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Comment And good riddance to them... (Score 5, Insightful) 128

If you won't properly separate your security-critical systems from your Internet-facing systems, or cannot even keep them from being rooted multiple times, you have no business being a CA.

Honestly, it's understandable DigiNotar didn't want this information out: bankrupcy is inevitable now, and that's bad for shareholder value.

Comment Re:Dutch advantage of herring? (Score 5, Interesting) 143

Also, since the middle ages we've been under pretty much constant thread of the sea washing away our country. The waterschappen (water boards), which are responsible for keeping our feet (and sometimes our heads) dry, are the oldest democratic institutions here, some dating back to the 13th century.

The geography of the Netherlands is so that you cannot keep just your bit of land dry. Thus on occasion even lords and cities that were otherwise formally at war had to cooperate to keep the dykes maintained and the water out. This has created a deep democratic tradition and a strong respect for engineering in the Dutch civic mind. For example, the Deltawet, the system of laws describing how the major dykes are to be maintained, isn't based on some ideology or pork-barrel system as it would be in some other countries, but on statistical models and sound engineering.

Does the current state of knowledge tell us that the dykes are too low? Shucks, we'll have to heighten them then. Well, lets get started, otherwise it won't get done before the storm season is upon us again. And don't worry about the cost much, these things usually pay for themselves in one night.

tl;dr: We have to have good governance. Otherwise, the dykes fail and we die. Literally.

Image

Designers Create Meat Eating Furniture 120

Sonny Yatsen writes "NPR's Robert Krulwich explores the work of several designers who are working on carnivorous furniture. These creations, include a clock that feeds on dead flies, and a table that lures mice into a guillotined death. 'We want robots to be able to get their own energy from the environment,' says co-designer Prof. Melhuish. Let's hope they come up with a lounge chair that eats cockroaches sometime soon."

Comment Re:Richard Marx Stallman is a pedophile communist (Score -1, Offtopic) 197

"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."

--Richard Stallman

That's pretty insightful of him!

Biotech

Re-Engineering the Immune System 175

destinyland notes a microbiology professor describing "Immunity on Demand" (or "Immunity 2.0") and wonders whether we could genetically engineer all the antibodies we need. "...there's a good chance this system, or something like it, will actually be in place within decades. Caltech scientists have already engineered stem cells into B cells that produce HIV-fighting antibodies — and an NIH researcher engineered T cells that recognize tumors which has already had promising clinical trials again skin cancer. Our best hope may be to cut out the middleman. Rather than merely hoping that the vaccine will indirectly lead to the antibody an individual needs, imagine if we could genetically engineer these antibodies and make them available as needed?"

Comment Re:Oh, well... (Score 1) 173

who's got a LAN with 2**64 machines connected

My ISP (XS4all in The Netherlands) gave me a /48, which is 65536 of those blocks. Actually, RIPE policy is that they're supposed to (ARIN allows /56's for residential users, which is a mere 256 64-bit blocks).

The rationale for this policy is that it allows for really easy routing while not even using one percent of the entire IPv6 address space.

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