. Each generation reduces the per-cell reliability at the expense of capacity, complicating wear levelling and requiring more complex controllers.

Flash sucks as a technology for persistent storage. The only reason people tolerate it is that spinning magnetic platters suck even more.

A Peltier device cools one end and heats the other. You need to dissipate the heat on the other end. If you don't, then the power required to maintain the temperature gradient increases and eventually the heat leaks back. Their main advantage is that they provide a good way of shifting the heat from the small CPU to a big heatsink. They don't magically make heat go away, they just move it.

How are you measuring price? Cost per GB? Then they're more expensive. Cost per IOPS? Then they're a lot cheaper. Cost per Watt during active use? Still a lot cheaper. Cost for the amount of storage that you need? Then they may or may not be more expensive: a 40GB SSD costs about the same as a 40GB hard disk, but a 1TB SSD costs a lot more than a 1TB hard disk. If you only need 16GB then the SSD option can be a lot cheaper.

I wouldn't replace the hard disks in my NAS with SSDs, but there's no way I'd go back to using hard disks in my laptop or in the rack-mounted machines I use for big jobs - the productivity hit would be too great, and my time is worth a lot more than the cost of the SSD.

If there's sufficient duplication that you don't need to think very much about the report, then you may be even faster with either a template system or an adaptive input device. Editors that autocomplete sentences from a corpus of existing documents can reduce sentences to a dozen keystrokes, which is even faster than most people can speak.

Most people can't dictate at anything like their normal talking speed, however.

Not yet, although I've only got a small number of machines with SSDs as yet. Over the last 15 years, however, I have had a lot of hard drives fail, some with no warning at all.

There's a long way between stone age and microprocessor. I couldn't build a transistor, but I do know how to make charcoal, which can make a fire hot enough for smelting, so I could make crude metal tools. There's not much by the way of dark ages technology that is difficult to make. I could also build steam engines, although not very efficient ones given the tolerances of the materials I'd likely have to work with. More importantly, I could build a plow that could be pulled by an animal and know about things like crop rotation and irrigation. It's not a lifestyle that I'd choose, but it's a lot better than living in a cave. If sheep are available, I could even card, spin, and weave wool to make fabric. These things are all fairly basic knowledge that I'd expect a fairly significant fraction of the population to retain.

If you have a managed switch, sure. If you have a cheap OTS switch, then you won't even get a notification that one of the nodes is doing an ARP flooding attack on the switch...