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Comment Re:419 Scams are named for their law they break (Score 1) 178

by dr. chuck bunsen (#30633782) Attached to: Scambaiting Gets Comical; Internet Scammers All Dressed Up
You are wrong, a smoker costs the insurance companies less over their lifetime than someone rather healthy that lives into old age. A healthy person that lives longer has an accumulative effect as they have more and more health visits over time, and the costs do trump that of a smoker who has to be treated at an earlier age and then eventually dies early.

Comment Re:A few great Amiga ideas I'm still waiting for (Score 1) 383

by Blakey Rat (#30633770) Attached to: The Amiga, Circa 2010 — Dead and Loving It

1. drive aliases. Basically the file system in Windows sucks. There are a ton of cool file systems in unix land but unless you want to really break tons of stuff AFAIK you are stuck with NTFS on Windows, no journaling FS in 7 like MS promised.

WTF? NTFS has had journaling since it was introduced. (What, mid-90s?)

Maybe you're confusing NTFS with Fat32, except everything from Windows 2000 on has defaulted to NTFS on installed. I believe Win2k and XP can run from a Fat32 disk, but they don't like doing it... Vista and Windows 7 require NTFS to run.

2. Real multitasking. The amount of things that make Windows unresponsive is mind boggling. Pop in a CD/DVD, try and print, explore the network, etc. Okay if you must, make ONE thing unresponsive, don't kill my whole OS trying to find all the printers on the network. I have 4 CPU's and 4GB of RAM etc and it's SLOW!!! WTF!

When's the last time you used Windows? That complaint applied to Windows 95, 98 and ME. But it hasn't been true in a looong time.

Comment Re:Power Corrupts... (Score 1) 460

by ceoyoyo (#30633692) Attached to: Do IT Pros Abuse Their Power?

What? Are you suggesting that my bank's website should verify whether I'm connecting over wifi vs. a wired connection, or a hub vs. a switch, etc. THEN decide whether to use SSL or not? Or perhaps I should have to remember to click a button when I'm on a potentially eavesdroppable connection?

SSL takes the right approach - if the information should be secure then encrypt it, regardless of whether it might possibly be somewhat secure by other means.

As far as the certificate infrastructure is set up, I'd go with an SSH-type system where everyone generates their own keys and the first time you connect you carefully confirm you connected to what you wanted to, but the central signing authority model does have some advantages, as well as disadvantages.
Microsoft

Submission + - WARNING: driver updates causing Vista deactivation (apcmag.com)

Submitted by
KrispySausage
KrispySausage writes: "After weeks of gruelling troubleshooting, I've finally had it confirmed by Microsoft Australia and USA — something as small as swapping the video card or updating a device driver can trigger a total Vista deactivation.

Put simply, your copy of Windows will stop working with very little notice (three days) and your PC will go into "reduced functionality" mode, where you can't do anything but use the web browser for half an hour.

How can this ridiculous situation occur, and what is Microsoft's response... read on."
Biotech

Thin Water Acts Like a Solid 138

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the mash-downs dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "What happens when you compress water in a nano-sized space? According to Georgia Tech physicists, water starts to behave like a solid. "The confined water film behaves like a solid in the vertical direction by forming layers parallel to the confining surface, while maintaining it's liquidity in the horizontal direction where it can flow out," said one of the researchers. "Water is a wonderful lubricant, but it flows too easily for many applications. At the one nanometer scale, water is a viscous fluid and could be a much better lubricant," added another one."
Education

Should Schools Block Sites Like Wikipedia? 545

Posted by Cliff from the concerned-about-its-accuracy dept.
Londovir asks: "Recently, our school board made the decision to block Wikipedia from our school district's WAN system. This was a complete block — there aren't even provisions in place for teachers or administrators to input a password to bypass the restriction. The reason given was that Wikipedia (being user created and edited) did not represent a credible or reliable source of information for schools. Should we block sites such as Wikipedia because students may be exposed to misinformation, or should we encourage sites such as Wikipedia as an outlet for students to investigate and determine the validity of the information?"
Robotics

Satellites Mating Via Robotic Arm 91

Posted by Zonk from the that's-one-way-to-do-it dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "The launch of the Orbital Express mission, with its two satellites ASTRO and NextSat, the first one servicing the other, was widely covered a month ago. But what is happening in space now? In 'Robotic satellite servicer rehearsal underway in orbit,' Spaceflight Now reports about the progress done. A week ago, the two satellites were able to link to each other to operate the first transfer of hydrazine fuel from ASTRO's propellant tanks into NextSat. This weekend, ASTRO's ten-foot-long robotic arm is going to be used to move objects to NextSat. But what does it mean for international satellite operators when they need help with their space birds? Will they use a system designed for U.S.'s DARPA? "
Graphics

3-D Virtual Maps For the Blind 50

Posted by kdawson from the see-me-feel-me dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes to let us know about research into producing palpable maps for the blind. Scientific American has the story of Greek researchers who produce 3D "haptic" maps that "use force fields to represent walls and roads so the visually impaired can better understand the layout of buildings and cities." Two separate systems produce haptic output from standard video and from 2D maps. The systems have been tested on a small number of users. Currently the devices that interpret the "force fields" for sight-impaired users are not portable, and so the systems are most appropriate for doing research before, e.g., visiting a new city.
The Internet

The Virtual Teacher 94

Posted by samzenpus from the aibo-ate-my-homework dept.
Roland Piquepaille writes "Researchers from Illinois and Florida are developing a networking system which will create virtual representations of real people to improve our knowledge. They will use artificial intelligence and natural language processing software to enable us to interact with these avatars. The goal of the project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is to give us the possibility to interact with these virtual representations as if they were the actual person, complete with the ability to understand and answer questions. We should see the results at the beginning of 2008 — if the researchers succeed."
Education

Vista Failing "Blackboard" College Courses 207

Posted by Zonk from the stay-awake-in-the-back-there dept.
writertype writes "Although Blackboard is used to communicate between students and professors at virtually all of PC Magazine/Princeton Review's top 20 wired colleges, when run under a Vista environment users can see glitches. Moreover, IT departments told PC Mag that if Blackboard is used with Vista plus IE7, students can't communicate via the software. When asked why, Microsoft ... waffled. Blackboard says they'll have a fix in place by summer. Meanwhile, are there any other common college apps that Vista fails to work with?"
Hardware Hacking

Apple TV Already Being Hacked 260

Posted by kdawson from the let-me-at-it dept.
TunesBoy writes "Only a couple of days after being shipped, the Apple TV is already being modified in a variety of ways. A thread at Something Awful discusses installing VLC, and a dedicated site, AppleTVHacks.net, has appeared and is cataloging hacks including a hard-drive upgrade tutorial. Did Apple intend for the Apple TV to be so easy to upgrade and hack?"
The Internet

Game Theory Computer Model Backs Net Neutrality 315

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the skynet-opinions dept.
Stu writes "'A world without net neutrality is one devoid of intellectual development' said Sir Tim Berners Lee in a presentation to congress last week. Well, now there's a computer model that uses game theory to back that forecast up. Developed at the University of Florida, the model shows that everyone loses if the IPs get their way — even, eventually, the IPs."
Businesses

Can Apple Penetrate the Corporation? 500

Posted by kdawson from the awareness-gap dept.
coondoggie sends us a NetworkWorld story on the prospects for Apple gaining market share in the corporation. A number of factors are helping to catch the eye of those responsible for upgrading desktops and servers, the article claims: "Apple's shift to the Intel architecture; the inclusion of infrastructure and interoperability hooks, such as directory services, in the Mac OS X Server; dual-boot capabilities; clustering and storage technology; third-party virtualization software; and comparison shopping, which is being fostered by migration costs and hardware overhauls associated with Microsoft's Vista." On this last point, one network admin is quoted: "The changes in Vista are significant enough that we think we can absorb the change going to Macs just as easily as going to Vista."
Television

Submission + - TV delays drive viewers to piracy

Submitted by Astat1ne
Astat1ne writes: The Register has a story about the delays Australian TV viewers are experiencing with overseas-produced series and how it is driving many of them to download the shows via BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks. From the story: "According to a survey based on a sample of 119 current or recent free-to-air TV series', Australian viewers are waiting an average of almost 17 months for the first run series' first seen overseas. Over the past two years, average Australian broadcast delays for free-to-air television viewers have more than doubled from 7.9 to 16.7 months." According to the article, the situation is compounded by the fact that Australian viewers are unable to download legal copies of the episodes from the US iTunes website and are turning to unauthorised means to get copies of their favorite shows.

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