Try something safer first - fix baggage handling
by trolltalk.com (1108067)

Before trying something as ambitious as routing airplanes, why not see if they can route luggage?

1. If it doesn't work, it can't get much worse than the current situation
2. So terrorists hack the system - and your luggage actually ends up where its supposed to go for a change!
3. Try crashing a Samsonite into a scyscraper ...

Re:Second Patent Office
by afidel (530433)

Actually I like the idea of a constitutional amendment making all Congressional Bills have an automatic sunset clause of say 10 years and require that all bills be read into law in a Congressional session. That way the legislature has to decide that a bill is still worth the effort to renew. Not only that but it conveniently also limits the size of the law by limiting it to what can be read in x hours. If the founding fathers had any idea how large the federal government would become I'm fairly sure they would have included some similar clause to naturally limit its growth.

Re:I'd kill myself, too...
by KodaK (5477)

No, I'm saying that if you take it seriously you're going to drive yourself insane. There's absolutely nothing you, or anyone, can do about what someone else says or does on the Internet, or in person for that matter. Trying to do so is an exercise in futility. The only person you have even a little control over is you.

It shouldn't matter (to you) if I say something that is offensive, what matters is how you deal with it. You have choices in how you react to it. One of those choices is to ignore it and write it off as "oh, that's just some asshole on the Internet." Another is to become upset about what some anonymous asshole on the Internet who didn't know your friend has said. It is your choice.

Who am I to you? Nobody. Why should anything I say at all have any impact on you if you don't want it to?

Predicted long ago
by timon (46050)

"It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself -- anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face (to look incredulous when a victory was announced, for example) was itself a punishable offence. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime, it was called."

-- 1984 by George Orwell

Re:Yeah, so I suppose ...
by Swampash (1131503)

Here is a story.

It's the story of a place called Mouseland. Mouseland was a place where all the little mice lived and played, were born and died. And they lived much the same as you and I do.

They even had a Congress. And every four years they had an election. Used to walk to the polls and cast their ballots. Some of them even got a ride to the polls. And got a ride for the next four years afterwards too. Just like you and me. And every time on election day all the little mice used to go to the ballot box and they used to elect a government. A government made up of big, fat, black cats.

Cheating is a HUGE problem with games - proof!?
by QX-Mat (460729)

Unlike MMORGs which are controlled almost entirely by server side user agents, first person shooters very vulnerable to cheating.

There are, even now, dozens of "hacks" that work with counterstrike - the most inventive give on screen itinerary information about players (which you can see through translucent walls) a la Deux Ex!

Allow me to ramble...

COD similarly suffers from cheaters. A sponsored (paid!) COD2 player was recently "discovered" cheating after a commercial hack manufacturer had their website's database exposed via a phpbb (iirc?) vulnerability. The happy-hacker was an admin at a gaming forum and compared the email addresses gleened from the site to ones registered on his forum... and tada, one of the biggest names in COD2 was a known cheat user... he even PAID $200 for it. (private cheats are almost always undetected)

Anti-cheat techniques often fail. VAC (now VAC2) - the Vale AntiCheat plugin - is notorious for being easy to sidle past. Other commercial varients such as Punk Buster either no longer support the games you want to play, or offer only a small degree better detection than the game manufacturer.

Re:Spoken Like a True Self-Deluded CEO
by Drake42 (4074)

I had a macbook but it was too damn slow, so I bought a 64 bit, 17inch monster laptop. It had everything, it could play games, have two documents open side by side, it was a beast. I had owned that macbook for almost three years before I gave up on it and bought the PC laptop.

I handed that PC laptop to the trash bin after only 12 months. I couldn't hot swap the battery. I couldn't tell how full the battery was until the stupid thing had booted. It's case was plastic and broke. It got stuffed with stupid software that I couldn't uninstall. I put Suse Linux on it, but it's a cutting edge funky laptop so nothing worked. I went back to windows with a fresh install but the CD ROM drive was loose and unless I held it in its bay the speakers would spew static. Finally it just gave up and the mousepad wouldn't work any more.

During this time I had given my old macbook to my stay-at-home wife and mother of my three year old. The three year old threw it while the plug was in an horribly bent the chassis. But it still worked. My wife is nursing the baby and it turns out that human breasts can spray that milk quite a distance. My macbook had breast milk spattered all over it and in every crevice. It still worked! The three year old stuffed something into the DVD drive to prevent us getting the disk out. After we finally got the disk extracted, everything continued to work. The laptop is over five years old and has literally been around the work with me. It still works fine.

No matter how hard you try to stay clean...
by smellsofbikes (890263)

In our chemistry department, we had a lot of controls on exposure to chemicals: hoods, materials handling procedures, that kind of stuff. The prof who did tin chemistry, and almost all his grad students, had gray hair: a sign of tin poisoning.

I worked in the microbiology department, in a pathogen lab, doing research on mycobacteria, specifically tuberculosis. Every semester we had to get tested for antibodies to TB (indicating that we'd been exposed) and every semester at least one researcher had.

My best friend works as a clinical technician in a lab doing human tissue sample analysis. Pathology lab, basically. About a week ago they had a patient that was *really* sick with a bunch of nasty things, and they were working through samples, and one of my friend's coworkers started screaming because one of the stool samples *moved*. The patient had serious tapeworms, among other problems.

It's not just the word "breakthrough"
by testadicazzo (567430)

I'm glad to see article like this.

I actually do research in optical computing, but the problems aren't unique to that field. I'm always getting pressured to use words/phrases like "novel", "highly accurate", "unique", etc (basically just non quantitative positive adjectives) to make the titles of my talks or publications more sexy or provocative.

It's annoying becuase they are just noise words. If something is really unique, a breakthrough, etc, those adjectives will be applied to your product (research, idea technology, choose your noun here) by others. Your job as an engineer or scientist should be to report the facts on your (noun here) in an unbiased and neutral fashion, giving meaningful benchmark figures regarding what it allows you to do.

A better list
by Animats (122034)

We can do better than that. In no particular order,

• IBM's VM operating system. (1972) OS/360 was a nightmare, and not even the best OS of its era. Burroughs and UNIVAC were way ahead in operating systems in the late 1960s. VM, though, had paging, good security, hypervisor capability, and good performance. In the 1970s. And it's still in use.
• Backus' FORTRAN compiler (1957) The first good compiler. Optimizing, even. Better code generation than anything running on UNIX prior to the mid-1980s.
• QNX (1980) The first really good microkernel OS. Still in use, deep inside railroad signalling systems, machine tools, and nuclear reactor controls, where it has to work.
• NLS (1967) The first system with a mouse, windows, and a GUI.

State of video technology
by MobyDisk (75490)

These sites are a good reflection on the current state of video technology. All these sites use Flash video: A low-quality proprietary solution that requires on a 3rd-party plug-in. The only one that tried using a standard video format was Google Video, and they quickly abandoned that in the beta phase because it was too complicated to support.

I think it is a sad state of affairs that these sites don't (or can't) just use embedded mp4 files. It shows how video standards have failed and a proprietary solution is more ubiquitous. This will make archival very difficult.

always two sides to every story
by Anonymous Coward

As someone who was involved in evaluating this technology for a major US manufacturer of power tools, there are a number of issues which prevented early adoption. First and foremost was the inventor's demands for unreasonable royalties (including a percentage of the gross sales of table saws from preceding years!). I heard the director of the power tools group say that if the royalty had been reduced by 50%, it would have been a no-brainer. As it was, the proposed royalty structure was just unsupportable for a saw that sold for $500.

The second issue was that the product had great difficulty distinguishing the change in capacitance due to human flesh from that due to very wet lumber. This has undoubtedly been improved over the past few years, but people would have been somewhat unhappy to have false triggers that required them to a) replace the safety cartridge and b) their saw blade, which is consumed when the system triggers. Not to mention having the bejeesus scared out them when the system fires in error.

Debugger Disables
by mugnyte (203225)

It is fascinating that TFA explains how if a boot routine can initialize a "debugger attached" flag, the PatchGuard system is not initialized. From this aspect alone, I'd say MS should start playing more nicely with the vendors, since any malicious code worth it's salt should set this value permanently and then replace kernal routines on disk as necessary.

Also, given the fact that MS intends to making patching the standard for releasing a secure OS, the vendors can't really do this kernal checking themselves. Thus, I think it's safe to say from the perspective of this article, the OS's kernel is patchable by anyone.

wow...
by marleyboy (174610)

Look what Google just did. They cornered the advertising niche for the largest single techno-social group on the web. They are going to put ads for brand new cell phones in the myspace addicts hands, deliver performing equipment ads to bands, and they will probably turn around and let bands advertise their gigs for next to nothing.

As we watch it, google is inventing the new economy in the new society. They will establish themselves in such a way that a severe impact on Google's functions will be visibly noticed, and by everyone. So they collaborate with MTV, the largest major youth/indepedant media business in the myspace nation. One metaphor would be that MTV is the natural gas that these kids cook things up with.

Can a climate change skeptic answer
by SEMW (967629)

I dislike arguing against a position unless I completely understand that point of view (Hell, if I don't completely understand a point of view, how do I know it's not correct?).

So can one of the climate change skeptics around here tell me exactly which stage of the following logical chain it is you disagree with? Who knows, you might even convert me if your argument is convincing.

One. It is fact that burning fossil fuels gives out carbon dioxide. The amount can be calculated from the amount of fossil fuels burned. This goes into the atmosphere, and since the rate at which the World's fauna is converting this back into Oxygen is reasonably static (or even decreasing, since we're cutting down vast amounts of the rainforest every year), the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will rise.