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Comment Re:Reboot (Score 1) 339

Now let's be careful here. It's DC Comics that have been rebooting themselves over and over, and even then only for about 30 years, 50 if you want to call the Silver Age a reboot. Marvel have never rebooted their main continuity, and nor have a lot of other major series.

Comment Re:What's the penalty for HTTPS? (Score 0) 95

Any thoughts on HTTPS only for the login page, or for all pages?

All pages. When you log in to begin with, if the login page is HTTPS then your username and password are encrypted. This is good, because it means nobody else can snoop your password and log in as you later. You are then sent back a cookie. Later, when you want to prove that you are logged in, you just send the cookie along with the HTTP request. Of course, if all the other pages are not encrypted, then the cookie is sent in the clear, which allows anybody to collect it and use it. So, obviously, any request sending a cookie should be sent encrypted too, which means that all pages should be HTTPS.

This is an extremely obvious and trivially-fixed security vulnerability. The fact that so few sites bother to fix it is disappointing indeed.

Comment Re:This is actually useful (Score 2) 99

And that's just considering the end result of this thing, namely Watson itself. Looking at the sheer amount of original research and work that had to be done to create it, it's unthinkable that there wouldn't be results in there that are worth spinning off and applying to other applications.

Comment Re:So... there is a God? (Score 2, Informative) 181

A hot mantle isn't something that happens by chance. When a planet forms, it involves large chunks of *stuff* coming and binding together - that is, coming from a dispersed position of high gravitational potential to a compressed position of much lower gravitational potential. All of that GPE has to go somewhere, and most of it went into thermal energy, hence the heat at the Earth's core. Mars is much smaller than Earth = less GPE to liberate = less core heat. Of course the fact that Mars is too small to hold on to a substantial atmosphere also plays a part.

What I'm saying is that any sufficiently large rocky planet almost by definition has substantial core heat. It's not really much of a coincidence that the Earth has a hot mantle. Probably, any large rocky planet of about the same age as Earth (i.e. orbiting a population I star) has plenty of core heat left.

Comment Re:Reclaim Some? (Score 4, Insightful) 717

There are two major reasons why this almost certainly won't happen. The first reason is that at the current rate of use this would delay IPv4 exhaustion by only a few months to a year.

The second is that for an organisation to claim such a large block of addresses, it must have done so relatively early in history. That probably means the organisation is a technology group or another organisation which has had a vested interest in the internet for a very long time. Over those decades, there's a good chance that the organisation has swelled up to make maximum use of its assigned address spaces, and rearranging its network and systems for greater efficiency would be a mammoth undertaking for relatively little gain (see above).

Comment Re:Consitancy (Score 1) 237

That's almost as good as those camera phones which automatically rotate the photograph to always be the wrong way up when you try to look at it.

(The device can detect which way up you're holding it, so it tries to put the photo the right way up for you to look at it... but it has no record of which way up it was when the photo was taken, and the photo was e.g. taken portrait instead of landscape.)

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