If you read the cited manuscript, it looks like the developer was relying on the locale being set for numeric file name sorting, where "file-2" would be sorted before "file-10". I always set LC_ALL="POSIX", so that all my sorts sort strings the same order as strcmp() in C. This is, IMHO, the "one true sort order". If the developer had zero-padded his file name numbers so that numeric vs. ASCII sort didn't matter, than all would have been well. The developer could have probably also called some functions to change the sorting locale within the program so as to guaranteed numeric sorting. Evidently, neither of these things were done. I also do not understand how in Figure 2, the Linux sort order is reversed! No idea how that could happen. This was simply poor programming :-(

If the genome hasn't been sequenced yet, then how can we know if its genome is or will be interesting or not?

What grey bar? Just install the YesScript plugin and disable JavaScript for slashdot (and do so as well whenever you get to one of the subdomains for a story). About the only thing that doesn't work when you disable JavaScript on /. is the ability to enter your own tags for a story. Block javascript for /. and all the places where ads would have gone don't even show up. It also stops the damn auto-refresh where you lose your place on the page. You get nice clean formatting. I agree that browing /. with JavaScript enabled is a poor experience, though....

From TFA:

"... it would not be in its lowest energy state, and it would require a regular kick to pulse."

and

"The recipe was incredibly complex, but just three ingredients were essential: a force repeatedly disturbing the particles, a way to make the atoms interact with each other and an element of random disorder."

So, no perpetual motion machine. However, maybe if they used a nice hot cup of tea to generate brownian motion as the source of random disorder, perhaps this could be a step towards inventing an infinite improbability drive?

I thought it was related more to the 1998 Lancet paper that really kicked off the anti-vaccination movement. That paper has since been thoroughly debunked, and retracted due to fraud and ethics violations. A good synopsis of the affair can be found here:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

I use NetGuard, but if you want hosts file blocking, you can't use the one from the PlayStore, since that disables that feature. I tried using the open source playstore equivalent for app updates, but it was buggy on my phone and updates often failed. So, I gave up with that and just have the app itself check for updates and install them direct from the opensource project site. You will need to disable updates for NetGuard, specifically, in the PlayStore to prevent the PlayStore from automatically overwriting the full version with the less functional PlayStore version.

It has ads, but they are small banners at the bottom of the app settings page, so it's really not much of an annoyance, since I rarely need to customize my settings after I've set it up the first time. No ads anywhere else at any time. I really like the app, overall.

For a Ginsu and Spiral Slicer, you bet! My family went to a flea market in the mid 80's, and there was a salesman giving a wonderful demonstration of a Gensu knife. It slices, it dices! Saws through a hammer, and still cuts cleanly through this tomato! Well, after a great demonstration like that, we bought a knife and spiral slicer.

Best damn kitchen and utility knife we ever had. That thing was awesome. Cut through all sorts of building materials for school projects, still worked great on watermelons, bread, etc.. The spiral slicer also made wonderful potato chips that we would fry in a Fry Daddy. These were indeed wonderful products!

I thought I'd add a potentially interesting anecdote to this. The app is not available on the US Google Play Store, as the github readme said may be the case. I downloaded the app directly to my Motorola Droid 2 Turbo (last OS update July 1st, 2016) and installed it. I was surprised to see a warning message pop up "Installation blocked. This app contains code that attempts to bypass Android's security protections." Something in my phone is detecting the potentially malicious code, and I don't think it is the Play Store, since I didn't use the Play Store, and installed the app directly from my download directory.

Once installed, it looked like it tried to download 100 files (progress meter showed 0 out of 100). This hung, since I have the NetGuard firewall installed, set to block all wifi / mobile data access by default.

I canceled out of the download and tried to run the hammertime attack, but got an extremely long error message that took up the whole screen.

So, for at least this proof of concept attack app, it failed on several levels:

1) Something on my phone detected it as potentially malicious and asked me if I really wanted to install it (I have not installed any virus/malware scanners that I am aware of, so I don't know what this was).
2) It failed to download some files, potentially necessary for the attack, due to my firewall
3) It failed to work, maybe due to missing the files it couldn't download.

I'm sure that a more robust attack app could be developed, but, at least as far as the proof of concept app is concerned, I'm not overly worried -- for the moment.

Something is wrong with Slashdot! Not a single post at moderation 3 or above questioning if the Tolkien estate can or should do anything about the use of the name Palantir.

The Smithsonian Channel heavily advertised a 2 hour special sort of about the 50th anniversary of Star Trek for several weeks before it aired, and it has been airing frequently this past week. It is about a sci-fi / pop culture museum in Seattle working to get a 50th anniversary exhibit completed, as well as the team at the Smithsonian restoring the original filming model of the Enterprise for display at the Air and Space Museum. And a bunch of not-so-great "we sort of have Star Trek technology now, but not really" science bits. Overall, worth a watch for the interviews with various people involved in the production (and/or disposal of the original props).

BBC America has also been showing Seasons 1 and 2 in their restored HD glory since yesterday, and will continue on today. The image and color quality look great, and the re-generated special effects are also pretty well done. Definitely worth a watch!

BakerHostetler Hires Artificial Intelligent Attorney 'Ross' Progress is being made on that front :-)

I'd been getting the "an error has occured, please try again later" error ever since the move to HTML5. I assumed it was yet another bug in HTML5 video support. So, I installed the plugin that lets you force Flash on youtube, and the problem went away. I never connected it with AdBlock. I had no idea an ad was even trying to play. I just forced Flash, which solved the problem, and never looked back. If Goggle wants to get rid of Flash, then they need to fix their HTML5 support to not get broken by adblockers (and also give a more informative error message, as I had no clue that adblocking was the problem).

It is, annoying, however, that the Flash version continues to default to pretty much the smallest low-resolution version available, and I have to switch to 720p or 1080p on *every single video*, despite my having set my preferences to use the highest video resolution. So, you either get broken HTML5 or broken Flash, neither one of which they appear to have any intention of fixing....

I have been reading Slashdot since the late 90's (I didn't create an account until the filter controls switched to those slider bars and layout changed a lot and became pretty horrid -- an account gave me some preferences to turn off a lot of that crap). Never, in my entire time reading slashdot, has the search function been even remotely useful. I've always had to use google (if it was even around when I started) to do any actually useful searches for content on slashdot.

Hmm... this is interesting given his previous 2012 Slashdot response when asked if he owned a mobile phone:

"RMS: I certainly do not! A cell phone is Stalin's dream: its movements are tracked, and it can be converted (through the universal back door) into a listening device."

I think you've got that backwards. Dynamic linking is fine for stuff you compile at home, but for any code that's distributed, using dynamic linking will often cause your binary to *just not work* on another system.

Missing a shared library? Which package does it come in? Oh crap, that package requires dependencies I don't have, or are the wrong version, etc.. Or you have the shared library, but it is a different version, and the size of a structure or something changed, or a variable doesn't exist anymore, and your binary crashes, won't run with it, or produces corrupt output. Or you go through all of your dependency Hell and update all the libraries you need to install the package with the missing shared library, only to find that the libraries you updated caused other programs to break for similar reasons to why yours wasn't working with your current library version. Newer versions of libraries do not always maintain binary compatibility with older versions.

Some programs should just be statically linked, so that they will always work on any version of any distribution. Otherwise, there may be no avoiding a recompile and its associated dependency Hell. Static linking is a compatibility God-send.