Didn't the 'in the wild' phones that they used to test have some sort of cover to make it look like a regular iphone? That would have kept them from experiencing the problem.

I don't know. Maybe FTL travel was developed as a military technology for galactic-scale battles or something like that.

Again, this runs into the whole problem with how ridiculously far apart everything is astronomically. If you want to develop FTL for military purposes, this presupposes that you've already found an enemy to fight where FTL would be an advantage. Presumably, any non-FTL-capable race will be just like us: they won't have any idea if other intelligent beings even exist, so they wouldn't know where to go to find these new enemies. The only exception here is if two races developed independently on two different planets either in neighboring systems, or in the same system somehow, and learned about each other's existence somehow.

The fundamentals of modern physics were developed in the first half of the 20th century with two world wars.

The two world wars took up a large part of the first half of the century (and then the Cold War took up even more), but that doesn't mean that every advance during that time was created for the wars. Einstein didn't create the theories of Relativity just so he could build a bomb; theoretical scientists like that (who are much closer to mathematicians) aren't really thinking of practical applications early on. IIRC, he came up with a lot of his stuff while he was still a patent clerk.

Remember, the whole Industrial Revolution was still going on in the early 20th century. That drove lots of advances on its own, without any need for a war.

Even if I like your way of thinking, being a pacifist myself, I really believe it to be wishful thinking. Unfortunately.

Well, for what it's worth, I'm not a pacifist at all. But I only believe violence is necessary to secure peace, because so many people (e.g. violent criminals) easily resort to violence to get what they want at the expense of others. I think any highly advanced race will either simply not have problems with violence (sort of like ants, who only use violence against non-ants, and never against other ants of the same tribe), or will have figured out how to make themselves evolve (with genetic engineering if necessary) past the point where they're predisposed to it.

Finally, as far as galactic-scale battles go, why would anyone have them? Wars are usually over one of two things: resources or ideology (which includes religion). Advanced aliens are very unlikely to have resource wars; with all the uninhabited planets and moons and asteroids out there, and the fact that such aliens are advanced enough for FTL or any decent level of spaceflight, it should be pretty trivial for them to find all the resources they want in their own systems, or in the many uninhabited systems around. Why go engage in a destructive war with someone on a faraway planet if you can get the same thing without a fight somewhere else, probably no farther away? Secondly, advanced aliens are unlikely to be religious and want to convert all the other aliens they can find. They'll have evolved past the need for making up myths to explain the unknown and the afterlife. And finally, what kind of aliens are going to go look for other aliens (who might barely be recognizable as "life" to them) just so they can have a capitalism vs. communism war with them?

the only way I can conceive this to be hacked ...
Always a dangerous statement - just because you can't think of an attack doesn't mean there isn't one.

You are correct that no one is going to guess the next one-time password. Instead, they are going to attack your machine, and piggyback on your session after you have logged in. This is happening in the wild today, although it's mostly aimed at larger commercial accounts.

Those keypads are more secure because they can be used to enter unique data for each transaction, like the amount of a transfer. Plus, they aren't connected to a network, so remote hacks are blocked. The keypad's generated code will definitively prove that the holder of the device entered the transaction data(*).

Obligatory Schneier reading: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/09/hacking_two-fac.html

(*) The most likely attack against devices like this: the key stored on the bank's server. But it's just a single target, so it is easier to harden.

First off, there is the pretty much proven idea that people that find children as acceptable sex partners (willingly or unwillingly) aren't going to change. Period. Nothing that we know of today will change this.

The current thinking seems to be that if a child is an acceptable sex partner and they are incapable of providing informed consent that there is no difference between someone that "seduces" a child and one that conks the child over the head, drags them into the bushes and rapes them. Probably kills the child immediately afterword. Whether or not that is true or not doesn't seem to be up for debate right now - it is just assumed as an established fact. This does have some grounding in reality.

The problem with child porn is pretty clear. If it makes children appear as a valid sex partners, well then, they are valid sex partners. Then the above paragraph comes into play - there are no "willing" child sex partners so every act is rape and every rape is violent, potentially leading to murder as well.

The conclusion is that anyone finding children are attractive as sex partners is one small step away from killing the next child they see. This is probably a bit far fetched, but is certainly where current thinking is today, especially in the legal system in a lot of countries.

So what exactly does one do with someone that has been convicted of finding a child an acceptable sex partner? Obviously, they are just one small step away from raping and killing children. While perhaps not a 100% valid conclusion, you can see where the thinking is on this and it is pretty tough to escape the logical progression.

At some point in the future there may be a way to tell the difference between someone that has no problem having sex with a consenting 16-year-old girl and someone that is all set to rape and murder. We aren't there yet. Right now, keeping these people in prison for eternity isn't a realistic solution in most Western countries - why should they be kept at State expense? Releasing them with restrictions on movement, contact with children and other things seems to be pretty logical. Restrictions on using a computer (or at least use of the Internet) seems to make some sense - again, based on the idea that anyone finding a child as an acceptable sex partner is one small step away from raping and murdering children.

The problem with the usual law enforcement methodolgy (you know, commit the crime, do the time, repeat as needed) is the whole part about it being (a) predicable that these people will re-offend and (b) having to tell the parent of the dead child that it was known about. People are pretty sensitive about that - I guess it has to do with the cost of raising a child these days. You know, all that money for nothing when the kid is murdered.

The main problem would seem to be separating the "murdering, raping" offenders from the "teen sex" offenders. We are't doing a good job of that today and there doesn't seem to be a good reliable test for it. And nobody, but nobody, wants to be the one telling the parent that the convicted child sex enthusiast just killed their child.

The use of vaccines is a public health necessity; vaccines are by far the most cost effective tool we have for preventing the spread of communicable diseases.

There have always been controversies about vaccines: there is non-zero risk to individuals from any medical treatment, and significant benefit to the population as a whole. As a single individual, you remove the (very small) risk by not having the vaccine, and you gain most all of the benefits if most everyone else around you has been vaccinated.

Spreading fear and misinformation about the safety of vaccines can cause direct, measurable and irreversible harm. Measuring the connection between a medical treatment and possible harmful effects is something drug companies can do very well, and the FDA approvals process (when it works) keeps the companies honest. We have solid, irrefutable and repeatable scientific evidence that shows vaccines do not cause these diseases, like autism.

The best article covering this was in the Bad Astronomy blog from Discover, aptly titled Antivax Kills.

Orson Scott Card did it with "Ender's Shadow"; which was "Ender's Game" told from a different character's point of view. I didn't feel cheated by either book (admittedly it's a stretch to consider this similar to the SC2 issue, but it was your analogy).

Aside from that; lack of LAN play seems like a perfectly valid reason not to buy a game. It's not a good reason to develop a persecution complex, though.

Yeah, I was thinking the same... how much ram are we talking about.. and ofcourse which version are they running? 32-bit or 64bit, as people should know that putting more ram as 4GB when running 32bit windows doesn't do anything with the more ram (it can even slow things down.. If you want to use a lot of ram you have to use 64bit windows)... Why anyone wouldn't put at least 4GB into their computer when running Windows 7 is really beyond me, especially when the price of ram is so low, and the advantages are great...

You mean Chelyabinsk-40 ? wasn't that where they just kept dumping radioactive waste into a lake so much that the decay started to heat the lake which started to dry up so they poured concrete on top to keep the radioactive dust down and the it blew up.

Military weapons research and production has fucked up far more than the civilian nuclear industry ever has.

I'm sure you're a very smart kid but I have to break it to you- this is slashdot, we're quite familiar with radio-nucleotides.

WOW! REALLY!!!

You can use the words "half life" here. People will understand what it means.
Quick tip: anything with a half life of 50K years is about as radioactive as concrete.
You could sit in a beach chair next to a lump of it for the day with no worry of cancer .

Fuzzy wuzzy was a bear.
fuzzy wuzzy had no hair.
so fuzzy wuzzy wasn't very fuzzy, wuzzy.

Definitely. My point was that you are describing both the pro- and anti-global warming studies. There are bad apples on both sides muddying the water.

But you probably do need a Ph.D. to interpret the actual data and figure out what is actually going on with the climate, right?

In that case, whoosh back, because I never claimed they were designed to last for 60 years. I only claimed that they were probably made saltwater resistant and therefore they MAY last 60 years, so we're vehemently agreeing on that point.

From my original post that you replied to:

At no point did I suggest that they used expensive materials like stainless, in fact I specifically stated that stainless probably would NOT have been the material they used, specifically due to cost.

Lots of saltwater-resistant materials were readily available and cheap, and would have been logical to include in something designed to be in saltwater for even brief periods of time. I just gave a few semi-random examples of appropriate materials that were available at the time.

I have no earthly idea what the Russians actually used in their mines, and I wouldn't know how to go about getting plans. And the Department of Homeland Security might pay me a visit if I tried. ;)

The overwhelming majority of digital cameras do not have a shutter. You do realize that clicking sound comes not from a shutter, but from a small speaker, right?

I'm honestly sorry I didn't patent this technique back in 2005 when I was working with digital image sensors, but suffice to say, it's been known about and used in industry for quite some time. Engineers have always known there was a tradeoff between the image resolution and frame rate, and this appears a rather obvious compromise. An image sensor chip has a limited bandwidth for reading out pixels, so naturally the framerate is a factor of the image pixel count.

Most image sensors can be reconfigured rather quickly, perhaps even between frames. This technique is hardly worth a patent, as it's obvious to anyone who's ever had to make a tradeoff between frame rate and light sensitivity, or frame rate and resolution. For video, there's the standard D1 resolution of 720 by 480. For stills, the whole resolution of the sensor is used. So obvious that it is hard to consider it novel enough to patent.

Punctuation!

I highly recommend getting the HHGTTG audio books, especially for people who preferred the radio drama. Douglas Adams has an amazing reading voice; There is a lot of humor that he puts into his reading that never would have translated as well from the book alone.