Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Why not closed-loop water cooling? (Score 2) 21

I get that the heat has to go somewhere, but there are ways to build a system that doesn't "consume" much water.

Building these kinds of systems may cost more cash up-front but the cost to the people in your state/country (which becomes a political/regulatory cost to you down the road) of using water in areas where water is scarce needs to be factored in.

Comment 1) O RLY? 2) what crimes? (Score 1) 1

I'm not surprised that people use crypto-currencies for criminal acts, just as I'm not surprised they use US Federal Reserve Notes for the same.

As for profiting exhorbitantly by inflating the exchange rate, that sounds like the free market in action to me. Back in the day when crossing the border meant changing out your paper money, you saw the same thing with money-changers near border crossings - customers were willing to pay a less favorable rate for the convenience of not having to go to a bank.

Comment Rust's claims of memory safety (Score 1) 141

First, I'm not a Rust programmer, but I am a programmer.

Rust's claims about memory safety read to me like "we promise we are memory-safe except where you tell me they aren't. If you use a library that is marked as unsafe, you are responsible for knowing what you are doing and what the library is doing. But in all other cases, we guarantee memory safety."

If I wanted 100% memory safety, there would be a lot of things that I either couldn't do or couldn't do efficiently enough to be worth doing. A large part of kernel-level programming is one of those things.

Comment Re:Letâ(TM)s take a guess (Score 2) 58

Where do we think autism comes from?

Smart (read: humble) people admit "We don't 'think we know where autism comes from,' we know that we don't know where it comes from. Anyone who says otherwise is either right and on his way to a Nobel-or-similar prize, or much more likely he's a liar and he knows it or he's deluding himself and anyone foolish enough to listen. If you really want humanity to discover where autism comes from, fund responsible research. Maybe, just maybe, in a few decades we will begin to have an answer. And oh by the way, like the common cold, cancer, and so many other 'things' in medicine, autism may turn out to be more than one 'thing.'"

Comment Intersex Re:All these 20th century cancers (Score 3, Interesting) 58

Like Transgenderism is a huge topic just because there's at least three distinct paths that lead to it, one of them being the "hormone disruption in-utero", one being SRY-gene translocation (basically XX Male and XY Female, and likely the only possible way for FTM to exist), and one being intersex Androgen insensitivity (aka PAIS/CAIS which is when a XY has little or no androgen response, thus their body defaults to female, but may not have working ovaries or testes at all.)

Not to take anything away from what you said, but you are describing some forms of biological inter-sex-ness, in which the body is neither wholly male nor wholly female.

Transgenderism, at least with respect to people who are not biologically intersex, is more of a psychological or possibly spiritual phenomenon, at least as far as we know today. I say "as far as we know" because there is a lot about the physiology of the brain and possibly the rest of the body that we don't know. Hopefully, future research will find answers.

Comment How hazardous? (Score 1) 58

Just how hazardous are these chemicals?

Some things, like lead and mercury, are considered hazardous in any measurable amount. That still begs the question: What if the amount of the material in my body is so low that it's infeasible to measure? Is it reasonable to extrapolate "down to near zero" and assume it's hazardous, or is it more reasonable to say "we don't know if it's hazardous or not at those too-low-to-detect levels"? I strongly suspect that as you get really close to zero, say, 1 molecule (or atom, or ion) per 100kg of body mass, the hazard is practically zero and not worth worrying about.

For the ones that are "safe at the lowest detectable levels," does the average person have enough in their body to be above the "probably not safe" or "definitely not safe" levels?

The answer of course will be different for each chemical.

Comment yes, I know that this is a different problem (Score 1) 32

The problem in this case was a stolen credential that was left usable for an extended period of time. Near-line storage alone would've only been a small "bump in the road" for this particular leak, assuming the person knew enough to ask for all the data to be loaded from near-line storage before stealing it.

Comment Keep some data near-line (Score 1) 32

Things like building-access-codes don't need to be kept on a "live" database. If a customer places an order, the key-access-code for that specific customer can be copied from nearline storage to "live" storage well before delivery, then deleted after delivery is complete.

This way, if the "live" database is completely compromised, only the relatively-few customers who have pending or very-recently-delivered items will have their key-access-code data stolen.

A similar principle can apply to the customer's contact and billing information and for that matter all information not needed to login in: only have it available to the "live" system when it's needed.

If a customer decides he wants to review his account information, give him a screen that says something like "it will take 5 minutes to retreive your data" then put a count-down timer in the corner of the web page. Use that 5 minutes to load the data from nearline storage.

Comment Re:I love living in Canada (Score 2) 120

As far as tariffs go, Trump telling the rest of the world they should learn to live without America may be the best thing for the rest of the world, long-term. Sure, there is short- and medium-term pain, but imagine it's 2060 and the rest of the world has weaned itself from any dependence on America. Imagine a Trump-like President trying to tell the rest of the world what to do. Imagine the rest of the world shugging its collective shoulders.

Slashdot Top Deals

To save a single life is better than to build a seven story pagoda.

Working...