Let me get this straight; the NSA (and the other three letter agencies it serves) are willing to blatantly and flagrantly violate the US Constitution, US law, international treaties, the trust of US allies and probably even the boy scout oath along the way, but it heeds the open source licensing model???
I think there are a few problems with this:
Like others have posted, the open source community is going to have to look at the released code very very carefully. The public has to assume that the NSA will include backdoors or obscure weaknesses if at all possible.
The other half of this is how in the hell this release of code passed any internal security review in order to have the release authorized. If *I* were in charge of an intelligence agency, I certainly would use Open Source code when and where practical, but I would NOT submit my code to any third party external to my nations intelligence community. My reasoning is that any code my organization released could be used as clues to figure out my agencies capabilities and current operations. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the code for mandatory access restrictions could be helpful to an enemy because analysis of it would at least allow the enemy to rule out certain forms of attack.
Oh sure, you could make the argument that releasing better code to the world makes everybody using that code base safer, depriving malicious agents of any existing exploits they have in their tool kits and that was probably among the reasons the NSA based its decision on. The problem I have with that argument is that, in other areas the NSA has proven that it is willing to deliberately weaken code that is in public use so as to add to their own tool kits. To fix existing weaknesses while also deliberately creating others seems illogical and self defeating to me...
I said "Polarized covers...prismatic covers...and so on" I did not explicitly say covers to defeat LIDAR I'll grant you. I did, however, implicitly include them in the "...and so on" part of my statement. There are companies which advertise sprays and covers intended to absorb or scatter the near IR wavelength laser light police LIDAR systems use.
Speeding isn't the crime I was referring to, since most places consider most traffic offences to be a civil, not criminal offence. However, use of a device or substance to deliberately obscure your licence plate may or may not be part of the traffic code where you live, but rather covered by the criminal code. If use of a cover plate is considered a criminal act where you live, then the car is being used in the commission of a criminal act even when it's safely parked in your driveway. Having a plate obscured on a dirty vehicle by mud or snow is plausibly neglect, there's no clear proof of intent to evade the law. Thus; most police officers will give you a warning or a "fix-it ticket". But purchasing and installing a device whose sole advertised purpose is to evade detection by police as you break traffic laws inherently displays intent to do exactly that.
Please note that I also said "...in the US". There have been numerous news stories about law abiding people being pulled over for no more reason than having a nice car with out of state plates, having their vehicles searched and cash confiscated as "proceeds of crime" even when there is NO other evidence of any crime. People who then try to protest this get beaten up and charged with resisting arrest. My reasoning is this: If certain officers and/or certain police departments are using any pretext at all to pull someone over and search for things they can confiscate to support their department financially, I certainly don't want to risk driving around with one of the license obscuring items on my car.
There are several companies which market license plate covers designed to obscure your plate when targeted by certain technologies. Polarized covers to defeat roadside speed cameras, prismatic covers to defeat overhead cameras from toll roads and so on.
Problem is; most places in North America and I imagine Europe as well, already have laws on the books covering illegible or obscured registration tags and these covers often fall on the wrong side of the law. Personally, I'd rather get the speeding ticket than a missing/illegible plate ticket and would really really like to avoid any possible "obstruction of a police officer in the performance of his duties" charge.
Something else to consider; based on what seems to be the growing trend in the US: Do you want to get a speeding ticket which usually isn't a criminal act and only nets you a fine Or do you want to use a device whose (arguably) sole purpose is to break the law with impunity, leading to your car being declared as property used in the commission of a crime and confiscated? (while you get beaten half to death and charged with resisting arrest) If you speed, you are only in violation when you speed, but if you put a contraband plate cover on, you are in violation just parked on the street
First count me among those who have provided "specific, constructive and substantive" feedback. I did so because, like many MANY others, I am part of the community you claim to recognize. Yet your actions and words to this point come across as pro forma, like you actually take us for granted.
1) Many of us do NOT want to give up Slashdot "classic" AT ALL and have said so repeatedly and forcefully. Yet you still tell us that it will only be available until you are done fine tuning the new look. (a new look moreover that we've said we hate)
2) you claim to recognize that what makes Slashdot so special is the community, but I think you fail to recognize a key aspect of this community. We are chemists, physicists, developers, sysadmins, engineers and so on. A HUGE percentage of us are not just geeks, but professionally trained and qualified geeks in some profession that takes brains. Over the years we've self-selected that demographic. Your desire to be "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience." runs the risk of diluting what the Slashdot community is. You are courting a new Eternal September and it appears that you don't even realize you are doing so. boards.4chan.org/b/ would cease to be what it is if it became mainstream. I think you can recognize and agree with that. A flood of pop culture would destroy/. just as a flood of nice average folks would destroy/b/ and drive out the/b/tards.
3) This seriously is a New Coke vs Classic Coke moment. Like the people at Coca-cola, you want to increase your market, I get that. Like Coca-cola, you are attempting to do so by copying the kind of features found among the competition. They failed to allow for the fact that they had spent decades differentiating themselves from Pepsi. Copying the Pepsi taste threw all that away. Slashdot is not primarily a content producer, but a news aggregator, so if you go with the glossy magazine look, what is there to separate you from say Ars Technica? We geeks often make a bit of a fetish out of choosing hobbies, sources of info and social situations that are less accessible to the common herd. In other words, we kind of like being outsiders. If you expand your market, you'd be throwing away that abstract sense of clique-ishness that attracts me to this place. I'm probably not alone in that feeling...
4) At the same time, you're not fixing things that in the group opinion, should have been fixed ages ago. Where is the Unicode and foreign language support? I personally support the long standing choice to not allow full HTML in comments, but I may be in the minority on that. I still think we should be able to incorporate umlauts and other accent characters though.
Here are my straightforward suggestions for expanding your appeal and market without killing off what Slashdot is to us long loyal members:
a) Allow the full Unicode set and such
b) Don't EVER "dumb it down". You can try expanding the range of news items you list, maybe add images to if they are truly relevant to the story, but do not simplify things. In fact; feel free to get MORE detailed, more in-depth. Make your own articles +5 Informative or Insightful!
c) spellcheck, spellcheck spellcheck. There should be more to editing that picking a story and copypasta the summary submitted.
d) You already have slashdot.jp , why not slashdot.ru or maybe slashdot.eu ?(which would feature multiple languages, but probably primarily French and German). While you're at it, put links to the other language sites at the bottom of the page.
e) I for one would love to be able to read the days most actively commented stories from the Japanese Slashdot. (or any other language geeky articles might be published in) I have no idea how hard it would be to implement a *decent* auto-translation of top articles in foreign languages. I think it would be easy to do shitty translation on the fly, so the challenge would be t
I've never been one for thread hijacking, flaming or any of that other sort of rude online behaviour. But I just got shown the latest beta.slashdot.org. Unlike during the last attempt at reinventing the place, there doesn't seem to be a story posted about it specifically. Given how long this story has been up on the main feed, it hasn't attracted all that much commentary, so jumping in offtopic here would be less disruptive than in say the latest Google-related news.
I know how much my fellow slashdotters like to nitpick and complain, the place wouldn't feel like home without you curmudgeons out there. (smile) I know *I* don't like the new version, I've never liked any of the new versions that have come along, always sticking with the closest thing to the classic interface that is offered at the time. I prefer the green-bar printout inspired listing of story summaries, not something that looks like it came out of a glossy magazine or pop culture website.
The way I look at it, the more images, the larger the graphics, the more space devoted to pretty floating banners, the less room there is for actual content I shouldn't have to do a full page scroll just to move from one story to the next.
Small problem with your approach: It relies on you knowing what to DO with the N number of pieces given to you by your friends. Sure you may get back A, B, C...but your description seems to imply that the requirement to perform an XOR operation on the pieces is not part of the data you have given to friends. Is your resulting password WhiteSuitRicardoMontalban, WhiteRicardoMontalbanSuit or RicardoMontalbanWhiteSuit? You need the generation method to be part of the recovered data, not just the "seed" if you will. Otherwise you won't know if you need to XOR, concatenate, follow the breadcrumbs or use a simple substitution cipher on the pieces.
A similar problem lies in most of the other "tell N friends to give you the clues needed to find the password" approaches. What happens if one or more friends fail to return the clue they possess? It's like having a hard drive array as a simple spanned volume. Lose one drive and everything is lost. Trying to include a checksum or similar function seems needlessly complex IMHO.
I think most folks are over-thinking this. Lets stipulate that I have lost my memory for whatever reason. All my passwords are generated using a relatively simple pattern. If I was amnesiac, I still have all those passwords saved in my browser, chat and email clients. Amnesiac me can collect email and log into sites that I use as long as my computer is intact. My wife knows the pattern but not the current passwords, if I can't get into the password lockers, my wife can give me the starting point. From there I can access my passwords with as little as 5 tries. However, as long as my email client still has useful passwords, the vast majority of my password list can be reset with a simple "I forgot my password" request. If, for whatever reason, those two options aren't good enough, I really don't care y'know? If I'm amnesiac, I have much bigger problems on my plate than whether I can access any social sites, member-only areas of sites and so on. Given the kind of brain trauma needed to get significant amnesia, I probably would not have much use for email for the first while anyway.
Criminals skillfully disabling alarm system after alarm system, entering and leaving with next to no trace are the stuff of jewel heist movies. For decades, the advice of experts has been to make things difficult (not impossible) for thieves to steal your stuff. That's because thieves are usually a) lazy b) stupid c)) feeding a habit or d) some combination thereof. As a rule, they are looking for the quick score. The will not spend hours disabling alarms in order to steal your TV/computer/jewellery/etc when there are numerous other apartments in the same building or homes in the same neighbourhood that don't have that protection.
Even if we stipulate, for the sake of argument, that some criminal did break into his home in this manner, that leaves us the obvious question of why the fuck wasn't anything taken? Thieves takes things, that's pretty much the definition! Whoever broke in could have taken all of his valuables, but didn't. Ergo, he, she or they weren't interested in valuables.
Then there is the fact that it would appear that some care was taken to leave minimal traces of the illicit visit. Again, this is not the behaviour of your typical burglar. B&E guys know that most of the time cops won't bother with the whole forensic fingerprints, DNA analysis etcetera. As long as they don't leave clear prints in obvious places, the cops will usually just file a report and move on. It is just not cost effective to spend tens of thousands of department funds to pursue your typical B&E.
The only logical conclusions we can make here is that:
a) The perpetrator(s) were far more skilled and patient than your average burglar
b) They weren't after fence-able valuables
c) They were interested in something they thought he had that none of his neighbours had.
d) Based on the access to his computers, what they were interested in was electronic data of some sort.
e) Given his long standing political views, he may have been investigated by the German intelligence community on general principles, but given his well known connection to Edward Snowden, it is highly probable that he was being investigated by someone with a strong interest in that situation.
f) Virtually all of the groups with access to people with those skills and with a strong interest in the Snowden case are state actors, mostly in the covert community.
I'll concede that there is a small chance that some private sector group might be involved with this. There may be a group on the scale of Anonymous that also acts on the real world/physical level and is (therefore) more paranoid about associating themselves with any actions. One could hypothesize that such a group was looking for data so that they could reach out and help Snowden with his agenda without leaving any clues for other agencies to follow as to how they found him, but I think that is a very low probability. (it would make for a great plot for some cyberpunk novel though wouldn't it?)
Mr Kaveh Kamooneh is clearly not white, in fact appears to be of middle eastern descent, and this arrest was in Georgia after all. If the arrrest happened up here in Canada, it wouldn't even occur to me that race might be involved, particularly since the arresting officers are just as likely to be non-white themselves. But since it was indeed in Georgia, there is a small chance that race might have been involved in the decision to proceed with criminal charges.
You fool! You've doomed us all! Your lack of seething hatred for the beta, indeed the audacity to say neutral things about it, gives Timothy/Soulskill et al the chance to cherry-pick your comment and believe that they haven't failed as massively as the rest of us claim.
Seriously though, You're still voting in favour of:
1) larger default text
2) huuuuuuuuge amounts of whitespace (which we are cynically certain will become ad space as soon as it's out of beta)
3) useless stock photos whose sole purpose are eye magnets
4) a photo-mosaic approach to summarizing the top stories in the default view. (I'm sure anyone with vision issues is gonna hate this)
5) Crippling the nested/threaded comment system. Which; as many have pointed out, is an important, I dare say critical and fundamental component of/.
6) More obvious whoring out to social media venues, a phenomenon which a rather large and vocal portion of us hate and bash at every opportunity. (C'mon Soulskill, do you really think many of us are going to link to here on Facebook? And even if we did, would you *want* the kind of yammerheads you'd catch casting a net in those waters?)
7) an overall marketing and packaging approach more suited to a glossy magazine than a salon where the articles are stimulators for lively conversation, debate and even outright arguing over by a self selected group of reasonably intelligent people. (trolls notwithstanding) Shallow glitz over actual content.
I've seen a lot of conversation over the fact that earth harbours many extremophiles. We have found life that survives, occasionally even thrives in environments that would be immediately fatal to the vast majority of life that we know of. The thing is though, I rarely see anyone pointing out a few key facts and questions:
1) Sure, life can survive in some pretty inhospitable environments, but can it arise in those environments? As i understand it, life as we know it arose in comparatively benign, even ideal conditions for the chemistry to work out well. Only after literally billions of years did life manage to evolve the ability to exist in the extreme environments we are just beginning to study and understand today. Saline geysers, black smokers and deep arctic boulders all apparently got colonized slowly over time by lifeforms that could handle just a bit more of the extreme condition(s) than its competitors. Step by step until they had evolved so far from the original environment it could no longer go back.
2) Sure, our probes and such could be contaminated by earthly microflora, but what are the odds that anything that could live in the shirtsleeve environment of a space vehicle assembly would also be able to survive long enough to reproduce at all in the environments we send them to? Europa has a surface temp of something like MINUS 160 Celsius. IIRC, the coldest ever recorded on Earth was like -90C. I'm not a chemist, but it seems to me that being in an environment where carbon chemistry flat out can't work because the environment is too cold is far more of a showstopper than the radiation level, aridity/liquidity, salinity or metallicity of the landing area. Can carbon based stereochemical reactions even occur at those sorts of low temperatures? IIRC, most of the possible alternative elemental bases for life chemistry, like sulfur and silianes require significant *higher* temperatures than anything carbon based could survive, so we are't likely to find any of those on Europa either.
As other posters have pointed out, the presitige of say Nature or Journal of American Medicine is very hard to match, let alone exceed. Prestige is not something you can just collectively decide to bestow. A given publication starts with a certain degree of respect/prestige when it is founded, based on the credentials of the founders. From there, it EARNS it's reputation over years, often decades of established track record. Trying to *choose* to accord prestige to a publication is like everyone deciding that, as of tomorrow, Joe Blow is going to be a world famous author and Generic Garage Band is going to be so well known that their next concert will be a sold out stadium venue.
Worse yet is the fact that, in academic publications, it's not the opinion of the authors that matters, nor is it, to a lessor extent, the opinion of the authors peers in that discipline that matters either. As others her have pointed out, publication is important for two reasons beyond the academic consideration of advancing the field. Being published in say Nature, matters for tenure and grant applications as well. It's the presitige of the publication of non-academics in the academic field that matters for those issues. You not only have to convince Professor Steamhead of the integrity of your Open publication, but convince the Dean of Steamology that a) Example Journal is as good prestige wise as Nature and b) This fact is already well established in that field, so all the other deans and grant board chairmen know this too.,/i>
THAT is the hard thing to establish, the near universal understanding and presumption that new and shiny Open Journal for Steamology is just as good as Proceedings of the Royal Society for Steamology which has been publishing for over 80 years.
there might not be much activity per se during a behind the scenes shop tour of your operation, but i can think of several things you could share with us nerds that we'd probably find interesting.:
1) how you generate the requirements for a medical device, the brainstorming period before you start actually working on materials
2) How you test a material for a particular application, why cobalt alloys might be used for a particular implant rather than titanium or surgical stainless steel.
3) Your projects are the kind of thing we hear about a few years down the road when device X gets approval for human applications, you could give us a sneak peek (intellectual property restrictions permitting) of the sort of thing you are working on now that mght be approved for human use in the near future.
4) Obviously most of your materials are valuable enough that you do a fair bit of waste recovery, but I imagine you or some of your employees still manage to come up with nifty little doo-dads out of scrap pieces. Cobalt alloys make for real pretty jewellry pieces.
5) what's the machiniblilty of alloys like vitallium like? Do you see any medical applications for stuff like metallic micro-lattice, aerogel or aerographite?
6) What device were you looking at that boralyn for? There's a surprising paucity of info on that alloy, mostly related to a single company's bike frame.
7) I think your shop would be interesting, but you say that there are other amazing shops out there, can you point us to some of them?
I once posted elsewhere about what *I* think would be great subjects for video.slashdot.org, behind the scenes at the computer room of a major observatory for example. I think getting a video tour of your shop might be equally fascinating. Exotic boron and/or titantium alloys and it's not an aerospace application? I'm guessing racing bicycles or Formula 1 fabrication work. Either way, I'd love to see an interview where you discuss what it's like working with these unusual materials.
Or Richard Kea AKA the Eternal Emperor of the Sten Chronicles, who was not a clone in the usual sense, since the mind was transcribed into each new body as well, so it was arguably the same man.
Making a rigid sphere to resist 1 atm differential is easy, the problem is making such a sphere that, when containing a vacuum, is light enough to weigh less then the total weight of air that the sphere displaces. If you can make such a rigid yet light container, you have the potential to create balloons with greater lift capacity than hydrogen filled gas-bags.
What vlm was saying is that the low weight and high strength of titanium makes it feasible (on paper) to create a thin foil sphere of titanium that encloses a vacuum, but such a structure would be so close to failure that it wouldn't be practical to construct it, even the lightest touch would cause the sphere to collapse.
(it occurs to me that even if you *could* build such a structure, it wouldn't contain a vacuum for very long anyway, as hydrogen and possibly helium would migrate through the foil and fill the void, negating any increase in lift the vacuum had provided)
I'm just guessing here, but I think what is going on is that the GP AC supports a hacking group that uses the initials CFC and taunting another group that is referred to by -A-. It's possible that -A- refers to the well known Anonymous group, but I doubt it. It is also possible that CFC is involved in the cybercrime case mentioned in TFA. One possible scenario is that -A- is believed to be responsible for the original crime and CFC is responsible for making a game out of passing tips to the police.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but researchers have been successfully cloning whole mammals like cats and sheep for some time now. It's been nine years since Dolly the sheep was cloned. I am not a biologist, but it seems to me that if we can clone one mammal, then the same broad set of techniques can be used to clone pretty much any other animal. If I recall correctly, to achieve the success of Dolly, the research team had to go through many, many attempts before achieving success, a failure rate which might not be acceptable for human cloning.
That assumes you are trying to clone a whole being of course. Cloning of organs or partial cloning of tissues should be rather easier to achieve.
As far as I'm concerned, human cloning can be treated as an accomplished fact, meaning it is now high time we started drafting ethical guidelines and legislative actions to limit the types of cloning we do. Cloning a new organ for you, or creating a clone you and your spouse wish to raise as your child is OK in my book (and most others I think) but creating an entire clone so you can harvest multiple organs or perform a brain transplant is, to me, a heinous and incredibly callous act. It requires that an individual be brought into this world solely for the purpose of being murdered and used as spare parts.
Yeah, sure, we don't know how to achieve that, not yet. But it is far from being science fiction at this point. Achieving that capability is just a matter of time.
what is this unity-lens-shopping of which you speak?
I am using Ubuntu 12.04 and Gnome in Fallback mode because I still want Compiz and all that pretty desktop cube eye candy, but I still have all the default Unity crap still installed.
Attempting to use the command you suggested (in simulate mode only because I don't want to make any real changes) gives me this result:
Slashdot Mirror
I think there are a few problems with this:
Like others have posted, the open source community is going to have to look at the released code very very carefully. The public has to assume that the NSA will include backdoors or obscure weaknesses if at all possible.
The other half of this is how in the hell this release of code passed any internal security review in order to have the release authorized. If *I* were in charge of an intelligence agency, I certainly would use Open Source code when and where practical, but I would NOT submit my code to any third party external to my nations intelligence community. My reasoning is that any code my organization released could be used as clues to figure out my agencies capabilities and current operations. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the code for mandatory access restrictions could be helpful to an enemy because analysis of it would at least allow the enemy to rule out certain forms of attack.
Oh sure, you could make the argument that releasing better code to the world makes everybody using that code base safer, depriving malicious agents of any existing exploits they have in their tool kits and that was probably among the reasons the NSA based its decision on. The problem I have with that argument is that, in other areas the NSA has proven that it is willing to deliberately weaken code that is in public use so as to add to their own tool kits. To fix existing weaknesses while also deliberately creating others seems illogical and self defeating to me...
Speeding isn't the crime I was referring to, since most places consider most traffic offences to be a civil, not criminal offence. However, use of a device or substance to deliberately obscure your licence plate may or may not be part of the traffic code where you live, but rather covered by the criminal code. If use of a cover plate is considered a criminal act where you live, then the car is being used in the commission of a criminal act even when it's safely parked in your driveway. Having a plate obscured on a dirty vehicle by mud or snow is plausibly neglect, there's no clear proof of intent to evade the law. Thus; most police officers will give you a warning or a "fix-it ticket". But purchasing and installing a device whose sole advertised purpose is to evade detection by police as you break traffic laws inherently displays intent to do exactly that.
Please note that I also said "...in the US". There have been numerous news stories about law abiding people being pulled over for no more reason than having a nice car with out of state plates, having their vehicles searched and cash confiscated as "proceeds of crime" even when there is NO other evidence of any crime. People who then try to protest this get beaten up and charged with resisting arrest. My reasoning is this: If certain officers and/or certain police departments are using any pretext at all to pull someone over and search for things they can confiscate to support their department financially, I certainly don't want to risk driving around with one of the license obscuring items on my car.
Problem is; most places in North America and I imagine Europe as well, already have laws on the books covering illegible or obscured registration tags and these covers often fall on the wrong side of the law. Personally, I'd rather get the speeding ticket than a missing/illegible plate ticket and would really really like to avoid any possible "obstruction of a police officer in the performance of his duties" charge.
Something else to consider; based on what seems to be the growing trend in the US: Do you want to get a speeding ticket which usually isn't a criminal act and only nets you a fine Or do you want to use a device whose (arguably) sole purpose is to break the law with impunity, leading to your car being declared as property used in the commission of a crime and confiscated? (while you get beaten half to death and charged with resisting arrest) If you speed, you are only in violation when you speed, but if you put a contraband plate cover on, you are in violation just parked on the street
1) Many of us do NOT want to give up Slashdot "classic" AT ALL and have said so repeatedly and forcefully. Yet you still tell us that it will only be available until you are done fine tuning the new look. (a new look moreover that we've said we hate)
2) you claim to recognize that what makes Slashdot so special is the community, but I think you fail to recognize a key aspect of this community. We are chemists, physicists, developers, sysadmins, engineers and so on. A HUGE percentage of us are not just geeks, but professionally trained and qualified geeks in some profession that takes brains. Over the years we've self-selected that demographic. Your desire to be "more accessible and shareable by a wider audience." runs the risk of diluting what the Slashdot community is. You are courting a new Eternal September and it appears that you don't even realize you are doing so. boards.4chan.org/b/ would cease to be what it is if it became mainstream. I think you can recognize and agree with that. A flood of pop culture would destroy /. just as a flood of nice average folks would destroy /b/ and drive out the /b/tards.
3) This seriously is a New Coke vs Classic Coke moment. Like the people at Coca-cola, you want to increase your market, I get that. Like Coca-cola, you are attempting to do so by copying the kind of features found among the competition. They failed to allow for the fact that they had spent decades differentiating themselves from Pepsi. Copying the Pepsi taste threw all that away. Slashdot is not primarily a content producer, but a news aggregator, so if you go with the glossy magazine look, what is there to separate you from say Ars Technica? We geeks often make a bit of a fetish out of choosing hobbies, sources of info and social situations that are less accessible to the common herd. In other words, we kind of like being outsiders. If you expand your market, you'd be throwing away that abstract sense of clique-ishness that attracts me to this place. I'm probably not alone in that feeling...
4) At the same time, you're not fixing things that in the group opinion, should have been fixed ages ago. Where is the Unicode and foreign language support? I personally support the long standing choice to not allow full HTML in comments, but I may be in the minority on that. I still think we should be able to incorporate umlauts and other accent characters though.
Here are my straightforward suggestions for expanding your appeal and market without killing off what Slashdot is to us long loyal members: a) Allow the full Unicode set and such
b) Don't EVER "dumb it down". You can try expanding the range of news items you list, maybe add images to if they are truly relevant to the story, but do not simplify things. In fact; feel free to get MORE detailed, more in-depth. Make your own articles +5 Informative or Insightful!
c) spellcheck, spellcheck spellcheck. There should be more to editing that picking a story and copypasta the summary submitted.
d) You already have slashdot.jp , why not slashdot.ru or maybe slashdot.eu ?(which would feature multiple languages, but probably primarily French and German). While you're at it, put links to the other language sites at the bottom of the page.
e) I for one would love to be able to read the days most actively commented stories from the Japanese Slashdot. (or any other language geeky articles might be published in) I have no idea how hard it would be to implement a *decent* auto-translation of top articles in foreign languages. I think it would be easy to do shitty translation on the fly, so the challenge would be t
I know how much my fellow slashdotters like to nitpick and complain, the place wouldn't feel like home without you curmudgeons out there. (smile) I know *I* don't like the new version, I've never liked any of the new versions that have come along, always sticking with the closest thing to the classic interface that is offered at the time. I prefer the green-bar printout inspired listing of story summaries, not something that looks like it came out of a glossy magazine or pop culture website.
The way I look at it, the more images, the larger the graphics, the more space devoted to pretty floating banners, the less room there is for actual content I shouldn't have to do a full page scroll just to move from one story to the next.
If I even had a bitcoin wallet, it would have been given a password using the same simple generation ruleset that all my other passwords are based on.
A similar problem lies in most of the other "tell N friends to give you the clues needed to find the password" approaches. What happens if one or more friends fail to return the clue they possess? It's like having a hard drive array as a simple spanned volume. Lose one drive and everything is lost. Trying to include a checksum or similar function seems needlessly complex IMHO.
I think most folks are over-thinking this. Lets stipulate that I have lost my memory for whatever reason. All my passwords are generated using a relatively simple pattern. If I was amnesiac, I still have all those passwords saved in my browser, chat and email clients. Amnesiac me can collect email and log into sites that I use as long as my computer is intact. My wife knows the pattern but not the current passwords, if I can't get into the password lockers, my wife can give me the starting point. From there I can access my passwords with as little as 5 tries. However, as long as my email client still has useful passwords, the vast majority of my password list can be reset with a simple "I forgot my password" request. If, for whatever reason, those two options aren't good enough, I really don't care y'know? If I'm amnesiac, I have much bigger problems on my plate than whether I can access any social sites, member-only areas of sites and so on. Given the kind of brain trauma needed to get significant amnesia, I probably would not have much use for email for the first while anyway.
Even if we stipulate, for the sake of argument, that some criminal did break into his home in this manner, that leaves us the obvious question of why the fuck wasn't anything taken? Thieves takes things, that's pretty much the definition! Whoever broke in could have taken all of his valuables, but didn't. Ergo, he, she or they weren't interested in valuables.
Then there is the fact that it would appear that some care was taken to leave minimal traces of the illicit visit. Again, this is not the behaviour of your typical burglar. B&E guys know that most of the time cops won't bother with the whole forensic fingerprints, DNA analysis etcetera. As long as they don't leave clear prints in obvious places, the cops will usually just file a report and move on. It is just not cost effective to spend tens of thousands of department funds to pursue your typical B&E.
The only logical conclusions we can make here is that:
a) The perpetrator(s) were far more skilled and patient than your average burglar
b) They weren't after fence-able valuables
c) They were interested in something they thought he had that none of his neighbours had.
d) Based on the access to his computers, what they were interested in was electronic data of some sort.
e) Given his long standing political views, he may have been investigated by the German intelligence community on general principles, but given his well known connection to Edward Snowden, it is highly probable that he was being investigated by someone with a strong interest in that situation.
f) Virtually all of the groups with access to people with those skills and with a strong interest in the Snowden case are state actors, mostly in the covert community.
I'll concede that there is a small chance that some private sector group might be involved with this. There may be a group on the scale of Anonymous that also acts on the real world/physical level and is (therefore) more paranoid about associating themselves with any actions. One could hypothesize that such a group was looking for data so that they could reach out and help Snowden with his agenda without leaving any clues for other agencies to follow as to how they found him, but I think that is a very low probability. (it would make for a great plot for some cyberpunk novel though wouldn't it?)
Mr Kaveh Kamooneh is clearly not white, in fact appears to be of middle eastern descent, and this arrest was in Georgia after all. If the arrrest happened up here in Canada, it wouldn't even occur to me that race might be involved, particularly since the arresting officers are just as likely to be non-white themselves. But since it was indeed in Georgia, there is a small chance that race might have been involved in the decision to proceed with criminal charges.
bonus points if you also include quotes of the great "turbo-encabulator" technical film!
Seriously though, You're still voting in favour of:
1) larger default text
2) huuuuuuuuge amounts of whitespace (which we are cynically certain will become ad space as soon as it's out of beta)
3) useless stock photos whose sole purpose are eye magnets
4) a photo-mosaic approach to summarizing the top stories in the default view. (I'm sure anyone with vision issues is gonna hate this)
5) Crippling the nested/threaded comment system. Which; as many have pointed out, is an important, I dare say critical and fundamental component of /.
6) More obvious whoring out to social media venues, a phenomenon which a rather large and vocal portion of us hate and bash at every opportunity. (C'mon Soulskill, do you really think many of us are going to link to here on Facebook? And even if we did, would you *want* the kind of yammerheads you'd catch casting a net in those waters?)
7) an overall marketing and packaging approach more suited to a glossy magazine than a salon where the articles are stimulators for lively conversation, debate and even outright arguing over by a self selected group of reasonably intelligent people. (trolls notwithstanding) Shallow glitz over actual content.
Y'know, say for sysadmin appreciation day (July 25th) , or for April 1 instead of some gawd-awful "OMGPonies!" colour scheme?
+1 Informative
1) Sure, life can survive in some pretty inhospitable environments, but can it arise in those environments? As i understand it, life as we know it arose in comparatively benign, even ideal conditions for the chemistry to work out well. Only after literally billions of years did life manage to evolve the ability to exist in the extreme environments we are just beginning to study and understand today. Saline geysers, black smokers and deep arctic boulders all apparently got colonized slowly over time by lifeforms that could handle just a bit more of the extreme condition(s) than its competitors. Step by step until they had evolved so far from the original environment it could no longer go back.
2) Sure, our probes and such could be contaminated by earthly microflora, but what are the odds that anything that could live in the shirtsleeve environment of a space vehicle assembly would also be able to survive long enough to reproduce at all in the environments we send them to? Europa has a surface temp of something like MINUS 160 Celsius. IIRC, the coldest ever recorded on Earth was like -90C. I'm not a chemist, but it seems to me that being in an environment where carbon chemistry flat out can't work because the environment is too cold is far more of a showstopper than the radiation level, aridity/liquidity, salinity or metallicity of the landing area. Can carbon based stereochemical reactions even occur at those sorts of low temperatures? IIRC, most of the possible alternative elemental bases for life chemistry, like sulfur and silianes require significant *higher* temperatures than anything carbon based could survive, so we are't likely to find any of those on Europa either.
Worse yet is the fact that, in academic publications, it's not the opinion of the authors that matters, nor is it, to a lessor extent, the opinion of the authors peers in that discipline that matters either. As others her have pointed out, publication is important for two reasons beyond the academic consideration of advancing the field. Being published in say Nature, matters for tenure and grant applications as well. It's the presitige of the publication of non-academics in the academic field that matters for those issues. You not only have to convince Professor Steamhead of the integrity of your Open publication, but convince the Dean of Steamology that a) Example Journal is as good prestige wise as Nature and b) This fact is already well established in that field, so all the other deans and grant board chairmen know this too.,/i>
THAT is the hard thing to establish, the near universal understanding and presumption that new and shiny Open Journal for Steamology is just as good as Proceedings of the Royal Society for Steamology which has been publishing for over 80 years.
1) how you generate the requirements for a medical device, the brainstorming period before you start actually working on materials 2) How you test a material for a particular application, why cobalt alloys might be used for a particular implant rather than titanium or surgical stainless steel. 3) Your projects are the kind of thing we hear about a few years down the road when device X gets approval for human applications, you could give us a sneak peek (intellectual property restrictions permitting) of the sort of thing you are working on now that mght be approved for human use in the near future. 4) Obviously most of your materials are valuable enough that you do a fair bit of waste recovery, but I imagine you or some of your employees still manage to come up with nifty little doo-dads out of scrap pieces. Cobalt alloys make for real pretty jewellry pieces. 5) what's the machiniblilty of alloys like vitallium like? Do you see any medical applications for stuff like metallic micro-lattice, aerogel or aerographite? 6) What device were you looking at that boralyn for? There's a surprising paucity of info on that alloy, mostly related to a single company's bike frame. 7) I think your shop would be interesting, but you say that there are other amazing shops out there, can you point us to some of them?
I once posted elsewhere about what *I* think would be great subjects for video.slashdot.org, behind the scenes at the computer room of a major observatory for example. I think getting a video tour of your shop might be equally fascinating. Exotic boron and/or titantium alloys and it's not an aerospace application? I'm guessing racing bicycles or Formula 1 fabrication work. Either way, I'd love to see an interview where you discuss what it's like working with these unusual materials.
Or Richard Kea AKA the Eternal Emperor of the Sten Chronicles, who was not a clone in the usual sense, since the mind was transcribed into each new body as well, so it was arguably the same man.
What vlm was saying is that the low weight and high strength of titanium makes it feasible (on paper) to create a thin foil sphere of titanium that encloses a vacuum, but such a structure would be so close to failure that it wouldn't be practical to construct it, even the lightest touch would cause the sphere to collapse.
(it occurs to me that even if you *could* build such a structure, it wouldn't contain a vacuum for very long anyway, as hydrogen and possibly helium would migrate through the foil and fill the void, negating any increase in lift the vacuum had provided)
I'm just guessing here, but I think what is going on is that the GP AC supports a hacking group that uses the initials CFC and taunting another group that is referred to by -A-. It's possible that -A- refers to the well known Anonymous group, but I doubt it. It is also possible that CFC is involved in the cybercrime case mentioned in TFA. One possible scenario is that -A- is believed to be responsible for the original crime and CFC is responsible for making a game out of passing tips to the police.
XKCD, Something Positive, Questionable Content, Sinfest and Gone with the Blastwave...
by Jeremiah Cornelius (137) on Tuesday December 25, @11:39AM
Says the man spending Christmas morning with his computer, reading Slashdot instead of hanging out with fellow humans in the real world...
That assumes you are trying to clone a whole being of course. Cloning of organs or partial cloning of tissues should be rather easier to achieve.
As far as I'm concerned, human cloning can be treated as an accomplished fact, meaning it is now high time we started drafting ethical guidelines and legislative actions to limit the types of cloning we do. Cloning a new organ for you, or creating a clone you and your spouse wish to raise as your child is OK in my book (and most others I think) but creating an entire clone so you can harvest multiple organs or perform a brain transplant is, to me, a heinous and incredibly callous act. It requires that an individual be brought into this world solely for the purpose of being murdered and used as spare parts.
Yeah, sure, we don't know how to achieve that, not yet. But it is far from being science fiction at this point. Achieving that capability is just a matter of time.
I am using Ubuntu 12.04 and Gnome in Fallback mode because I still want Compiz and all that pretty desktop cube eye candy, but I still have all the default Unity crap still installed. Attempting to use the command you suggested (in simulate mode only because I don't want to make any real changes) gives me this result:
root@machine1:/home/User# dpkg --simulate --purge unity-lens-shopping dpkg: warning: there's no installed package matching unity-lens-shopping
Furthermore; browsing through Synaptic Package Manager reveals the following unity-lens-* packages:
unity-lens-applications (installed)
unity-lens-askubuntu (not installed)
unity-lens-files (installed)
unity-lens-github (not installed)
unity-lens-gwibber (not installed)
unity-lens-music (installed)
unity-lens-sshsearch (not installed)
unity-lens-video (installed)
unity-lens-vm (not installed)
unity-lens-wikipedia (not installed)
It's my understanding that unity-lens-shopping is part of 12.10 and later and also that it only effects people still using Unity and Dash.