For systems with limited access. Where Whipping the PC isn't an option. I would suggest the following. Delete Cache, and Cookies, Clear up your Document Folders.
Then I would run a program that fills the disk with a large file ( or several large files, of random data) then Delete that file. Then Defragment the drive.
Just pull out the disk, put it in an externals enclosure or boot from a USB stick and run a scrubber on the HD. Then reinstall Windows if you feel like it. The Department of Defense used to recommended that drives be scrubbed at least 3 times times before being recycled, now they are recommending 7 times. That being said scrubbing does take time and doing it once is probably enough to defeat most casual attempts at data retrieval. The last time I ran a disk scrubber on a large sized disk 500 Gb it finished one scrubbing round over night.
how about an article about Mac malware that doesn't feel compelled to mention Windows?
Come on, our resident Windows users have to wait months and years between opportunities to to take the piss out the users of other OSes over malware issues. Let them have their fun...
I think I had snake once, and it was really quite tasty. I don't know which kind it was, or indeed if it really was a snake. The idea of snake farming is rather amusing though, especially if there's a risk/reward factor there. Is there a golden taste-to-poison ratio?
While there are many species of venomous snakes there are vey few species of poisonous ones. Many kinds of snake venom can be ingested. The venom will not kill you (unless you have a wound in your mouth) but it may make you throw up. That's why you can suck snake venom from a wound without dying yourself.
So as a result of Amazon caving to my state on the tax thing, I pay 8% more for my purchases, but might eventually get them a day faster. Not being the impatient and impulsive sort, I liked the old system a lot better.
This could however make other online retailers a lot more attractive. If I want to buy, say, an iPad, the cost is the same from any merchant thanks to price-fixing. So I could buy it locally for instant gratification, or online to save the tax. Before Amazon was my go-to for online purchases, being the fastest of the tax-free options. Now, however, I would go to a competitor with no physical presence in the state in order to save good money for waiting a couple extra days.
Going to a local retailer has it's advantages beyond instant gratification, I get to see the product close up and try it out before buying it and I get a better warranty. I mainly go to Amazon because I have read about some product in a review on Ars Technica, The Register, MacNews or some such site and consequentially I find myself wanting that exact product and local retailers don't sell it. Amazon does not have a physical presence in my country so I get a whole lot of VAT and Toll joy at the post office when I pick up the package. Mind you, Amazon has recently started refusing to ship certain goods outside of the national market zone the respective store is responsible for which is extremely annoying. I am now increasingly going to Ebay where a lot of the vendors don't seem to give a shit what country you are from as long as you pay up.
And that punishes people who had nothing to do with. Again, ask the judicial system.
Screw jail time. All that accomplishes is that a few scapegoats go to jail while the rest of the cabal which inevitably escapes prosecution goes and buys new yachts to celebrate getting away with breaking the law. Do what was done here, fine them, except make the fine much bigger. Google shrugs off a $22 million fine, but I $2 billion would get their attention. The only time a corporation feels pain is when it looses money.
Who buys a computer without a warranty that covers its expected usage period? (...) If you skimped on household insurance as well as buying a computer that isn't covered by a warranty you are up a creek without a paddle when your device breaks down.
Yeah... What was I thinking? I've neither, and I had to shell out €125 the other day because I broke my MacBook's top case while opening it. Surely, had I not refused to cough an extra €200 or so to extend my warrantee period by two years when I bought my Mac in 2007, they wouldn't have told me that the warranty period is long ended and doesn't cover me opening my laptop to clean it.
Fwiw, the math is not in your favor... It is never in your interest to extend a warranty. If a PC/car/whatever maker offers you an extended warranty, you're on the receiving end of an overwhelmingly losing bet. The extended period being offered is, as a rule, the one they know carries about zero risk. When it might, they compensate by overcharging for out-of-warranty extras. And all too typically, they'll wiggle out of their obligations much like insurance companies do when you thought you were covered. If you add up the various costs that you save by not extending warranty periods, you're more than enough to cover the occasional repair, and you get to put the leftovers on a savings account.
The math is not in my favor on extended warranties? Where exactly was it that I mentioned or recommended buying extended warranties? I have never bought an extended warranty in my life. In my part of the world law mandates that when a vendor sells you a computer they have to give you a minimum of two years warranty free of charge. I also had the common sense to buy an insurance package that covers my house, everything in it plus my car. People can piss and moan about insurance not being worth while but I just spent the last three years as a penniless student finishing a masters degree. I cut a lot of unnecessary expenses but I never let the household insurance lapse. Just over a year ago I had the exact same thing happen to me as you did, broken display, warranty expired, bank account almost emtpy, I made a claim under my household insurance policy. The insurance company got the thing repaired, and it didn't cost me a dime which as lucky because I would not have been able to replace that computer. Anybody who is dumb enough not to get even basic household insurance on their stuff deserves to get burned. FWIIW I have also claimed repairs under standard, non extended, warranty from Apple and they always repaired my devices without a word of complaint.
The author pretty much lost me as soon as he said it wasn't clear whether people weren't buying iPads due to size.
No that's not what he said, he said it wasn't clear whether the interest in the Galaxy Nexus was due to the Nexus' for it's own sake or whether a lot of the interest is being driven by the fact that here is no 7" iPad. He then went on to imply that we'd see which is the case if and when Apple rolls out a 7" iPad 'Mini'. If it really is the case that people are mostly interested in the Galaxy Nexus because there is no 7" iPad we should see a deflation in interest in the Nexus as soon as the 7" iPad hits the market, if not Apple gets a kick in the nuts when their 7" iPad flops. He never claimed that device size is not a selling point.
and has there been a study if it's cheaper with apple or not? apple repairs can be darn expensive, unless you plan on using the applecare insurance card - in which case you should compare it with buying insurance with the non-apple pc too.
Who buys a computer without a warranty that covers it's expected usage period? In most European countries computer vendors are required by law to offer at least a two year warranty, some offer more than required as a sales incentive. I usually sell my laptops no more than a year after the legally required warranty expires. The bargain hunters who buy them know the risks they are taking, laptop and tablet repairs are always expensive to the point of being uneconomial. But even if the warranty has expired computer repairs are covered by most decent household insurance policies. My insurance replaced a broken iPod and a defective display on an out-of-warranty MacBook. If you skimped on household insurance as well as buying a computer that isn't covered by a warranty you are up a creek without a paddle when your device breaks down.
You're forgetting the part where using improper grammar makes you look like an idiot.
I was wondering when you grammar nazis would get around to sending a regiment our way but I see you felt alarmed enough by that headline to scramble an entire panzer corps.
When you look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which had actually given them an inroad into the media market, the X360 flaw, Vista, blowing shitloads on companies that he knew fuck all what to do with, if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
I'm not sure if there were any chimps involved but they did ship the Zune in fecal matter brown it had a 'squirting' feature.
What's the best way to survive this type of system?
Set up your own religion like L. Ron Hubbard.You could also found your own Fortune 500 corporation but that's more work. Which ever path you choose it boils down to the same truth, if you are the grand poobah you don't have to perform, only punish your underlings for not doing so.
IMHO it's underused, especially on wikipedia. Making statements without providing sources is pure laziness. Anyone can write crap on wikipedia (evidence: wikipedia;), it's the research that is where the actual effort is, and the research should be done by the submitter not the reader. I also find the attitude of "i'll just say whatever the hell I want and if anyone asks for proof i'll just scream profanity at them and claim that they are lazy, and maybe throw in a bit of 'suck it up princess' in there too" kind of dumb. If it was once in a while it would be fine but it's not.
No, wikipedia is not a community divided into contributors ans dobters. Everybody can contribute. If you have enough expertise on the subject of a wikipedia atricle to feel comfortable in doubting its truthfulness, contribute to the community by trying to fix the error before dropping a "citation needed" tag. Is that too much to ask? Most of the time fixing does not take that much more time than injecting a "citation needed" tag.
I'm sick of you lazy fucktards who cannot be bothered to spend 10 seconds on Google.
Hell no. If I had to go and google every crackpot theory every retard on the internet cites as fact I'd never get anything done. Why don't you spend 10 seconds pasting a link and save everyone else the time. This has the added bonus that when we see that your citation is theonion.com we can laugh at you instead of wasting time reading it.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (and potty mouth retorts don't count as evidence, no matter how many expletives you might use).
I agree with him, "citation needed" is overused. One of the wikipedia guidelines i read said it means "I don't believe you, please privise a source" but my experience shows that often it really does means more like "I don't believe you but because I'm a lazy fucktard who can't be bothered to do a simple web search somebody else should fix this". The vast majority of "citation needed" taggings that I have fixed on wikipedia (and I have fixed a bunch of them) were doable in less than five minutes, usually way less. Nobody is asking you to refute every crackpot conspiracy theory out there but surely you can sacrifice a few minutes of your time once in a while to do a simple web search and see if you can easily provide a fix before dropping yet another "citation needed" tag in a wikipedia entry.
I know this is a joke, but seriously what the hell is "developer culture"? There seems to have been this bizarre and nonsensical fad with HR groups about developing corporate culture recently. They'll talk about what their culture is and try to foster it and all sorts of feel good fuzzy things, without even acknowledging that every building and every part of the buildings will have teams that act differently. The only times "culture" seems to make sense is with describing dysfunctional companies where some people don't fit in with the in-crowd and are excluded. I've seen kids complain that the companies they've applied to don't have a good "culture" and whine that they're expected to do unreasonable things like show up on time and get the job done.
Modern corporations have created a world where people are hired and fired at will, where you can return ftom lunch to find yourself locked out of the building only to be laid off by SMS five minutes before your phone is wiped remotelywhile you and a couple of hundred other sods stand there and wonder wtf is goingn on. A week later you then get a call from some HR drone reminding you that by contract you are obligated to train your Indian/Chinese replacement an like it. Problem is that, while convenient, this is not a good environment to foster the kind of team spirit (aka. Culture) that drives companies who do no treat their employees like disposable cutlery.
The problem is that no one knows for sure whether that actually happened. Yes, the Iranians claim that's what they did, but it is unlikely for two reasons: the article specifically mentions that military GPS signals are encrypted (although it wouldn't be the first time that the military decides to use unencrypted channels to send/receive live drone information), and the Iranians are... well, prone to exaggerating their achievements. I'm much more of the opinion that the drone malfunctioned, crash landed, and the Iranians went "PR Jackpot!".
Dont make the mistake of thinking the Iranians are a bunch of ill educated goat herders and dirt farmers I'm sure some of them are ill educated but the Iranians have some pretty intelligent CS and math people, I have met some of them. If the Iranians or anybody else could really hack the encrypted data streams on these drones like those UT researchers seem to be suggesting then the pilotless airforce concept is in trouble (never been a big fan myself). People keep talking about drones as if, when you loosa a squadron of them, you can just break out a new one like a six pack of beer. The problem is that a drone that has JSF or F -22 level tech also has a JSF or F -22 level price tag plus you defenitely do not want a whole brace of them to be hijacked by the enemy and captured in foll working condition along with their precious top secret tecnology and radar absorbant materials.
What a terrible fucking summary. Also, this has been all over the web for nearly a week.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser
It works by ionizing the air with a UV laser to create a path of lowered resistance for the arc to follow.
Yes and the headline stinks too, to be in any kind of sync with the usual/. hyperbole it should have been: "Army, inspired by id Soft's DOOM, creates it's own BFG9000!".
KDE and Chromium. I used to use both, until GNOME3 and Firefox's general suckiness pushed me off onto the alternatives.
I'm kind of on the fence with Chrome, I regard it as a giant piece of spyware but I use it at work because it requires one click to create a security exception every time the Websense thought police software decides to rewrite yet another security certificate as opposed to Firefox where creating a security exception requires three clicks. As for GNOME I rather like it, it's rather fast, and I must be one of a handful of people who actually like the new UI even if it is bug ridden as hell. Even with all of their bugs and shortcomings I still prefer Xfce (despite the disappearing GUI widgets), Gnome (despite the blue screens and non functioning shortcut config utility) or even Unity (even though its still FUBAR) to KDE. I took one look at the latest iteration of the KDE desktop and boy is that thing bloated. It was sluggish on a brand new Lenovo desktop machine with 8GB of ram, an SSD and a NVidia display card.
Iran with nukes, on the other hand, is still theoretical, still has a long way to go, and even if they had nukes the chances are 99:1 that they would use them for MAD and not actually use them and even if the extremely remote chance of a nuclear detonation came to pass, it would almost certainly not affect me in the slightest.
I'm not really sure which would scare me more, an already nuclear weapons capable Israel or the possibility of a nuclear weapons capable Iran (if it isn't there already). The Israelis call Ahmadinejad irrational and judging from some of his public utterances that seems to be true. However, I'm not all that impressed either with the rationality of some of the ultra right wing nutters that we have seen manning Israeli governments over the last couple of decades. Thankfully cooler heads have prevailed until now and at least in the case of Israel, the USA has proven to be a reasonably effective brake on the mindless aggressiveness of some of the more hawkish Israeli politicos.
Sure it does, your property rights expire the moment somebody drives into your town with several tanks and a few hundred armed militia, kills anybody who resists and evicts you and your neighbors from your houses at bayonet point to be locked up in squalid concentration camps. If you don't believe me you can go and ask the Palestinians.
Slashdot Mirror
For systems with limited access. Where Whipping the PC isn't an option. I would suggest the following.
Delete Cache, and Cookies, Clear up your Document Folders.
Then I would run a program that fills the disk with a large file ( or several large files, of random data)
then Delete that file.
Then Defragment the drive.
Just pull out the disk, put it in an externals enclosure or boot from a USB stick and run a scrubber on the HD. Then reinstall Windows if you feel like it. The Department of Defense used to recommended that drives be scrubbed at least 3 times times before being recycled, now they are recommending 7 times. That being said scrubbing does take time and doing it once is probably enough to defeat most casual attempts at data retrieval. The last time I ran a disk scrubber on a large sized disk 500 Gb it finished one scrubbing round over night.
how about an article about Mac malware that doesn't feel compelled to mention Windows?
Come on, our resident Windows users have to wait months and years between opportunities to to take the piss out the users of other OSes over malware issues. Let them have their fun...
I think I had snake once, and it was really quite tasty. I don't know which kind it was, or indeed if it really was a snake. The idea of snake farming is rather amusing though, especially if there's a risk/reward factor there. Is there a golden taste-to-poison ratio?
While there are many species of venomous snakes there are vey few species of poisonous ones. Many kinds of snake venom can be ingested. The venom will not kill you (unless you have a wound in your mouth) but it may make you throw up. That's why you can suck snake venom from a wound without dying yourself.
..... but the idea that it is illegal primarily in order to prevent use of the wonder-material hemp is just silly.
You must be new here...
Google Maps has added cycling directions for the UK. The directions aim for safety rather than speed...
So it sounds a klaxon whenever Jeremy Clarkson is in the vicinity so that the cyclists can run for cover?
So as a result of Amazon caving to my state on the tax thing, I pay 8% more for my purchases, but might eventually get them a day faster. Not being the impatient and impulsive sort, I liked the old system a lot better.
This could however make other online retailers a lot more attractive. If I want to buy, say, an iPad, the cost is the same from any merchant thanks to price-fixing. So I could buy it locally for instant gratification, or online to save the tax. Before Amazon was my go-to for online purchases, being the fastest of the tax-free options. Now, however, I would go to a competitor with no physical presence in the state in order to save good money for waiting a couple extra days.
Going to a local retailer has it's advantages beyond instant gratification, I get to see the product close up and try it out before buying it and I get a better warranty. I mainly go to Amazon because I have read about some product in a review on Ars Technica, The Register, MacNews or some such site and consequentially I find myself wanting that exact product and local retailers don't sell it. Amazon does not have a physical presence in my country so I get a whole lot of VAT and Toll joy at the post office when I pick up the package. Mind you, Amazon has recently started refusing to ship certain goods outside of the national market zone the respective store is responsible for which is extremely annoying. I am now increasingly going to Ebay where a lot of the vendors don't seem to give a shit what country you are from as long as you pay up.
Because of that fine, Apple will have to use the cheap toilet paper for a whole DAY! YOU try to develop with a sore anus!
Umm, Google was the company that ignored the settings on Apple's browser. Google is being fined, not Apple.
Do you lack the ability to comprehend simple sentences, or is your hatred of Apple the issue? ::sigh::
I's called a 'Freudian slip'.
And that punishes people who had nothing to do with. Again, ask the judicial system.
Screw jail time. All that accomplishes is that a few scapegoats go to jail while the rest of the cabal which inevitably escapes prosecution goes and buys new yachts to celebrate getting away with breaking the law. Do what was done here, fine them, except make the fine much bigger. Google shrugs off a $22 million fine, but I $2 billion would get their attention. The only time a corporation feels pain is when it looses money.
Who buys a computer without a warranty that covers its expected usage period? (...) If you skimped on household insurance as well as buying a computer that isn't covered by a warranty you are up a creek without a paddle when your device breaks down.
Yeah... What was I thinking? I've neither, and I had to shell out €125 the other day because I broke my MacBook's top case while opening it. Surely, had I not refused to cough an extra €200 or so to extend my warrantee period by two years when I bought my Mac in 2007, they wouldn't have told me that the warranty period is long ended and doesn't cover me opening my laptop to clean it.
Fwiw, the math is not in your favor... It is never in your interest to extend a warranty. If a PC/car/whatever maker offers you an extended warranty, you're on the receiving end of an overwhelmingly losing bet. The extended period being offered is, as a rule, the one they know carries about zero risk. When it might, they compensate by overcharging for out-of-warranty extras. And all too typically, they'll wiggle out of their obligations much like insurance companies do when you thought you were covered. If you add up the various costs that you save by not extending warranty periods, you're more than enough to cover the occasional repair, and you get to put the leftovers on a savings account.
The math is not in my favor on extended warranties? Where exactly was it that I mentioned or recommended buying extended warranties? I have never bought an extended warranty in my life. In my part of the world law mandates that when a vendor sells you a computer they have to give you a minimum of two years warranty free of charge. I also had the common sense to buy an insurance package that covers my house, everything in it plus my car. People can piss and moan about insurance not being worth while but I just spent the last three years as a penniless student finishing a masters degree. I cut a lot of unnecessary expenses but I never let the household insurance lapse. Just over a year ago I had the exact same thing happen to me as you did, broken display, warranty expired, bank account almost emtpy, I made a claim under my household insurance policy. The insurance company got the thing repaired, and it didn't cost me a dime which as lucky because I would not have been able to replace that computer. Anybody who is dumb enough not to get even basic household insurance on their stuff deserves to get burned. FWIIW I have also claimed repairs under standard, non extended, warranty from Apple and they always repaired my devices without a word of complaint.
The author pretty much lost me as soon as he said it wasn't clear whether people weren't buying iPads due to size.
No that's not what he said, he said it wasn't clear whether the interest in the Galaxy Nexus was due to the Nexus' for it's own sake or whether a lot of the interest is being driven by the fact that here is no 7" iPad. He then went on to imply that we'd see which is the case if and when Apple rolls out a 7" iPad 'Mini'. If it really is the case that people are mostly interested in the Galaxy Nexus because there is no 7" iPad we should see a deflation in interest in the Nexus as soon as the 7" iPad hits the market, if not Apple gets a kick in the nuts when their 7" iPad flops. He never claimed that device size is not a selling point.
and has there been a study if it's cheaper with apple or not? apple repairs can be darn expensive, unless you plan on using the applecare insurance card - in which case you should compare it with buying insurance with the non-apple pc too.
Who buys a computer without a warranty that covers it's expected usage period? In most European countries computer vendors are required by law to offer at least a two year warranty, some offer more than required as a sales incentive. I usually sell my laptops no more than a year after the legally required warranty expires. The bargain hunters who buy them know the risks they are taking, laptop and tablet repairs are always expensive to the point of being uneconomial. But even if the warranty has expired computer repairs are covered by most decent household insurance policies. My insurance replaced a broken iPod and a defective display on an out-of-warranty MacBook. If you skimped on household insurance as well as buying a computer that isn't covered by a warranty you are up a creek without a paddle when your device breaks down.
You're forgetting the part where using improper grammar makes you look like an idiot.
I was wondering when you grammar nazis would get around to sending a regiment our way but I see you felt alarmed enough by that headline to scramble an entire panzer corps.
"all illegal immigrants should be sent back to whence they came. america for americans."
Wasn't that Sitting Bull motto?
http://i173.photobucket.com/albums/w50/alix2304/cartoons%20II/Immigration.jpg
When you look at the man's track record, Zune, Kin, killing playsforsure which had actually given them an inroad into the media market, the X360 flaw, Vista, blowing shitloads on companies that he knew fuck all what to do with, if you would have taken a chimp and left it to fling its own poo at the stock page and then bought major amounts of any stock whose listing was heavily covered in monkey shit I have NO doubt you would have made more money for MSFT than the man who has led the company for the last decade!
I'm not sure if there were any chimps involved but they did ship the Zune in fecal matter brown it had a 'squirting' feature.
So... FOX News was the prototype for this?
Prototype for what, generating a fog of disinformation? That was congress...
What's the best way to survive this type of system?
Set up your own religion like L. Ron Hubbard.You could also found your own Fortune 500 corporation but that's more work. Which ever path you choose it boils down to the same truth, if you are the grand poobah you don't have to perform, only punish your underlings for not doing so.
IMHO it's underused, especially on wikipedia. Making statements without providing sources is pure laziness. Anyone can write crap on wikipedia (evidence: wikipedia ;), it's the research that is where the actual effort is, and the research should be done by the submitter not the reader. I also find the attitude of "i'll just say whatever the hell I want and if anyone asks for proof i'll just scream profanity at them and claim that they are lazy, and maybe throw in a bit of 'suck it up princess' in there too" kind of dumb. If it was once in a while it would be fine but it's not.
No, wikipedia is not a community divided into contributors ans dobters. Everybody can contribute. If you have enough expertise on the subject of a wikipedia atricle to feel comfortable in doubting its truthfulness, contribute to the community by trying to fix the error before dropping a "citation needed" tag. Is that too much to ask? Most of the time fixing does not take that much more time than injecting a "citation needed" tag.
"citation needed."
Look it up yourself you lazy cunt.
I'm sick of you lazy fucktards who cannot be bothered to spend 10 seconds on Google.
Hell no. If I had to go and google every crackpot theory every retard on the internet cites as fact I'd never get anything done. Why don't you spend 10 seconds pasting a link and save everyone else the time. This has the added bonus that when we see that your citation is theonion.com we can laugh at you instead of wasting time reading it.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence (and potty mouth retorts don't count as evidence, no matter how many expletives you might use).
I agree with him, "citation needed" is overused. One of the wikipedia guidelines i read said it means "I don't believe you, please privise a source" but my experience shows that often it really does means more like "I don't believe you but because I'm a lazy fucktard who can't be bothered to do a simple web search somebody else should fix this". The vast majority of "citation needed" taggings that I have fixed on wikipedia (and I have fixed a bunch of them) were doable in less than five minutes, usually way less. Nobody is asking you to refute every crackpot conspiracy theory out there but surely you can sacrifice a few minutes of your time once in a while to do a simple web search and see if you can easily provide a fix before dropping yet another "citation needed" tag in a wikipedia entry.
Obligatory: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-05-19/
I know this is a joke, but seriously what the hell is "developer culture"? There seems to have been this bizarre and nonsensical fad with HR groups about developing corporate culture recently. They'll talk about what their culture is and try to foster it and all sorts of feel good fuzzy things, without even acknowledging that every building and every part of the buildings will have teams that act differently. The only times "culture" seems to make sense is with describing dysfunctional companies where some people don't fit in with the in-crowd and are excluded. I've seen kids complain that the companies they've applied to don't have a good "culture" and whine that they're expected to do unreasonable things like show up on time and get the job done.
Modern corporations have created a world where people are hired and fired at will, where you can return ftom lunch to find yourself locked out of the building only to be laid off by SMS five minutes before your phone is wiped remotelywhile you and a couple of hundred other sods stand there and wonder wtf is goingn on. A week later you then get a call from some HR drone reminding you that by contract you are obligated to train your Indian/Chinese replacement an like it. Problem is that, while convenient, this is not a good environment to foster the kind of team spirit (aka. Culture) that drives companies who do no treat their employees like disposable cutlery.
The problem is that no one knows for sure whether that actually happened. Yes, the Iranians claim that's what they did, but it is unlikely for two reasons: the article specifically mentions that military GPS signals are encrypted (although it wouldn't be the first time that the military decides to use unencrypted channels to send/receive live drone information), and the Iranians are... well, prone to exaggerating their achievements. I'm much more of the opinion that the drone malfunctioned, crash landed, and the Iranians went "PR Jackpot!".
Dont make the mistake of thinking the Iranians are a bunch of ill educated goat herders and dirt farmers I'm sure some of them are ill educated but the Iranians have some pretty intelligent CS and math people, I have met some of them. If the Iranians or anybody else could really hack the encrypted data streams on these drones like those UT researchers seem to be suggesting then the pilotless airforce concept is in trouble (never been a big fan myself). People keep talking about drones as if, when you loosa a squadron of them, you can just break out a new one like a six pack of beer. The problem is that a drone that has JSF or F -22 level tech also has a JSF or F -22 level price tag plus you defenitely do not want a whole brace of them to be hijacked by the enemy and captured in foll working condition along with their precious top secret tecnology and radar absorbant materials.
What a terrible fucking summary. Also, this has been all over the web for nearly a week.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrolaser
It works by ionizing the air with a UV laser to create a path of lowered resistance for the arc to follow.
Yes and the headline stinks too, to be in any kind of sync with the usual /. hyperbole it should have been: "Army, inspired by id Soft's DOOM, creates it's own BFG9000!".
KDE and Chromium. I used to use both, until GNOME3 and Firefox's general suckiness pushed me off onto the alternatives.
I'm kind of on the fence with Chrome, I regard it as a giant piece of spyware but I use it at work because it requires one click to create a security exception every time the Websense thought police software decides to rewrite yet another security certificate as opposed to Firefox where creating a security exception requires three clicks. As for GNOME I rather like it, it's rather fast, and I must be one of a handful of people who actually like the new UI even if it is bug ridden as hell. Even with all of their bugs and shortcomings I still prefer Xfce (despite the disappearing GUI widgets), Gnome (despite the blue screens and non functioning shortcut config utility) or even Unity (even though its still FUBAR) to KDE. I took one look at the latest iteration of the KDE desktop and boy is that thing bloated. It was sluggish on a brand new Lenovo desktop machine with 8GB of ram, an SSD and a NVidia display card.
Iran with nukes, on the other hand, is still theoretical, still has a long way to go, and even if they had nukes the chances are 99:1 that they would use them for MAD and not actually use them and even if the extremely remote chance of a nuclear detonation came to pass, it would almost certainly not affect me in the slightest.
I'm not really sure which would scare me more, an already nuclear weapons capable Israel or the possibility of a nuclear weapons capable Iran (if it isn't there already). The Israelis call Ahmadinejad irrational and judging from some of his public utterances that seems to be true. However, I'm not all that impressed either with the rationality of some of the ultra right wing nutters that we have seen manning Israeli governments over the last couple of decades. Thankfully cooler heads have prevailed until now and at least in the case of Israel, the USA has proven to be a reasonably effective brake on the mindless aggressiveness of some of the more hawkish Israeli politicos.
Copyrights expire.
Property doesn't.
Sure it does, your property rights expire the moment somebody drives into your town with several tanks and a few hundred armed militia, kills anybody who resists and evicts you and your neighbors from your houses at bayonet point to be locked up in squalid concentration camps. If you don't believe me you can go and ask the Palestinians.