Comment Is it time to start shorting Bitcoins yet? (Score 1) 157
Or am I way off base? Isn't the eventual path of quantum computing to almost simultaneously discover all remaining Bitcoins and render digital encryption useless?
Check out the new SourceForge HTML5 internet speed test! No Flash necessary and runs on all devices.
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Comment Re:Units, people! (Score 1) 419
The point - you missed it! One should not be willy-nilly about scientific units when discussing science. This is how Mars probes get lost.
Comment Units, people! (Score 1) 419
From TFA: "The latest paper describes their latest thruster and gives the test results in details, showing that with a couple of kilowatts of power they can produce 720 mN (about 72 grams) of thrust."
I'm sorry, how did we go from an expression of force to mass?
Comment Re:Cue the hippies (Score 4, Informative) 226
Yes, everyone's so worried about the disposal of the spent nuclear fuel rods, while coal ash is scattered to the wind with reckless abandon: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
Comment So Jenny McCarthy was right? (Score 1) 163
So she really could cure Autism with diet?
Comment Re:The Twilight Zone (Score 1) 224
You're probably right. . . but I'll take it.
Go Comcast!
Comment Re:Educators aren't missing the punchline... (Score 1) 381
Interesting that this hits
-CR
Comment Big deal. . . (Score 2) 54
. . . we did this in high school Biology with hotdog casing.
Comment Re:Oil companies will get the patent and shut it d (Score 2) 937
This is true. Back in the '50s the oil companies buried the patent for the carburetor that got 100 mpg. In fact, they used a car equipped with just such a carburetor to get all those people with rifles off that grassy knoll.
Submission + - Curious NASA Pre-Announcement (nasa.gov) 2
CrtxReavr writes: 'NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.'
Comment Re:Slightly heavier then... (Score 1) 174
Fucked-up metric indeed. . . it weighs kilograms? Idiots.
-CR
Comment It's gotta be multi-platform (Score 1) 1007
I use a text file that I keep on a USB stick, copy lots of places and encrypt/de-crypt with OpenSSL. It's native to so many systems, and can pretty easily be installed on anything that it isn't.
(First switch to borne shell or something else that doesn't keep a command history, dummy!)
openssl des -k yeahUwish < passwords.txt > passwords.txt.des
openssl des -d -k yeahUwish < passwords.txt.des
You can even kick the security up a notch.:
openssl des -k `md5 -s yeahUwish` < passwords.txt > passwords.txt.des
openssl des -d -k `md5 -s yeahUwish` < passwords.txt.des
Let the reactionary flaming begin!
-CR
Captain Bligh's Logbooks To Yield Climate Bounty 232
Pickens writes "The BBC reports that researchers are digitizing the captains' logs from the voyages of Charles Darwin on HMS Beagle, Captain Cook from HMS Discovery, Captain Bligh from The Bounty, and 300 other 18th and 19th century ships' logbooks to provide historical climate records for modern-day climate researchers who will use the meteorological data to build up a picture of weather patterns in the world at the beginning of the industrial era. The researchers are cross-referencing the data with historical records for crop failures, droughts and storms and will compare it with data for the modern era in order to predict similar events in the future. 'The observations from the logbooks on wind force and weather are astonishingly good and often better than modern logbooks,' says Climatologist Dr. Dennis Wheeler from the University of Sunderland. 'Of course the sailors had to be conscientious. The thought that you could hit a reef was a great incentive to get your observations absolutely right!' The logbooks will be online next year at the UK's National Archives."
Null-Prefix SSL Certificate For PayPal Released 351
An anonymous reader writes "Nine weeks after Moxie Marlinspike presented at Defcon 17, null-prefix certificates that exploit the SSL certificate vulnerability are beginning to appear. Yesterday, someone posted a null-prefix certificate for www.paypal.com on the full-disclosure mailing list. In conjunction with sslsniff, this certificate can be used to intercept communication to PayPal from all clients using the Windows Crypto API, for which a patch is still not available. This includes IE, Chrome, and Safari on Windows. What's worse, because of the OCSP attack that Moxie also presented at Defcon, this certificate cannot be revoked." Update: 10/06 23:19 GMT by KD: Now it seems that PayPal has suspended Marlinspike's account.
Eolas To Sue Apple, Google, and 21 Others 252
vinodis and several other readers sent along the news that Eolas is suing 23 companies including Apple and Google for patent infringement. The company won $585M from Microsoft in a drawn-out, 9-year battle that the companies settled in 2007; in the course of it the USPTO upheld the "906" patent several times. Now, Eolas is also in possession of a newly-issued patent that they claim covers the use of any browser plugin with AJAX. Let's see how far this lawsuit gets before the Supreme Court plays its wildcard in the Bilski case, which we have been discussing for a while now.
