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  1. Re:Long distance photo? on MIT Students Release Code To 3D-Print High Security Keys · · Score: 4, Informative

    Whenever you'll be playing with a 12 inch or larger telescope, do yourself a favor and point it onto a terrestrial target a few hundred feet away. I've seen terrestrial pictures being taken through a 20" telescope and all I can tell you is that with clear air it's feels like taking your point and shoot and teleporting it a mile away. Never mind that if you don't care about giving yourself away, you can also flash-illuminate your target through the same optical assembly. I have to dig up some of the portraits my colleague took with his girlfriend standing about 1100 m. away on a winter night, with heavily overcast sky and no moon, with through-the-lens flash. It really looks as if you've been standing right there, except that of course the aberrations typical for closeup pictures are nowhere to be seen. As far as portraits go, a telescope gives you IMHO the best 2D reproduction to be had. I'm sure it'd be just as great at extracting the geometry of a key, since you get as close to axonometric projection as you can get.

  2. Re:Risk Aversion on Crowd-Funding a Mission To Jupiter's Moons · · Score: 1

    Sometimes we're just lazy. Human, even :)

  3. Re:Isn't Europa full of methane or something? on Crowd-Funding a Mission To Jupiter's Moons · · Score: 1

    That's good, it means you'd only need to bring oxidizer with you for the surface mission - no need for fuel.

  4. Re:One way mission? WTF? on Crowd-Funding a Mission To Jupiter's Moons · · Score: 1

    Of course the things you value in life must apply to everyone, by edict, or else! Who the fuck are you to tell others how to live their lives, and how to set up their values?

  5. Re:One way mission? WTF? on Crowd-Funding a Mission To Jupiter's Moons · · Score: 1

    All life ends in death. We're already born with our fucking heads in need of a check, according to you :)

  6. Re:Risk Aversion on Crowd-Funding a Mission To Jupiter's Moons · · Score: 2

    From a risk-reward perspective, this proposal makes no sense, because success is exactly like failure.

    From a risk-reward perspective, human life makes no sense either :) Expanding the line of thinking from the 2nd half of your post, just a bit, leads us to believe that there's almost nothing that we can gain from any of human pursuits. It'd be very easy to construct a similar argument based on similarly sufficiently arbitrary notion of what is a gain. In other words, the "argument" is just a logical fallacy, although it escapes me at the moment which one.

  7. Re:Organized crime on Luxury Car Hacker To Speak At USENIX Despite Injunction · · Score: 1

    What are those public presentations you speak of? Because I think you just made it all up. Universal "tv-zappers" are normally used for turning off annoying stuff in public spaces of some sort, yes, but it's usually for the benefit of everyone present in such space. Nofuckingbody is my corporate overlord enough for me to let them induce a headache just because they think ads blaring in a loop are a good thing to have in a waiting room.

  8. Re:Well maybe there will be some time to fix thing on Luxury Car Hacker To Speak At USENIX Despite Injunction · · Score: 4, Informative

    The researchers informed the chipmaker

    That's the key phrase here. Most likely the chips are not field-reprogrammable. There are no measures to take short of getting new silicon out and recalling the hardware. Knowing the corporate inertia, they'd probably need a year from the date the recall decision was made to implement it and push to the dealers, if they really worked on it like crazy. Fixing crypto where the cost of another mistake may be another recall isn't something you do casually. Presumably some people with suitable theoretical background would need to be contracted and check things out before it hits the fabs. How long would deciding on a recall take I wouldn't know, but presumably not overnight either.

  9. Re:Well maybe there will be some time to fix thing on Luxury Car Hacker To Speak At USENIX Despite Injunction · · Score: 1

    the researchers alert the people responsible for fixing the problem in good time before publication

    This is no openssl vulnerability. Such findings require to spin new silicon, and there's no field fixes short of recalling hardware. It may well be that paying for insurance coverage for increased liability from lawsuits would be cheaper than doing a recall on presumably tens of millions of vehicles from multiple vendors.

  10. Re:Organized crime on Luxury Car Hacker To Speak At USENIX Despite Injunction · · Score: 1

    In case of most transponder modules in keyfobs and the like, I don't think there's anything to repair short of replacing the hardware with as-of-yet vaporware. There's a reason why there's a particular vendor's chip (say Microchip's) in those keyfobs/transponder tubes. There's either nothing else available, or the alternatives are no better. You need to spin new silicon to fix this. So, first the Microchip's stuff from the keyfobs was found vulnerable due to homegrown crypto tech, now whatever is the part of this break, is there anything left out there that's not solidly broken by now?

  11. Re:Organized crime on Luxury Car Hacker To Speak At USENIX Despite Injunction · · Score: 1

    Is it really fixable? The stuff in the transponders is practically a fixed-function unit that can't do anything else and can't be reprogrammed, I'd think. Unless the vulnerability is explicitly in the car-side software and can be patched up.

  12. Re:Dispute - not often at all on SF Airport Officials Make Citizen Arrests of Internet Rideshare Drivers · · Score: 1

    So it's a bit more messed up than I thought, then. I didn't deal with big projects, perhaps thankfully.

  13. Re:Bad comparison. on Watch the Crab Nebula Expand Over a 13 Year Period · · Score: 2

    Many people keep repeating it. To me it seems to indicate that many people are either in serious need of an eye exam, or that they see only what supports their preconceived notions, not how it really is. There is no "slight" movement of the filaments, the images almost look like they were of different nebulas, if it wasn't for the background stars!

  14. Re:LAME!!! just 2 exposures on Watch the Crab Nebula Expand Over a 13 Year Period · · Score: 2

    Why the misinformation?! The background stars don't move, the nebula expands, the color is irrelevant. Watch it in black and white if you must.

  15. Re:Dispute - not often at all on SF Airport Officials Make Citizen Arrests of Internet Rideshare Drivers · · Score: 1

    Um, since when does an inspector have the authority or training to reject something that an engineer/architect has designed? They don't have the training to do so, they are not allowed to make design decisions (it'd be illegal, in fact), and the codes explicitly say that equivalently engineered stuff is off-limits, more-or-less. Is there a lawyer familiar with such things on retainer for the project? There should be.

  16. Re:A tablet isn't a PC. That's the point. on Asus CEO On Windows RT: "We're Out." · · Score: 1

    Huh? Are you sure that the surface pro won't run anything a PC can run?

  17. Re:Dispute - not often at all on SF Airport Officials Make Citizen Arrests of Internet Rideshare Drivers · · Score: 2

    Having recently paid for three permits and six inspections for me and myself doing the work on my own house, I beg to differ. If you're building a non-standard, engineer-designed home, presumably you have enough money to immediately quash any attempts by inspectors at not following the rules. Lawyers come comparatively cheap when you think about the cost of the entire project.

    If they don't get it, they'll (at least they should) ask for plans - plans that are sealed by a PE or an architect and are approved by the county. Yes, inspectors are people, and they may have overcoming their own biases low on their priority list. Still I think you're painting a picture that's overly gloomy.

  18. Re:Dispute - not often at all on SF Airport Officials Make Citizen Arrests of Internet Rideshare Drivers · · Score: 1

    said regulations make it hard to build a non-traditional house, for example

    I don't know where you live, but at least in the U.S., pretty much all building codes say that if an engineer has designed it, so it will be. No problems with non-traditional houses, as long as you've got someone competent to design it.

  19. Re:Zynga on Sad Day In FarmVille: Facebook's New Game Developer Program · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I agree about transient crowd whims - that's precisely the way to call it. Calling games pointless is what I have a bit of trouble with. Is entertainment really only to be valuable to person A if it submits to some random person B's values?

    Most days I don't play any computer games. Some days I feel like playing KSP running cargo missions to resupply some stations. Other days I feel like trying to do gravitational assists without any mods. Some other days I may feel like playing the almost mindless but nevertheless fun Papa's Freezeria or Quake IV. Both are equally almost mindless, although one is more violent than the other :) Yet some other days I may do some zooniversing. All of those activities are equally entertaining to me, yet involve vastly varying levels of intellectual engagement. Just because I'm not doing orbital mechanics, but rather simply transcribing old ship logs doesn't mean it's pointless to me.

    I'd strongly debate the pointlessness of entertainment in general: if it makes you happier, it presumably has some value. I doubt the humanity would go very far with zero fun along the way. We'd all end in suicide, sooner or later.

  20. Re:Premptive STFU to GPL haters on German Court Finds Fantec Responsible For GPL Violation On Third-Party Code · · Score: 2

    What does it mean to be a FOSS company? The way you use it, it's pretty much meaningless. It's a smoke screen. You're trying to make an argument, but you seem yourself a bit puzzled as to what argument you're after.

    GPL is a comparatively simple license, and compliance is fairly easy. If someone claims that it's hard, they IMHO admit to being dense. I still don't get it why would someone need to label themselves "a FOSS company" in order to, you know, comply with the terms of just one one of the multitude of software licenses they have to deal with. GPL is not special in the sense that if you have any complex product that leverages other third party products, you'll be dealing with a bucketload of licenses. Often most of those licenses were never tested in court, have never been scrutinized by anyone but the lawyer(s) who originally wrote them, and in the end seem to be a much bigger pain in the ass than GPL would ever be.

    I posit that in spite of perhaps unwanted freedom that GPL forces upon you and your customers, GPL wins you a lot of free third-party expertise as to what it takes to comply in various locales, and case law to back it up. Last time I checked, some of this legal expertise is billed $500/hour. Any other popular OSS license would give similar benefits. Shrink wrap licenses and one-off licenses (products from small software shops) are potentially much more risky since you don't have a big body of knowledge telling you really what the potential pitfalls are. Even shrink-wrap licenses for popular products like MS Windows have multiple variants and are subject to constant revisions, so their benefits of scale are diminished compared to fairly constant GPL.

  21. Re:Oracle claims the defendants are distrib new ve on Oracle Sues Companies It Says Provide Solaris OS Support In Illegal Manner · · Score: 1

    New support agreements for low-end Cisco gear are fairly cheap. I'd say $300-$500 is what you should budget.

  22. Re:Slowaris Delenda Est on Oracle Sues Companies It Says Provide Solaris OS Support In Illegal Manner · · Score: 1

    In other words, their customers had to wait for this what, more than a decade? LOL.

  23. Re:FOSS license compliance is difficult for many on German Court Finds Fantec Responsible For GPL Violation On Third-Party Code · · Score: 1

    Agreed. After all you can be getting an implementation that was poached by a contractor from GPL sources, for example. Suppose you are making telecom gear and subcontract out the ISDN PRI stuff. It's nothing but very basic due diligence to make sure it didn't get copy-pasted from libpri or the other open source implementation I forget now.

  24. Re:Bigger Issue on German Court Finds Fantec Responsible For GPL Violation On Third-Party Code · · Score: 1

    That's their problem, to be honest. And it's good for me if they wish to make themselves less competetive by giving into FUD.

    You've taken the words out of my mouth. I was just going to say that re-use of de-facto industry standard GPL code in most cases brings huge financial savings. If my competitor doesn't want to leverage that, it's their loss. Same goes for re-use of open communications protocols. Bitch all you want about "dinosaurs" like, say, X.25, but that thing is by now patent free and comes with an extensive machine readable conformance test suite, and is a free download. There is way more if you care to dig in the ITU-T's treasure trove. Same goes for IETF RFCs. A lot of other communications protocols, especially industrial ones, are only "open" in marketing speak. They end up costing thousands of USD just to get the pdfs, and usually a couple thousand more to get the conformance test suites. And you need to license the patents. At least there's a couple that have learned from ITU's approach, and keep their stuff at least free to download like ethernet powerlink or ethercat...

  25. Re:Premptive STFU to GPL haters on German Court Finds Fantec Responsible For GPL Violation On Third-Party Code · · Score: 1

    There is zero risk if you comply with terms of the license. Is that so hard to understand?