I recommend watching this video of Sketchpad narrated by Alan Kay. You have to remember this is from 1963. It demonstrated copy and paste, rotation and scaling, a pointer based graphical interface, and more. Pretty damn impressive.

Well the new synapse drivers have Facebook and Twitter integration. I'm not kidding - open the mouse configuration page and down the bottom right there's a row of social media icons.

Hell not just that. SMS is one small step of internet banking. You still need the banks userID and password to log into online banking before you even make use of the SMS transaction confirmations. There's also a lot of requirements for number porting as it is too - accountID and details with the old provider and there's SMS notices sent when the porting is attempted too.

So this woman was socially engineered out of the following - Her real name, address and DOB (fair enough, this is publically available), her old mobile providers details and accountID (someone go through her bin?), her banks clientID and password (she fall for a fake bank email?), she didn't notice the SMS announcements that she'd be ported to a new provider next month (wtf?) and finally she didn't notice a lack of calls coming in.

At some point you have to say fuck it, there's no way to protect people like this. Even if it was made more difficult to port numbers she's clearly stupid enough to give away any and all information asked of her.

Let me guess. Secure Computing and iTnews.com.au work closely with Telstra and Optus right?

Here in Australia, thanks to consumer protection legislation changing mobile providers is a breeze. You ring up the provider you wish to change to and you ask to be ported. They send you an SMS and ask your personal details and old providers account number and then switch you over. It's both secure and easy (they need your phone number, old provider details and personal details to switch you over). You're now with another provider. You don't need to cancel with your old provider, they do that for you. Your number stays the same. The two biggest Telcos (Telstra and Optus) hate it as there's no lock in. They have to compete on price and service.

So Telstra and Optus lobby hard to ban number porting. They make up bullshit such as "OMG allowing people to switch phone providers is dangerous!!!!". They get their friends in the media to chant the same thing. "Ban number porting!!!"

The reality is that the banks don't use SMS confirmations for anything more than a 3rd layer of security. They don't ask you to transmit anything over the SMS service, it's simply used by them to send you message that a transaction is taking place along with a key that you have to type into online banking (after logging in securly) to allow that transaction to proceed. Essentially it's traditional "login over https" style banking with an extra layer of SMS notifications when you do transactions. It doesn't need the SMS security itself to be bomb-proof as that's just the last step.

So all this talk of restricting number porting is ridiculous. Good on the Communications Alliance (who are mostly made up of smaller Telcos that like number porting) for not bowing to the pressure and bullshit spouted by here by iTnews.com.au. It really isn't an issue, in fact i think other countries should adopt similar consumer protection laws where switching providers whilst retaining the old mobile number is a breeze.

There's a minimum threshold for acceleration to take effect. Look in your xord.conf file to see this threshold. Small movements essentially have no acceleration. Turn acceleration up full and it'll be the same and acceleration at 0. This is due to the minimum threshold. What you will notice with acceleration turned up to maximum is a massive amount of movement if you move the mouse quickly. Even if you only move it quickly over a short distance.
 

No, the OS most certainly has control over it. You just need to add Option "Sensitivity" "float" to the xorg.conf file. NOTE HOW THIS IS DIFFERENT TO THE ACCELERATION OPTION! What KDE4 doesn't have is a way to change this commonly used property graphically.

Not all games use RAW INPUT. In fact it's quite disconcerting for a game to have a different cursor movement to the OS, especially for RTS games.

Acceleration increases the amount of cursor movement per unit of real world mouse distance travelled based on the velocity of the mouse. Move your mouse a small distance really quickly and your cursor flies across the screen.

Sensitivity is purely the amount of cursor movement per distance travelled. It's quite common to have acceleration at 0 and sensitivity reasonably high for gaming. It allows a clear correspondence between the location of the mouse on the mouse mat and the position of the cursor on the screen.

Read the fucking parent.

Yes you can set acceleration but ACCELERATION IS NOT SENSITIVITY! Not even remotely the same thing. Acceleration increases the speed the mouse moves as you move the mouse. I like my acceleration at 0. Sensitivity is the speed the mouse moves given the amount of real world mouse movement.

If you want a specific example of what he was gettting at how about this;

KDE 4 has no way to set mouse sensitivity graphically.

You can set acceleration, threshold (amount of movement before mouse responds), double click speed and all that graphically. But you can't set mouse sensitivity graphically. The only way to set sensitivity right now, in the year 2012 is to edit xorg.conf manually.

the iPhone 5’s three known display suppliers - LG Display, Japan Display and Sharp Corp.

Yes, Raptor Codes are the specific ones used by NASA on their newest deep space missions link. Raptor codes are a type of fountain code.

Fountain codes are worth looking at if you haven't been keeping up with the latest and greatest Comp Sci developments in the last 15 years. With fountain codes you can break up a chunk of data into any number of unique packets. Any subset of those packets that add up to the size of the original packet can be used to reform the original file.

So say i had a 1MB file to send to Mars. I run a fountain encoder on that and i tell the encoder to make me 10,000,000 packets 1KB in size out of that 1MB file. So the fountain coder gives me 10GB of generated packets from that 1MB file. Now i spam those 10,000,000 packets across a really noisy connection. As soon as the receiver successfully receives any 1,001 of those packets (totalling up to just over 1MB worth of received packets) it can rebuild that file. I don't need to wait for retransmission requests or anything and it doesn't matter what packets make it or not. Just as long as the receiver can eventually successfully receive slightly over X bytes of data it can rebuild an X byte file.

Traditional error correction codes are great for correcting bit errors in a message that mostly gets there. Fountain codes on the other hand are great in situations where entire chunks of the desired message can be lost, they can avoid the retransmission of these lost packets entirely. The only issue is that they require redundancy in transmission in the first place.

It seems here they are grouping 50 packets of data together into 1 lot and making 50+R coded packets out of it where R is some number that's variable depending on how much loss they see. So they might send 60 coded packets. If any 50 of the 60 coded packets make it there they should have enough to rebuild the original 50 packets using fountain codes.

You have that completely backwards. The first Itaniums WERE backwards compatible with IA-32 (x86) at the hardware level. It was later Itaniums that ditched backwards compatibility in favour of the software based IA-32 Execution Layer.

Local Aussie hosting is easily double the cost though. I have servers with Crucial Paradigm Australia and Crucial Paradigm USA. The websites appear just as fast to the average user but the USA hosting is 1/3rd the price.

Having the big companies exchanging patents just means the big players divide up the monopoly between them whilst suing the start ups out of existence.

I hate how shitty tools are often labelled as 'for beginners'.

Get yourself a 100W (or greater) Goot (or equivalent) soldering iron if you're just starting out. You'll have enough things to worry about already, don't let a shitty tool cause you even more grief.

This really is what you want exactly. A lot of development frameworks have a code->redeploy->view cycle for every change. Play on the other hand dynamically compiles everything when in development mode so it's just code->refresh. It also lays everything out in nice MVC pattern so you're really just filling in the blanks as you code.