I'm not sure whether you should be so quick to dismiss the proposal. Rampant copyright lawsuits hurt everyone, not just those who download.

Don't bother. It's practically an article of faith around here that Windows is badly-made, that Microsoft is a malicious, profiteering drag on innovation, and that Windows OS security is responsible for the spread of malware. This view might have been partially accurate 15 years ago, but in 2011, the worm has turned. Companies are made up of people, and people change and mature. Microsoft is trying to be a good corporate citizen these days, and frankly, I'd be far more worried about Apple, both from a technical-security perspective and from a market lock-in perspective.

First of all, kudos to Google for finally going with MSI. It's like providing an RPM and makes everyone's life easier.

Now, that said, the situation with respect to delayed updates is fundamentally different because Chrome hasn't provide security updates for older versions. You're essentially running snapshots all the time. Any IT department would have be bonkers to follow that model.

In my experience, biologists write the best software; they love Python. The physicist-written software I've seen is full of single-letter variable names, complex functions, and tightly-coupled special-purpose code, almost as if written by someone more comfortable with mathematical notation. :-)

The word "dweeb" is telling. It confirms my theory that the GOP mindset is just aged and distilled schoolyard bullying.

The GOP is a monstrosity. As Brad Delong says, they "lie about everything all the time." More than that, though, every single Republican initiative exacerbates inequality, smashes our dignity, and adds to the sum of human misery. There are no exceptions. There are no moderates left in the Republican party. What remains is an organization dedicated to aristocracy, superstition, and the snuffing out of curiosity. This party is a scourge, and to see its members elected against and against forces one to doubt the fundamental goodness of human nature.

If you can design an antibody to selectively attach to cancer cells, can't you then use the body's normal immune mechanisms to destroy the cancer?

There's an embarrassing set of experiments that simply won't go away that imply physics isn't as local as relativity would suggest.

Superdeterminism seems to be the most parsimonous way out of Bell's theorem. It's a depressing result, in a way, but it's the one that requires the least "spooky action at a distance" in the universe. Modern physics just dashes all our dreams.

That's why space colonization is important. If we can't hold it together here on earth, having settlers elsewhere will ensure that humanity continues to exist somewhere, and that the cultural contributions of everyone who's lived won't be forgotten.

The article presupposes that we'll be limited to our present thin-walled spacecraft propelled by chemical rockets. There are other options: we don't even need new technology per se. Something like Project Orion would permit the construction of a craft heavy enough to have effective shielding.

I'm reminded of this famous quip from Napoleon:

"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense."

The quality of the articles really has been in the toilet lately, and Slashdot's editorializing is more sensational than ever. Just look at another one of today's headlines: "Two Huge Holes In the Sun Spotted".

This nonsense is ridiculous, immature, and intellectually insulting. It's getting to the point where I only check the site out of habit, and because it has a decent rank on my awesomebar. This can't last.

Canvas.globalCompositeOperation works now!

This situation is a textbook example of a tragedy of the commons. Each PC manufacturer stands to gain from including bloatware. Consumers generally don't decide between different PC makers based on the amount of bloatware installed (because they all have it), so the cost is practically nothing, while the direct, short-term financial benefit is substantial.

However, consumers *do* consider subjective frustration when choosing a computing platform, and bloatware increases the frustration consumers feel toward the PC platform as a whole, reducing its market share. In short, bloatware is like pollution: nobody pays to dump sewage in the river, but everyone gets sick.

There are two common solutions to the commons problem: regulation, which isn't really feasible in a private market like that for PCs, or property rights that give actors an incentive to maintain the commons. The latter tactic explains why walled gardens have grown so explosively: their "owners" (Apple, Google, and to some extent, mobile carriers) have a strong incentive to not pollute the market.

Are you daft? Two normal distributions can have different means, yet overlap significantly in the tails. The overlap does not eliminate the difference.

Zener and tunnel diodes depend on silicon doping for their operation. Semiconductors do not appear in biological systems. The diodes themselves may be macroscopic, but the junctions inside are on the Angstrom scale.