We allow companies and capitalism to grow and gain power that equals or, in some aspects of society, exceeds that of the government.

Yes, I applaud China for keeping their corporations on a leash. Letting them run wild and free and unregulated leads to collapse. Just look at the USA, your government is literally bought and paid for by the megacorps.

TLDR; Trans people have the neurology of the gender they say they are.

Oh, hang on. You're saying that men and women have different brain structure!

This explains why men are better at mathematics and computer science.

If they were able to release the fix so quickly, they obviously had developed it ages ago, but not released it.

I can think of only one reason why a company would delay the rollout of a security fix they had developed: A government they are in bed with wanted to use that security hole for its own purposes. Only once the exploit code was made public and it became a larger risk to common users did google release the fix they had been withholding at the orders of $gov.

I use WeChat, and you're definitely wrong here. It's better than Whatsapp, Signal, and Telegram.

For one thing, WeChat allows plugins. Whatsapp doesn't. Signal doesn't. Telegram doesn't. For another thing, WeChat has seamless integration with the facebook-like profile pages and feeds, better security than facebook (when you add a friend you have very fine-grained permissions on what you allow them to see or have access to. I can add someone on WeChat and allow them access to *nothing*. They'd go into my contact list, and that's it.)

..and on top of that it does video calling, seamless translation, naturally it has better internationalization support due to the audience, it has all of these cute animation things built in (if you say "I miss you" you get lots of little hearts on the screen, etc.)

Lastly, I have been submitting bug reports to whatsapp every few months for 4 YEARS now because the stupid blue/grey checkmarks that say whether a message has been delivered/read are indistinguishable to me and my colourblind friends. Whatsapp is dead in the water when it comes to support. With WeChat, you can call support at any time and get a real live person who has access to your account and can fix any of your problems. Whatsapp, Signal, and Telegram don't have support, nor do they have plans to ever add it.

I also use Whatsapp, and I don't see the point. Why would I use ten different apps on my phone to accomplish one thing, where none of them integrate with each other, when I can just use WeChat and everything Just Works? Integration is key, and WeChat is king of integration.

Minor update: This is an IP extension, not a TCP extension.

I've actually thought about this and come up with the following TCP extension:

Routers all maintain a reasonably sized set of source/destination/timer triplets. If a packet comes in from 'source' and is headed to 'destination', drop it. When 'timer' expires, drop that rule.

A special new "Add rule 'source,destination,timer'' packet is added, to be sent to a router. This causes the router to initiate a 3-way handshake with 'destination' to confirm that they requested the new rule, and if so, they add the rule to their table and set the expiration timer.

The idea is simple: If you're being DDoS'd, you don't have much bandwidth, but you always have bandwidth available between you and the first router, so you can always send them special packets telling the first hop router to drop all packets that you suppose are malicious, with a small timer so that you can renew it. After that's done, you should have eased the traffic enough to send more table-update packets to the second hop routers, and then to the third hop routers, and so on, until you've pushed the 'timed reject rule' right back up the traceroute chain until its at the source's doorstep and can go no further. At that point, not only are you free from the DDoS, the routers themselves no longer have to handle the traffic, either, as you've cut it off very near to the source.

The rule expiration timer makes it so that you need to actively maintain the rules or they'll disappear, and furthermore, it makes it so that when the DDoS stops, normal traffic can resume just fine. You can always 'peek' to see if the DDoS is ongoing by letting a few timers expire and watching to see if the malicious traffic is still coming through. If it is, update the rules and block it for some more time.

How about we get serious about it and use a much more appropriate terms: Global Ecological Catastrophe and Pollution Crisis.

slashdot is not a product, it's a community! That should be respected more than anything, Dice! You don't have the right to alter slashdot without the consent of the community, and it clearly hasn't given consent!

I'll be participating in the slashcott at midnight in my own timezone (in about 2 hours). I'll also be moving to the altslashdot page.
If the beta is still around, there's a pretty good chance that I won't be back.

I'm impressed. :) It's rot13. but that's really cool that you could figure it out by hand.

Those idiots!
They should never have shut that down. Sure, it might have been used to support drug cartels etc. and so on, but it is one of the most advanced communications systems available.
Go find a cellular provider that runs their entire infrastructure on solar power, and who has their network de-centralized (meshed) such that it's difficult to take down.
There is no mistaking it, the drug cartels have developed a superior communications system, and it was just shut down. I'm going to build my own version of this thing to cover the island I'm currently on.
Make no mistake, the drug cartels have an incredible amount of financial power, and they are only now starting to use it for potentially good development. Take the hi-tech underground tunnels, the hi-tech submarines, and now the advanced solar mesh network. Someone needs to partner with these guys.

These are two different movements, I would hope that it is of the 'free software' movement...slashdot always uses the wrong terms..

There is no reason for them to be connected to this only 1 hour a day. Perhaps if the patients were connected to their avatars continuously for two or three days, they would quickly grow accustomed to it through personal experimentation in much the same way that self-taught programmers train themselves in a new language. I think that if they are self-taught for controlling the avatar that they might be much more efficient at it.

I work with some university professors on research projects regularly.
I don't want to use too many 'buzz-words' or anything, but I also don't want to give away our research before we publish it.
One of our projects (we have developed a patentable method) involves a method of distributing control messages of X length to N computers by using only X bandwidth on the sender side, with built-in error recovery and automatic redundancy by virtue of a propagating message source. Combine that with public-key crypto and you have a super-resilient propagating message with no 'source point'.
We make use of the DNS protocol to accomplish this.

You can see when we publish the paper, I will make it available to slashdot at that time. We've found that there is no clear way to stop the messages from reaching the destinations, and no way of impersonating the sender. There is also no way to detect the true source of the message.
Essentially, an alternative to P2P transmissions which is probably just as good.
There might be a flaw somewhere that we haven't noticed though, but at the moment it seems to be that we will finish the paper soon.