If you're too lazy to actually come up with unique passwords for each site and you happen to have OpenSSL installed (who doesn't?), you can automatically figure out all your passwords only having to remember one.

Come up with a base password, for the sake of argument let's say ABCDEF. For each site, append the name of the site to your base password. E.g., for Slashdot, it's ABCDEFslashdot. "echo ABCDEFslashdot | openssl sha1" yields your password of 040b6c2fb4d5858ad21810deb8e9ee2eb804e2a7. From that password it is intractable to determine what your base password was and hence what your other passwords are.

Some sites require special characters or, even worse, have maximum password lengths (which would suggest they're storing your password in plaintext, yikes). Fuck those sites.

Yes, but that's no surprise. If they were eavesdropping then necessarily they have to have physical access to the fibre. They could just cut it.

I can't think of any that don't. I cut my teeth on PDP-11 assembly, which is 40 years old and has a BLE instruction. I'll admit I've only coded in half a dozen architectures or so, but I've yet to come across one that doesn't do branch on less-than-or-equal.

That was the worst video demo I've seen in recent memory. None of the purported applications were interesting at all.

Quick, you want to pause the music you're playing. Which would be easier? (1) Hitting a pause button on your laptop; (2) Hitting a pause button on your headphones; (3) Putting an accelerometer in your headphones; (4) Finding the exact tiny square on your desk such that if you put your headphones down there and maybe fiddle with it for a couple seconds so it's in the proper orientation to be picked up by a camera? I don't see much future in option #4.

The scanning was pretty bad, too. Even manually taking a picture of a photo or piece of paper, where I'm directly overhead and fiddling with the lighting, it's hard to get a good result. When that started I thought "wow that picture is going to look like absolute shit" and it turned out even worse than I thought. Even at 480p you could the picture was unusable for anything, virtually unrecognizable even.

The worst was the "tapping", though. It actually requires you to break your own finger bones just to register a "tap"?

This is awesome! Not to detract from it, but why is there so much more love for Theora than for Dirac?

Might I ask what about Itanium makes it bloated, brute-force or an abomination? Its circuitry is not hand-designed like the Alpha's was, but its design is really beautiful, a testament to the later Berkeley RISC philosophy. It's everything SPARC should have been, really.

Were many Itanium users running Windows? My impression was that most Itanium users were running some sort of *nix. I don't think it's a huge deal for Itanium.

I also don't see Itanium going anywhere any time soon. As much as people like to talk about its demise, its numbers do grow every year. Or at least they were growing up until a couple years ago; I assume they're still growing. They're not growing very quickly, but they're still going.

It's a shame. It's a remarkably beautifully designed architecture, especially when it was first designed (1991-ish?). It's a shame no one can build a good chip for it or write a decent compiler for it :P

We're not supposed to make any decision on whether the soldiers acted appropriately or not. Or at least I hope we're not supposed to. We're really not qualified to do that.

What we're supposed to do is compare the video to the official statements from military brass 3 years ago and realize how badly they were lying through their teeth. Nothing the military said about the incident three years ago meshes even remotely to what actually happened. They did their best to cover-up. They ignored access to information requests, possibly illegally.

That's what this video is about. It isn't about the front-line soldiers who may or may not have made an honest mistake. It's about the entire structure of the military that exists for no purpose other than to lie and spread propaganda to its employers (the American people).

The experience doesn't need to actually exist. No experience needs to exist: for all you know, the universe did not exist one second ago. All you need is for a memory to be formed and it's absolutely indistinguishable from a real experience. If you look at what memories are formed when the brain regains consciousness, you'll have your answer.

"Uses" or "has mmap()ed into its address space"? There's a galaxy of difference between the two.

I know NASA used Reed-Solomon codes for the old Voyager probes. Maybe they're using something more efficient these days, but I'd have to imagine they'd be using error-correcting codes of some sort in whatever custom protocol they've devised. It would be ludicrous to use simple error-detection (necessitating a retransmit) at that latency.

As for the software itself, the Mars rovers just run VxWorks, right? Once you've got the code uploaded I'd think it'd be as simple* as restarting the process.

* Yes, I'm sitting in my pyjamas eating a bagel right now and describing what NASA does as "simple". Suck it!

That's IU. IO looks like an E with umlauts.

We speak English, not Latin. The Latin word "virus" has no plural. The English word "virus" does have a plural form, which is "viruses".

That's not entirely true, depending on what you mean by "independent". So long as you are a member of SOCAN and have music tracked by SoundScan, you're eligible for the levies, regardless of whether you're signed onto a major label. This flow chart (warning: PDF) describes the pay-out structure.

The media have been kind of lacking here, though. I have no idea how this pay-out scheme works in practice :(. Go go go investigative journalism!

No I think they got this going the right away around. The Internet will finally reach its full potential once everyone can filter out everything except .xxx domains.