Slashdot Mirror

Newer phones SELL for $600-800.
The BOM (cost to mfr) for the Galaxy S5 is $251

I couldn't find a current BOM for a laptop, but a few years ago they had RAM at about $25

Actually Google is taking a page from MSFT and is going EEE on Android and if the rumors are true Win 9 will either be free or insanely cheap so...good luck with that.

BTW what Torvalds SHOULD have said was "I want the desktop....but not enough to give up my shitty 1970s throwback driver model" because you look at the forums and a good 90% of what the problems in linux get boiled down to is that shitstorm of a driver model, it'd be like MSFT trying to build Windows 9 on top of the old DOS .INI drivers because when you have such a fundamental thing old and shitty it makes all the new stuff on top just new and shitty. BTW this is NOT a FOSS thing, its a LINUX thing, as nobody in the FOSS world besides Linux uses his shitty driver model, not BSD, not Android, NOBODY.

The problem here is that the policy is apparently all about "misogyny", which makes it inherently discriminatory. The policy should be about sexism.

While I understand what you are saying, I disagree in the intent of the policy. Sexism is offensive, misogyny is hatred.

Are you certain? Let us not forget that there is a really wide range of opinion about what is and what is not misogynistic.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... Adria Richards got two guys fired for making dongle and forking jokes. She apparently thoght they were misogynists.

Enough outrage at these guys that she took a photo and shamed them on Twitter and complained to the organizers of the event.. And got one of them fired.

And yet,Adria managed to post this on her twitter account earlier

https://twitter.com/adriaricha...

"you should put something in your pants next time...like a bunch of socks inside one...large...sock. TSA agent faint"

Which was obvoiusly a story about smuggling socks.

Fact is this is a world where we now have two different standards. And men can lose their jobs if a woman overhears them and might be in a bad mood, or had too much coffee

As a Co-worker once told me - sexual harassment "depends on the mood I'm in."

And the discretion of the reviewer, too. I severely doubt that the men who were fired hate women. It was a joke, yet getting fired for making it shows exactly how it is interpreted as misogyny.

And in the end, her likely bad mood cost her her job, as she went outside channels to publicly shame these guys. Which no doubt some think was a misogynistic firing. And despite your assertions, check this out: http://colorlines.com/archives...

Not only misogyny, but racist bigots too!

Fortunately only men are this way, so at least half of us are innocent.

From arstechnica
http://arstechnica.com/busines...

Microsoft announced last year that it was moving its German headquarters to Munich. This move is planned to take place in 2016. While Reiter was involved in the deal that precipitated the move and describes himself as a "Microsoft fan," he says the criticism of LiMux is unrelated.

Limux is a project which, up until 3 days ago, has been widely reported as successful. It's been going on for 10 years for god's sake.
Now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it's a failure - according to one politician.

This is a single politician in the german government trying to derail the project for personal gain.

years ago MS announced plans to build a large server farm in the state of Iowa, this would be an economic boost to the area, this was during a time when conservative politicians were questioning "privacy" issues with companies and the internet, there was a senator named Grassley that apparently raised the issue in Congress specifically with MS to the irritation of Balmer and shortly thereafter it was announced these plans were cancelled

"Microsoft announced last year that it was moving its German headquarters to Munich. This move is planned to take place in 2016. While Reiter was involved in the deal that precipitated the move and describes himself as a "Microsoft fan," he says the criticism of LiMux is unrelated." http://arstechnica.com/busines... One polititian making convenient claims?... microsoft intervention?... hard to tell from where this is coming. (This looks like nokia's disaster)

except it hasn't gone that way.. however the junkets and freebies.. that's true.

From an ArsTechnica comment its just some remark by the Mayor who has been involved in Microsoft's decision to move its HQ to Munich.

There is a third (unproven, but likely) option:

3) Bribe the officials to starve to project to dead. Wait until valid complaints from the users come in.

Clues for this (but of course this does not prove anything):

• According to wikipedia, they use the following quite outdated software:

  version 4 available from August 2011 is based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, although using KDE Desktop 3.5 and version 4.1 available from August 2012 is also based on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

  (Source: wikipedia page about LiMux). Especially the desktop environment is really old, first published around 2002 if I remember correctly.

• Microsoft moves its German headquarter to munich (source)
• Munich lord mayor Reiter is a self-confessed Microsoft fan (source)

I think it's pretty clear from the article that politics is behind this reconsideration of LiMux. Is it really such a coincidence that Microsoft is moving their HQ to Munich in 2016?

Reading this Ars Technica article, which reports that the Munich City Council has recorded significant savings (more than 10 million euros) and that the head of their IT department expected a user adjustment period, convinces me even more that it's just money in politics yet again. LiMux only went live in 2013.

Oh, and the Ars article notes that the new Munich mayor, Dieter Reiter, was involved in the deal that precipitated Microsoft's plan to move their German HQ to Munich.

That sound about right. Here is where I did a calculation about seven years ago. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/20...

There is an interesting form of storage called electrically synthesized methane that was included in this recent report: http://arstechnica.com/science... I suspect that the wind resource south of Iceland may end up being used for that.

From arstechnica
http://arstechnica.com/busines...

Microsoft announced last year that it was moving its German headquarters to Munich. This move is planned to take place in 2016. While Reiter was involved in the deal that precipitated the move and describes himself as a "Microsoft fan," he says the criticism of LiMux is unrelated.

Limux is a project which, up until 3 days ago, has been widely reported as successful. It's been going on for 10 years for god's sake.
Now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it's a failure - according to one politician.

This is a single politician in the german government trying to derail the project for personal gain.

Well, Josef Schmid is CDU (arch conservative) so he would be opposed to FOSS. It is part of the CSU's ongoing war to stop the march of communism (that was sarcasm in case somebodu failed to notice). But all fun aside, I can relate to some of their complaints. Specifically lack of interoperability between OpenOffice and MS Office (whose fault is that I wonder?) but making the case that the entire Munich city IT infrastructure shold be switched back to MS because somebody is carrying a torch for MS Outlook is just plain stupid. As for laggint behind, I can only re-iterate my previous question: whose fault is that I wonder? Could it be Microsoft and their crappy proprietary formats? Finally, is there really no FOSS mail server solution that can handle push mail notifications to smartphones?

From arstechnica
http://arstechnica.com/busines...

Microsoft announced last year that it was moving its German headquarters to Munich. This move is planned to take place in 2016. While Reiter was involved in the deal that precipitated the move and describes himself as a "Microsoft fan," he says the criticism of LiMux is unrelated.

Limux is a project which, up until 3 days ago, has been widely reported as successful. It's been going on for 10 years for god's sake.
Now, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, it's a failure - according to one politician.

This is a single politician in the german government trying to derail the project for personal gain.

The drive unit is a combination of the single electric motor, gear reduction, differential and inverter and axles. It's all a single unit that can be quickly replaced. As Elon stated in his last earnings call, most of the problems were due to some cables that were tucked up in there coming loose and making noise. Before finding out that that was the root cause they just replaced the drive unit because it could be done quickly. Now it turns out all they do is apply some zip ties to fix the problem. The car is fairly modular and should be fairly easy to work on, especially since there's no engine in the way of everything. Things like power steering, coolant pumps, AC, etc. are all easily accessible after removing the frunk plastic tub or the plastic panel under the front of the car.

When I have taken my Tesla in for a problem they don't fool around but try to address it as quickly as possible. All of the issues I've had with my car, an early model S, have been addressed by later versions of the car.

Here's a picture of the drive unit: http://arstechnica.com/cars/20...

- Stop making it easy on them. Stop using Windows. Seriously [imagicity.com]. Understand that what's convenient for you is often convenient for them.

10,000 Linux servers hit by malware serving tsunami of spam and exploits
Kernel.org Linux repository rooted in hack attack

Those stories must be a lie and they were really running Windows, right? Oh and there are plenty of other examples to be found.

- Stop using proprietary software at all. Yes, yes, HeartBleed nothing is safe bla bla bla. I'm not talking about safe, though; I'm talking about safer. And FOSS is, objectively, a safer environment, and will remain so even after it becomes popular.

Open SSL has not only Heartbleed but CCS Injection Vulnerability and many more vulnerabilities, GnuTLS & Apple's SecureTransport (yes it is "free software") had the goto fail problem, Debian OpenSSL with broken entropy generation and predictable keys, Android's SecureRandom using weak entropy for it's PRNG, etc. The list really can go on and on and on.

We know that They don't like TOR because it's harder for Them.

It is?

FBI Admits It Controlled Tor Servers Behind Mass Malware Attack

The FBI Is Infecting Tor Users with Malware to Catch Kiddie Porn Creeps

Tor security advisory: "relay early" traffic confirmation attack

The US government agencies have unlimited resources to run Tor exit nodes and to write malware to infect people who use Tor.

Hopefully no one actually listens to your stupid advice.

This is the recliner you've been looking for.

You're welcome.

so you're pushing the old "rich scientists" myth?
You know its BS right?
As in false, made up, not true?
In fact, it's actually a projection, because the REAL money to be made in global warming is in DENYING it.

Well you should.
Come back to reality.
It's not just more rational, it's nicer over here too.
And we have cookies.

To sum up: climate research doesn't pay well, the amount of money dedicated to it has been shrinking, and if the researchers were successful in convincing the public that climate change was a serious threat, the response would be to give money to someone else. If you come across someone arguing that scientists are in it for the money, then you can probably assume they are willing to make arguments without getting their facts straight.

http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://www.scientificamerican....

Not really (at this point), at the recent BlackHat some researchers demonstrated how they could remotely compromise a Blackberry.

http://www.accuvant.com/about-...

Another great article that talks a little about that instance with Blackberry and another smartphone platform designed for security as well:

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

Not to mention OpenSwitch, which Cisco hasn't exactly embraced: http://arstechnica.com/informa... also: http://arstechnica.com/informa...

The NSA screwed over Cisco in a big way (and other American companies, of course): http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Not to mention OpenSwitch, which Cisco hasn't exactly embraced: http://arstechnica.com/informa... also: http://arstechnica.com/informa...

The NSA screwed over Cisco in a big way (and other American companies, of course): http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Not to mention OpenSwitch, which Cisco hasn't exactly embraced: http://arstechnica.com/informa... also: http://arstechnica.com/informa...

The NSA screwed over Cisco in a big way (and other American companies, of course): http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

"Identifying and blocking foreign threats" is the NSA's job

Sure, but that doesn't extend to knocking Syria off the internet or inserting back-doors into encryption standards or failing to report known vulnerabilities and the like. How about recording every single phone call in made in two countries? Some spying on foreign countries is expected and acceptable, but not the lengths the NSA has gone to. Spying on your allies, like Merkel, is definitely something America should be ashamed of and that the German people have a right to know about.

Knowing what is happening and their capabilities is essential for us to re-build the internet to be bulk-surveillance proof. There is zero chance of the NSA and GCHQ stopping what they are doing, so the only solution is technological.

As a result of this failure they were unable to deploy their payload. The satellite burned up on reentry. [arstechnica.com]

I don't understand, are you sarcastically agreeing with jfdavis or do you not understand how reading works? The mission was completed successfully, according to the article you linked...

As a result of this failure they were unable to deploy their payload. The satellite burned up on reentry.

Only if you're dumb enough to let authentication program be suspceptible to such an attack. Dictionary attacks can be trivially defeated by rating limiting tries and after, say, 5 tries not allowing any more attempts for some cooldown period. No attacker is going to bother if they can only have 5 tries every 15 to 20 minutes.

Few attacks actually try to login repeatedly.

If they do, there are botnets that help you try lots in a short period of time.

Most attacks involve dumping the password hash database.

And even brute forcing is getting easier. If you need a SPECIFIC password, it's not any easier, but if you have a bunch of hashes and you want a good chunk of accounts (without caring if you have every account), it's actually easy. In fact, Ars Technica covers a domain-specific brute forcer.that relies on terminology from the sites cracked to get a list of potential passwords EXTREMELY quickly. Follow this with trivial modifications to get more. If you have a list of a million passwords, you could easily derive half of them this way, and then move on to the next list.

Remember, let's differentiate between cracking one SPECIFIC account and password, with cracking AN account and password from a list. You might be cool and use a super complex password that involves every typeable character on the keyboard, and yes, people may not find your password easy to crack. But perhaps your neighbour just used "password". Well, of the two, it's easy to crack AN account, but not a SPECIFIC account.

You probably shouldn't try to write about things you don't know about or understand.

1. The industry accepted way to store passwords securely in a database is with a one-way, salted cryptographic hash (using as CPU intensive algorithm as possible).

2. Many organisations have had database intrusions where these password hashes have been stolen (eg. eBay, Linkedin, LivingSocial etc.)

3. When this happens (i.e. "they have a copy of the password hash") passwords can be cracked offline. Strong passwords are safe (too hard to brute force), but weak passwords can be found using a dictionary attack.

4. Once the password is found offline a hacker can log straight in to the victim's online account with a single password attempt.

Geez, you're quoting someone at a thorium power conference? Who cares what his take is?

(Refering to THIS and THIS )... I sure do. Dodson is a bright, outspoken fellow who is working on his Masters in utility Electrical engineering. He has already demonstrated that he has a grasp of the issues surrounding proper impedance matching of transmission lines and power sources. He arrived at the conference with NERC animations showing synchronous resonance occurring on the grid and explains its significance. This is real stuff.

Let's look around and see what we can see... hmmm, Ars has a whole collection:
http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://arstechnica.com/science...

Yeah, I had to read carefully to make sure they weren't the same article. I can see the folks who gathered these numbers now. They're sitting in cubicles and each article presents an amalgamation of optimistic spreadsheet projections that leverage imagined costs and revenue streams tailored to arrive at a projected goal of 'X" percent renewables. It's money all the way down. Spreadsheet wizards. The planet is awash in such mind games. They're assuming that the grid is some modular component, the perfect sink, that they can click their renewable LEGO pieces into -- perhaps a little column labelled 'retrofit' with a dash of money in it -- and somehow... it will all work. There is a general need for such things but these are suffering from a deficit of engineering reality.

From all I've learned from people working on these problems whom I trust, it won't work. Intermittent sources are polluting the grid in a way that has begin to threaten its stability.

If the country was connected with overlapping rings of HVDC conduit (as it must be some day) then the mere introduction of potential into the ring -- whether it be intermittent or 'noisy' or not -- could happen with near 100% efficiency, AC would be pushed into the legacy grid (which would begin to decouple as the DC feeds become redundant and reliable) -- and ONLY THEN will those spreadsheets work nicely. With a little boost from natural gas here and there. We can even bridge the continents.

This is not that world or that continent, yet. In order to build out our existing resonant AC grid we need to feed it by adding a few, massive generating plants that run 24/7.

Every cent that has been spent attempting to put wind and solar onto the grid has been wasted. Because it has diverted resources away from more serious problems and more sensible approaches.

Geez, you're quoting someone at a thorium power conference? Who cares what his take is?

(Refering to THIS and THIS )... I sure do. Dodson is a bright, outspoken fellow who is working on his Masters in utility Electrical engineering. He has already demonstrated that he has a grasp of the issues surrounding proper impedance matching of transmission lines and power sources. He arrived at the conference with NERC animations showing synchronous resonance occurring on the grid and explains its significance. This is real stuff.

Let's look around and see what we can see... hmmm, Ars has a whole collection:
http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://arstechnica.com/science...

Yeah, I had to read carefully to make sure they weren't the same article. I can see the folks who gathered these numbers now. They're sitting in cubicles and each article presents an amalgamation of optimistic spreadsheet projections that leverage imagined costs and revenue streams tailored to arrive at a projected goal of 'X" percent renewables. It's money all the way down. Spreadsheet wizards. The planet is awash in such mind games. They're assuming that the grid is some modular component, the perfect sink, that they can click their renewable LEGO pieces into -- perhaps a little column labelled 'retrofit' with a dash of money in it -- and somehow... it will all work. There is a general need for such things but these are suffering from a deficit of engineering reality.

From all I've learned from people working on these problems whom I trust, it won't work. Intermittent sources are polluting the grid in a way that has begin to threaten its stability.

If the country was connected with overlapping rings of HVDC conduit (as it must be some day) then the mere introduction of potential into the ring -- whether it be intermittent or 'noisy' or not -- could happen with near 100% efficiency, AC would be pushed into the legacy grid (which would begin to decouple as the DC feeds become redundant and reliable) -- and ONLY THEN will those spreadsheets work nicely. With a little boost from natural gas here and there. We can even bridge the continents.

This is not that world or that continent, yet. In order to build out our existing resonant AC grid we need to feed it by adding a few, massive generating plants that run 24/7.

Every cent that has been spent attempting to put wind and solar onto the grid has been wasted. Because it has diverted resources away from more serious problems and more sensible approaches.

Geez, you're quoting someone at a thorium power conference? Who cares what his take is?

(Refering to THIS and THIS )... I sure do. Dodson is a bright, outspoken fellow who is working on his Masters in utility Electrical engineering. He has already demonstrated that he has a grasp of the issues surrounding proper impedance matching of transmission lines and power sources. He arrived at the conference with NERC animations showing synchronous resonance occurring on the grid and explains its significance. This is real stuff.

Let's look around and see what we can see... hmmm, Ars has a whole collection:
http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://arstechnica.com/science...

Yeah, I had to read carefully to make sure they weren't the same article. I can see the folks who gathered these numbers now. They're sitting in cubicles and each article presents an amalgamation of optimistic spreadsheet projections that leverage imagined costs and revenue streams tailored to arrive at a projected goal of 'X" percent renewables. It's money all the way down. Spreadsheet wizards. The planet is awash in such mind games. They're assuming that the grid is some modular component, the perfect sink, that they can click their renewable LEGO pieces into -- perhaps a little column labelled 'retrofit' with a dash of money in it -- and somehow... it will all work. There is a general need for such things but these are suffering from a deficit of engineering reality.

From all I've learned from people working on these problems whom I trust, it won't work. Intermittent sources are polluting the grid in a way that has begin to threaten its stability.

If the country was connected with overlapping rings of HVDC conduit (as it must be some day) then the mere introduction of potential into the ring -- whether it be intermittent or 'noisy' or not -- could happen with near 100% efficiency, AC would be pushed into the legacy grid (which would begin to decouple as the DC feeds become redundant and reliable) -- and ONLY THEN will those spreadsheets work nicely. With a little boost from natural gas here and there. We can even bridge the continents.

This is not that world or that continent, yet. In order to build out our existing resonant AC grid we need to feed it by adding a few, massive generating plants that run 24/7.

Every cent that has been spent attempting to put wind and solar onto the grid has been wasted. Because it has diverted resources away from more serious problems and more sensible approaches.

As wind builds out, it will provide more electricity than is needed at times. Using that to produce methane provides a drop-in replacement for fossil methane. This is being included in carbon emissions reduction stratagems these days. http://arstechnica.com/science...

If you ask me, the Netgear WNR3500Lv2 is the "true" successor to the WRT54GL:
Pros:
- Cheap! -- around $40
- Is supported by Shibby's Tomato port -- no problems with uptime; frequent updates in the face of Heartbleed, etc.
- 4 Gigabit Ports in addition to the WAN port
- N support
- USB support for a NAS, but I've never used that functionality

Cons:
- Only 300 mBit N support
- Only 2.4 GHz
- Internal antenna only
- Flimsy base, heh. Mine broke, but the router still stands up.

Netgear seemed to be pretty open to the idea of supporting open source firmwares through their My Open Router website and forums. ...But Netgear was also caught with a backdoor in their firmware, like a lot of other vendors, but I would hope that replacing the stock firmware with Tomato would help with that. (Although since I'm using someone else's build instead of doing it myself who knows!)

I've really loved this router, though.

I wish it were newer (AC support I guess?), had a 5 GHz radio and/or supported faster N speeds... but 300 Mbit is enough for anything I'm doing.

You means Java try to follow C# only adding same features couple years after? C# is open source (http://referencesource.microsoft.com/) both the framework and the compiler and ECMA and ISO standard. Java have none of that. Many companies can develop competing runtime environment (mono) with help of Microsoft while in Java you get sue. http://arstechnica.com/informa...

Looks more like he is throwing everything he can think of at the wall in order to find something that might work. Given how slowly the wheels of justice turn it delays the eventual reckoning but Judges tire of the technique eventually

More whole system studies are coming out. Here, for example: http://arstechnica.com/science... but Lovins has paid more attention to the effects of increased transmission as studied, for example, by Mark Jacobson at Stanford. You should notice also that the video is based on an NREL study, so government scientists are also working this. By my calculation. the cast off batteries from the electrification of transportation give half a day's power use in storage at the low cost of merely delaying their trip to the recycler. So, while the need for storage may be a myth, there will be plenty of it regardless.

The name "Mozilla" used to be among the most respected names in computing. It represented integrity, honesty, innovation, and quality software.

Bugzilla was one of their first successes. It was widely used during the early 2000s, and some development teams still use it to this day. It's the kind of tool that helped make a lot of software development teams a lot more efficient, and it helped users do what they could to get a better experience out of the software they were using. People's lives were made better.

And then when Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox first came on the scene, it was revolutionary. Mozilla was graciously providing us with a high-quality open source web browser that was far more secure and usable than its competitors. This new browser offered a better browsing experience for pros and new users alike. A large number of people immediately found it to be useful, and it saw widespread adoption. People's lives were made better.

Then they released Thunderbird. Again, it was a great piece of software that many people rapidly found to be very useful. People's lives were made better.

But then something happened. I don't know exactly what it was, but around 2010 or so things really started to slide downhill for Mozilla. Maybe it was the rise of Google Chrome, which provided some serious competition for Firefox. Maybe it was how they reacted to this competition from Chrome, by throwing away everything that made Firefox good and usable in their rush to imitate Chrome to the very last detail. Maybe it was a change in culture, with more hipsters getting involved, and taking away influence from the sensible old guard who had founded Mozilla and achieved its early success. Maybe it was the rise of mobile computing.

Like I said, I don't know what it was. But since around 2010 we've seen nothing but total bullshit from Mozilla. All of the Firefox design changes have ruined it for a lot of users. The user experience is similar to or worse than Chrome's, but at least Chrome is a faster browser (don't waste our time with the bullshit benchmarks that Mozilla tries to use to ineffectually refute this fact). I read an article linked to from another submission here at /. about how Firefox's usage share is under 13% now, and it is even below Safari's! With Safari, Chrome and even IE giving a better experience than Firefox, it's no wonder why people are switching away!

Then Mozilla gave Thunderbird to the community to maintain, which essentially means they killed it as a product. Then they wasted a bunch of effort on that failed authentication system (sorry, I can't even remember the name of it). And then they wasted even more on that failed mobile OS that nobody really wants. Do they seriously think they're going to compete with iOS and Android by offering a half-assed mobile OS (sorry, I can't remember its name, either) that doesn't support real native apps of any kind? Come on, every HTML5 and JS "app" I've ever seen has been total shit. And if a usable HTML5/JS app ever was created, it would probably run just fine on Android and iOS! There's no need for another mobile OS that'll be less used than even BlackBerry OS and whatever Microsoft's mobile OS is these days.

Although I think that Mozilla has a mobile version of Firefox out now, I don't know anyone who actually uses it. I rarely hear about it, and when I do it's never positive. I do hear positive things about the mobile Opera, Chrome and Safari browsers, though. So as far as I can tell, this mobile version of Firefox is pretty much irrelevant.

And then there were all those shenanigans recently about their former CEO who donated money to some cause that some people got offended about and whined a lot about, causing him to step down, or something like that.

Now we have this whole data leak debacle, which is totally stupid and probably should never have even happened in the fi

With privacy and online freedom becoming more and more of an issue every day, one would think that Mozilla should have an ever-expanding role in today's world.

Just look at the Mozilla Manifesto. It includes statements like:

"The Internet is a global public resource that must remain open and accessible."

"Individuals’ security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional."

"Transparent community-based processes promote participation, accountability and trust."

So when facing corporations and governments who seek to crush privacy, limit freedom and promote opaqueness, people who are concerned about such things should be flocking to Mozilla and products like their Firefox web browser.

But what do we actually see? Well like a Slashdot submission from earlier today showed, people are fleeing Firefox for Chrome and even IE! Firefox now has under a 13% share of the market. Even Safari, which runs on a very limited number of very expensive platforms, is more widely used than Firefox!

It's obvious why this is happening: Mozilla has gone absolutely fucking stupid with Firefox's UI the past several years. They've taken the usable UI that Firefox 3.5 had, and progressively turned it into a god-awful, half-arsed clone of Chrome. What's worse is that Firefox users have repeatedly told Mozilla that these changes are horrible and that they're unwanted, yet these users have been totally ignored.

After having shitty UI changes forced on them one release after another, without end, these users have had enough and have moved to other browsers. If Firefox is going to deliver us a broken UI that looks just like Chrome's, but Firefox is going to run slower and use more memory than Chrome, then we might as well just use Chrome! A half-shitty experience is better than a fully-shitty experience.

Now that Mozilla has driven away so many of the former Firefox users, they've become pretty much irrelevant these days. None of Mozilla's competitors need to listen to them now, none of Mozilla's competitors need to implement anything Mozilla designs, and none of Mozilla's competitors need to care what Mozilla's Firefox users think (since there are, in practice, almost none of them now)!

Mozilla just can't fight for privacy, transparency, security, freedom, and an open Internet when they have no voice, and when they have no influence, and when they have no real power to compel anybody else to do anything.

Whatever good they might have been able to do to help promote a better social environment has been lost. Thanks to some obviously stupid UI redesigns and then showing nothing but total contempt for their users, Mozilla simultaneously managed to drive away most of these users, which has also essentially eliminated their ability to have any influence at all. It's quite sad, really.

Q: What is the launch code for all U.S. Minuteman missiles?

A. 00000000

The moon is much closer to Earth than Mars. It's so close that we can pilot vehicles on the moon manually, like an RC car, with just a two-second delay. Vehicles on Mars need to be a lot smarter.

That said, Opportunity is really slow. Its top speed is 50 mm/s, or .1 MPH. I think Curiosity is actually slower. Maybe one of these private space ventures like Elon Musk's SpaceX can send up a fast (minimum 5 MPH or 2,200 mm/s) rover that just drives and takes pretty pictures.

SoylentNews.org
  OSNews
  DaemonForums
  ArsTechnica
  Distrowatch

"SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada to build their three spaceships, all scheduled for their first manned launches before 2017."

And surprise, surprise. There are serious attempts to pillage that program (CCDev), which is on time, on budget, and (comparatively) insanely cheap, for funds to prop up SLS.

http://arstechnica.com/science...

Re:"Face it, this site and it's users aren't even on their radar."
Yes we are AC
Recall Quantum insert? "GCHQ Created Spoofed LinkedIn and Slashdot Sites To Serve Malware"
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po... (Nov 11 2013)
We are of interest to some part of the intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. What one nation finds is shared with the other 5 :) (and a few other nations too)

I am excited for a google-less android phone. Read this article, and realize that this phone is our best and only hope:

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

Pretty much. This guy nailed it.

Yes a lot of funding has gone into "Containment control".
Air Force research: How to use social media to control people like drones (July 17 2014)
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
"...researchers could be used to sway the opinion of social networks toward a desired set of behaviors—perhaps in concert with some of the social media “effects” cyber-weaponry developed by the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ"
A push by sock puppets in posting AC stories eg the "IP addresses".
Someone has new war PR to sell.

For one thing, 120 USD != "hundreds" unless you refer to a non-U.S. currency also called "dollar". For another, if your laptop was purchased from nearly any vendor other than System76, it almost certainly already came with a copy of OS X if made by Apple else Windows.

Actually, they did. Verizon has just yet to deliver. Apparently they don't expect to deliver until the end of the year in any case.

Which this article seems to implies it takes Verizon a year to send a technician to 7 cities to connect up a few cables between routers. (And / or maybe install a couple of cards). Maybe Verizon should stop having their techs travel by horseback, they might get it done faster.

It's not that simple. This isn't adding cards and cables to an existing interconnect, it's installing a whole new one. In fact, Netflix will be co-locating servers with content either within or close to Verizon's data centers. So there is lots of logistics involved.

Actually, they did. Verizon has just yet to deliver. Apparently they don't expect to deliver until the end of the year in any case.

Which this article seems to implies it takes Verizon a year to send a technician to 7 cities to connect up a few cables between routers. (And / or maybe install a couple of cards). Maybe Verizon should stop having their techs travel by horseback, they might get it done faster.

Actually, they did. Verizon has just yet to deliver. Apparently they don't expect to deliver until the end of the year in any case.

you wouldn't be so infuriated with their stupid requirements (and, I agree, most are stupid) if you just used a password manager. Then the only thing that is annoying is figuring how what parameters of the random generator you have to weaken to get an acceptable password. Instead, you have to remember how you had to adapt your generation rules to their site.

Humans are terrible at selecting passwords, and it isn't just the obvious 123456 or password. If you think you have a clever password method, it isn't. If you think you are randomly selecting characters, you aren't. The bad guys know all of this and exploit it. It may not have fancy equations, but there's some practical information at Ars Technica (e.g., http://arstechnica.com/securit... and http://arstechnica.com/securit...)

Personally, I use a lot of rather weak passwords. You know, for the site that insists I create an account to read it. Whatever, they get the "stupid" password. (And I mean "stupid".) Those are throwaway "accounts" that I couldn't care less if they were hacked. I know the password, because its "stupid", just like all the rest (or "stupid123" if they require numbers). OTOH, if it is a password for access to something I *do* care about it gets a computer generated password that is stored in a password safe. I don't care how hard it is to type, because I don't have to. I don't care how hard it is to remember, because I don't have to.

The only middle ground are login passwords (e.g., to a computer, or something I have to type into a mobile device, ugh!). There the ability to actually input the password can become a consideration, and for a desktop login it has to be memorable -- but when you don't have to remember a laundry list of passwords, the two or three you *do* have to remember aren't that bad (home system, work login, mobile phone -- you *do* lock your mobile devices, right?)

you wouldn't be so infuriated with their stupid requirements (and, I agree, most are stupid) if you just used a password manager. Then the only thing that is annoying is figuring how what parameters of the random generator you have to weaken to get an acceptable password. Instead, you have to remember how you had to adapt your generation rules to their site.

Humans are terrible at selecting passwords, and it isn't just the obvious 123456 or password. If you think you have a clever password method, it isn't. If you think you are randomly selecting characters, you aren't. The bad guys know all of this and exploit it. It may not have fancy equations, but there's some practical information at Ars Technica (e.g., http://arstechnica.com/securit... and http://arstechnica.com/securit...)

Personally, I use a lot of rather weak passwords. You know, for the site that insists I create an account to read it. Whatever, they get the "stupid" password. (And I mean "stupid".) Those are throwaway "accounts" that I couldn't care less if they were hacked. I know the password, because its "stupid", just like all the rest (or "stupid123" if they require numbers). OTOH, if it is a password for access to something I *do* care about it gets a computer generated password that is stored in a password safe. I don't care how hard it is to type, because I don't have to. I don't care how hard it is to remember, because I don't have to.

The only middle ground are login passwords (e.g., to a computer, or something I have to type into a mobile device, ugh!). There the ability to actually input the password can become a consideration, and for a desktop login it has to be memorable -- but when you don't have to remember a laundry list of passwords, the two or three you *do* have to remember aren't that bad (home system, work login, mobile phone -- you *do* lock your mobile devices, right?)

Also, there's the unavoidable problem you have with display clarity. Right now screens are on a flat substrate, and so each pixel is aligned with the next one, which reproduces an image accurately. But what happens when you have an unrolled display sitting on your desk, or held in your hand? It will inevitably be have varying levels of curve along it's length and possibly more complex crumples, resulting in poor image accuracy. Fixing that will require some clever sensors embedded in the display along with some expensive signal processing, and that fix will STILL cost you resolution.

Then when you consider that LG's current flexible displays have poor color rendition and contrast, along with piss-poor resolution, you realize how much of a lost cause this is. I cannot see myself giving up the best qualities of modern displays so that they break a little less often, and can fit in a smaller pocket.

And Microsoft will be happy to sell you an IDE for that.

The corporate strategy does not revolve around MS stack top-to-bottom anymore. It hasn't been like that even in the last couple of years under Ballmer, but that has accelerated a lot under Satya.