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Comment And what is this *office* thing that you speak of? (Score 1) 100

In my case, the paper is already mostly gone. Most documents that I work with are on the computer. Most of the info I read is now online. And I hardly ever print anything anymore - there's just no need for it.
- -

But going beyond that, the way mobile devices are trending, and with just a little more acceptance from society with regards to telecommuting, I don't see why many people would even need to go in to the office most days. Even face to face meetings could be done in some temporary venue, like a nice coffee shop.

Once businesses realize that they don't have to spend all that money just to rent office space so they can stuff their employees into cubicle farms, well then ...

Communications

Call In the Military To Blast Rogue Satellite? 243

coondoggie submitted a follow-up to the tale of the wandering satellite that might collide with other stuff in orbit. He asks "Will the military need to be called in to blow up the rogue Intelsat satellite meandering through Earth's orbit? Or maybe a NASA Space Shuttle could swing by and grab it? You may recall that in 2008, rather than risk that a large piece of a failing spy satellite would fall on populated areas, the government blasted it out of the sky. The physics of such a shot were complicated and the Navy had a less than 10-second window to hit the satellite as it passed over its ships in the Pacific Ocean. But it worked. Now word comes that a five-year-old Intelsat TV satellite is meandering in orbit and attempts to control it have proven futile. At issue now is that the satellite could smash into other satellites or ramble into other satellite orbits and abscond with their signals."
Television

Drifting Satellite Could Knock Out Cable TV 217

A few days back we discussed some of the problems caused by the demise of Intelsat's Galaxy 15, including possible degradation of GPS and its WAAS refinement. Now reader crimeandpunishment writes in with another damage scenario, one which could affect vastly more people — interference with cable TV programming across the US. "A TV communications satellite is drifting out of control thousands of miles above the Earth, threatening to wander into another satellite's orbit... Galaxy 15 continues to receive and transmit satellite signals, and they will probably interfere with the second satellite, known as AMC 11, if Galaxy 15 drifts into its orbit as expected around May 23... [A spokesman] said one option would be using AMC 11's propulsion system to shift that satellite about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away to an orbit that's still within its carefully prescribed 'orbital box' but as far away as possible from Galaxy 15."

Comment Re:Windows only (Score 3, Informative) 160

So are you only vulnerable if you use ISAPI ? It does look like that module is enabled by default though. I wonder why ?

Actually, according to the advisory, it seems you are only vulnerable if you actually load an ISAPI .dll module.

"it is possible to trigger a vulnerability in Apache mod_isapi that will unload the target ISAPI module from memory. However function pointers still remain in memory"

Even so, it's probably a good idea to comment out mod_isapi if you're not actively using it.

Image

Own Your Own Fighter Jet 222

gimmebeer writes "The Russian Sukhoi SU-27 has a top speed of Mach 1.8 (more than 1,300 mph) and has a thrust to weight ratio greater than 1 to 1. That means it can accelerate while climbing straight up. It was designed to fight against the best the US had to offer, and now it can be yours for the price of a mediocre used business jet."

Comment Why not just use a house key instead? (Score 1) 180

There's nothing two-factor about this solution.
Someone just has to steal (or take) the plastic thingie from you and now they can get in but you can't.

If you first had to login normally (using a memorized password) and second hold the plastic up to see the one time pad then you could say it was two-factor.

A two-factor key cannot be allowed to have just a single point of failure.

Then there is the recovery problem afterward. At least after a stolen housekey you can just bust in and then fix your door.
What do you do when the plastic thingie goes missing?

Do you need a back door? And how secure would that be?

Or can you get another plastic thingie exactly the same? Only to use it once to get in so you can then register another (uncompromised) one.
Not to mention that if you can get a replacement plastic thingie exactly the same, then maybe somebody else can too.

Comment Some oldie goldies for pre-teens (Score 1) 1419

Rocketship Galileo-Heinlein
Space Cadet-Heinlein
Have Spacesuit Will Travel-Heinlein
Storm Over Warlock-Andre Norton
Star Rangers-Andre Norton
Slan-A.E. Van Vogt
The City and the Stars-Isaac Asimov
I Robot-Isaac Asimov
Lucky Starr series-Isaac Asimov
Childhood's End-Arthur C. Clarke
Expedition to Earth-Arthur C. Clarke
Brightsuit McBear-L. Neil Smith
Raiders From The Rings-Alan E. Nourse
Rocket to Limbo-Alan E. Nourse
Star Surgeon-Alan E. Nourse
The Counterfeit Man-Alan E. Nourse
Hospital Station-James White
Star Surgeon-James White
Hestia-C.J. Cherryh
Dragonflight-Anne McCaffrey
Dragon's Egg-Robert L Forward
Mission of Gravity-Hal Clement
Spacepaw-Gordon R. Dickson
Blackcollar-Timothy Zahn
Enemy Mine-Barry B. Longyear
And of course pretty much anything by E.E. Doc Smith, but specially the Lensman series.

I also consider Starship Troopers somewhere in there, but you have to consider that young boys won't really get the political side of it until they get older and re-read it.

Education

Where Are Tomorrow's Embedded Developers? 245

An anonymous reader writes "In a similar vein to the previous discussion about the New York professors taking Java to task for damaging Computer Science education, Mike Anderson of the PTR group wonders why it's so hard to find good embedded developers these days. 'As for today's CS programs, it seems that long gone are the computer architecture classes, writing code in assembly language (or even C at this point) and engineering software economics. In fact, a large number of CS majors apparently believe that everything can be implemented in a virtual machine and that both memory and [CPU] cycles are infinite.'"

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