While I was manually updating to 7u11, I found out that the 64-bit version does not even have auto update - only the 32-bit version does. How the hell can Oracle be so irresponsible? I know most people use the 32-bit version, but still, what the fuck.

I agree. We Americans do have rather large penises.

These two quotes from the article are confusing to me: "We do have sensors and it usually takes about five minutes before the sensors will see the earthquake" and "scientific alerts can take between two and 20 minutes".

Why would a seismometer take so long? Can someone explain this?

As far as I know, the USGS website has data in realtime and doesn't necessarily wait for any kind of human verification. For example, within approximately 15 seconds of the Virginia quake last year, I checked the USGS site and they already had it in their list of recent quakes. For other quakes I've seen reported on Twitter, the USGS site has always had data up at least as soon as the first tweets I've seen.

Obviously this is a grand conspiracy by the Europeans to distract us from what really matters today - blowing shit up! If they really wanted to celebrate the Fourth, they would have blown up CERN.

The original source of this article, which was copied verbatim, is NASA Earth Observatory. Give credit where credit is due.

Which versions of Java are vulnerable? Basic details are nice to have...

I think I'm in love.

Slashdot is an amazing site. Thanks for creating it. Great work.

There are all kinds of strategies that can be used to speed this up.

Let's say that we're trying to find a short path between someone in the US and someone in China. Start by trying to find a link that allows you to hop the Pacific ocean as quickly as possible. Try to find an American friend of the Chinese guy, or vice versa. When you've got it to two people in the same country, then start picking the nodes that allow you to hop the greatest distance.

You could come up with a group of highly-connected people to start with - the people who have lots of connections in various countries, economic classes, interests, etc. Create a graph of these people and pre-compute all the shortest paths between them. Then when you're going through all the combinations, you just need to get to brute-force your way to this central graph.

Of course this won't get you the shortest path between each pair of people, but it'll probably get you pretty close. Close enough to say if an average of "six degrees" is reasonable.

And already back up. Outage actually started around 10:24 EDT.

Haha. Mod parent up please.

There was a series of chicken pox vaccine emails from around January 18, 2008, that caught my eye. Somewhat worrying that these emails have so many redactions. Seems like there might have been a turf battle between the governor's office and the Board of Education, and maybe the governor's office was engaging in some campaign to torpedo the immunization regulations. Here's part of them:

I wonder if they have thought out the security of this system. Sending a message to nearly every person in the United States at the same time would be an amazing hack. Is it supposed to be all automated, or does each provider have to get the message from FEMA and then manually send it out on their network?

This is totally unfair of Google to punish JC Penney like this. We need to help them restore their page rank. I'll start.

Nazi memorabilia
abortion factory
murder weapons
penny stock
worst place to work
token black guy

The submitter messed up two of the basic details of this story - the number is actually 295, not 250, and this value is as of 2007, rather than the implied present day. (I know, I must be new here.)