Qlither - Slashdot User

Most UK GPs Have Prescribed Placebos 240

Posted by samzenpus on Friday March 22, 2013 @02:56AM from the balance-the-humors dept.

Techmeology writes "In a survey of UK GPs, 97% said they'd recommended placebo treatments to their patients, with some doctors telling patients that the treatment had helped others without telling them that it was a placebo. While some doctors admitted to using a sugar pill or saline injection, some of the placebos offered had side effects such as antibiotic treatments used as placebos for viral infections."

When Antivirus Scammers Call the Wrong Guy 473

Posted by timothy on Thursday May 24, 2012 @05:18PM from the human-engineering-with-phony-humans dept.

ancientribe writes "Phony AV scammers posing as Microsoft dialed the wrong number when they inadvertently phoned a security researcher at home. He lured them into a honeypot to study their actions, and posted the video online here. His main takeaway: they were 'Stone Age' when it came to their tech know-how."

Comment Re:Firefox's Memory Hassle (Score 1) 585

by Qlither on Thursday September 29, 2011 @04:28PM (#37558926) Attached to: Chrome Set To Take No. 2 Spot From Firefox

Amen.

It has been a long running joke with Firefox. The Firefox 7 Beta does seem to be A LOT better on the memory. I have 7 tabs open and it is only using 249mb, it would easily be on 450+ by now on Version 6. I was *this* close to moving to Chrome due to Firefox and its RAM addiction. No crashes in FF7 yet either.

Comment Website hacked? (Score 1) 192

by Qlither on Sunday September 04, 2011 @04:24PM (#37304008) Attached to: The Register Hacked

Errr...UK here, seems all good to me...

Did i miss the hack? Kudos to the admin if i did. I was reading it not two hours before this too.

Comment Video link (Score 1) 106

by Qlither on Tuesday August 30, 2011 @11:38AM (#37254146) Attached to: Cornell's Creative Machines Lab Lets Chatbots Interact

Where was the link to the video?

I found it on youtube anyway :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnzlbyTZsQY

Russian Supply Vehicle To ISS Burns 184

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday August 24, 2011 @02:19PM from the shuttle-for-sale-slightly-used dept.

First time accepted submitter Oxford_Comma_Lover writes "The Russian cargo spacecraft 'Progress' developed problems and burned up in the atmosphere shortly after its launch at 1300 GMT. From the article: 'The Russian space agency said the Progress M-12M cargo ship was not placed in the correct orbit by its rocket and fell back to Earth. The vessel was carrying three tonnes of supplies for the ISS astronauts.'"

What Do I Do About My Ex-Employer Stealing My Free Code? 545

Posted by samzenpus on Monday August 01, 2011 @05:06AM from the get-a-meeting-with-the-bobs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "I recently found out that the company I used to work for is removing all the open source licenses (GPL and MIT) from my work, distributing it as proprietary software and taking all the credit despite the fact that they contributed nothing to it. They are even renaming it something really silly. What should I do?"

'The Code Has Already Been Written' 253

Posted by timothy on Sunday July 24, 2011 @03:45PM from the is-that-how-you-see-things dept.

theodp writes "John D. Cook points out there's a major divide between the way scientists and programmers view the software they write. Scientists see their software as a kind of exoskeleton, an extension of themselves. Programmers, on the other hand, see their software as something they will hand over to someone else, more like building a robot. To a scientist, the software soup's done when they get what they want out of it, while professional programmers give more thought to reproducibility, maintainability, and correctness. So what happens when the twain meet? 'The real tension,' says Cook, 'comes when a piece of research software is suddenly expected to be ready for production. The scientist will say 'the code has already been written' and can't imagine it would take much work, if any, to prepare the software for its new responsibilities. They don't understand how hard it is for an engineer to turn an exoskeleton into a self-sufficient robot.'"

Hacker Group LulzSec Challenges FBI 308

Posted by Soulskill on Saturday June 04, 2011 @09:14AM from the getting-down-to-business dept.

Tiek00n writes "Hacker Group 'LulzSec' has gained some attention recently for their hacks of PBS and Sony. Their most recent target: FBI affiliate Infragard. The group claims, 'It has come to our unfortunate attention that NATO and our good friend Barrack Osama-Llama 24th-century Obama have recently upped the stakes with regard to hacking. They now treat hacking as an act of war. So, we just hacked an FBI affiliated website (Infragard, specifically the Atlanta chapter) and leaked its user base. We also took complete control over the site and defaced it...'"

New MacDefender Defeats Apple Security Update 427

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday June 01, 2011 @04:41PM from the +1-or-better-update-to-hit dept.

XxtraLarGe writes "Apple released a security update yesterday designed to rid Macs of the menacing MacDefender malware that has plagued users for nearly a month. But mere hours after the update, cyber-criminals released a new variant of the malware that easily defeated Apple's belated security efforts. That didn't take long."

France Outlaws Hashed Passwords 433

Posted by samzenpus on Thursday April 07, 2011 @03:53AM from the keep-your-receipt dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Storing passwords as hashes instead of plain text is now illegal in France, according to a draconian new data retention law. According to the BBC, '[t]he law obliges a range of e-commerce sites, video and music services and webmail providers to keep a host of data on customers. This includes users' full names, postal addresses, telephone numbers and passwords. The data must be handed over to the authorities if demanded.' If the law survives a pending legal challenge by Google, Ebay and others, it may well keep some major services out of the country entirely."

Obama Calls For New Privacy Bill of Rights 217

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday March 16, 2011 @05:34PM from the l33t-amendment dept.

CWmike writes "The Obama Administration is backing a new data privacy bill of rights aimed at protecting consumers against indiscriminate online tracking and data collection by advertisers. In recent times, high-profile examples of a need for improving privacy laws include Facebook's personal data collection practices and Google's problems over its Street View Wi-Fi snooping issue. In testimony prepared for the Senate Committee on Commerce Science and Transportation, the Commerce Department's assistant secretary, Lawrence Strickling, said that the White House wants Congress to enact legislation offering 'baseline consumer data privacy protections.' Strickling said the administration's call for new online privacy protections stems from recommendations made by the Commerce Department in a paper released in December. The administration's support for privacy protections is very significant, said Joel Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham Law School who specializes in privacy issues. 'This is the first time since 1974 that the U.S. government has supported mandatory general privacy rules,' Reidenberg said."

Comment Re:Not only graphics (Score 1) 568

by Qlither on Wednesday March 09, 2011 @03:24PM (#35433810) Attached to: How the PC Is Making Consoles Look Out of Date

Since when did speed become the only thing to affect the immersion of a game?

While there is more options for move/action placement on a keyboard. You can still make great FPS and some lighter on the slots RPG's on consoles. I find the argument of mouse/keyboard vs controller to pointless most of the time. In the end it all boils down to what works best for you. Crunch gear did a good piece on this a few years back now :

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/11/10/mouse-and-keyboard-vs-console-controller-lets-bury-the-hatchet/

The main benefit to console gaming is the greater chance of a working game out of the box, compared to the troubles of running games on pc.

How Watchmen Killed 'R'-rated Fantasy Movies 771

Posted by CmdrTaco on Thursday February 17, 2011 @12:46PM from the oh-the-irony dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Of all the Hollywood properties consigned to development hell in the reductionist policy of the last 3-4 years of bad economy, the very last to have a prospect of a green light are expensive fantasy and SF projects that fall outside the 'family' remit. Not even the addition of James Cameron to David Fincher's Heavy Metal remake has stopped its begging-bowl passage from studio to studio; Robert Rodriguez's propriety of the Barbarella remake likewise toured the world in vain, apparently unmindful of the very unusual set of cultural and demographic circumstances that caused a major studio to back an 'erotic space opera' in 1968 — and to the fact that these circumstances are not likely to reoccur. David Fincher lamented in 2008 that the creation of dazzling artificial movie worlds is limited to family-friendly output — but in the long wake of the box-office disappointment of the 'R'-rated Watchmen movie, there seems no current prospect that the adults will ever get to play with the kids' toys again." The most frustrating part of this is that Watchmen was actually *good*.

Comment Re:How is this revolutionary? (Score 1) 83

by Qlither on Saturday February 12, 2011 @09:19AM (#35185526) Attached to: Kinect Revolutionizing Robotics

<quote><p>makes it available to the general public at a low price point. </p></quote>

Point me to the item that does what the Kinect does, with the simplicity and cheapness of that Kinect. Cheapness, and how easy it is to use can be a game changer in any market.

On the hardware side, it is nothing MAJOR, such as an easy universal robotic language(which everyone uses) would be. However, it does mean more interactive robots that can navigate and recognise objects better. It will add all that, at a dirt cheap price and the implementation of it is only getting easier.

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