Posts by phil dude 1937 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Nov 2011
I believe that is one of the "accidental" things they discovered from the Apollo missions. Bacteria survived on some of the cameras they had use on the moon (and were brought back to Earth).
In my own experiments, E.coli can survive in glucose and the high vacuum and radiation of an electron microscope.....though it does tend to get chunks blown out of its membrane.
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This is a strange advert that proclaims "our new browser will be brilliant compared to our old browser, but to use it you will have to buy into our crufty, malware desktop environment".
It is not opensource, so it cannot be trusted. It doesn't run on other platforms so why would anyone *choose* this browser unless they had no choice?
Oh yeah. Free market. right....
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The El Reg FUD machine is in full flow, before heading to the pub.
Security by Obscurity is no Security at all. Arguing that Open source some how reduces the non-existent security, is a bogus argument and missed the point.
Bad people are always looking to do Bad Things with the toys on our side of the fence (i.e. Society)
That's because criminals do not produce anything, which is why they look to pollute our world with their ignorance, greed and probably a health dose of depraved psychosis.
</rant>
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"This was designed to be a common system, but watching out to stop naughiness. The German influence on the Eurozone rules might be guessed by the fact that all €500 and €200 notes are only ever printed in countries who speak German..."
The Germans still have the well oiled wheelbarrows....
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@Tridac: While any encryption can be broken given enough time and sample data,...
This statement is not true. Good encryption is effectively unbreakable no matter how much data you have. Flawed encryption is crackable some of the time, by those with resources. Bad encryption is just not considered encryption.
With as many devices running this downgraded cipher, I suspect there will be a bounty for crims of all stripes for years to come...
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All of these 3 browsers have mechanisms for isolation. The most useful is profiles - completely separate installations that can be even executed as another users (in Linux and Mac, I don't know about Windows).
The point is, you can have browsers for banking, company, mail etc.. and then a toxic one for all those sites with whizzy dancing flash rubbish.
As much as flash needs to die, the current situation is at least a practical workaround for those who need to use it for corporate websites (that includes me).
Yes I know this may not be ideal for IT in large organisations, but it seems simple.
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What are business rates?
These are taxes charged on non-domestic properties – such as shops, offices and pubs – to help pay for local services. You will have to pay business rates if you are using a building, or part of a building, for anything beyond just living there. Business rates based on the value of the property.
From this article, in clearer English than the govt speak
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@TimWorstal: Business (Non-domestic) rates are paid by the business in a property not the landlord.
Business rates are payable even if there is no business in a property, which was introduced to force renters to rent - plenty of loop holes I am sure....
Please fact check better.
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In Linux there the the login manager - you can autologin and get the desktop, but that is not the default on most modern distros.
The "display manager" has a drop down list of what session you would like - KDE, Gnome, Openbox etc etc...
You can have any desktop, anytime you like, as can any user.
I run KDE on my workstation (2 monitors 6400 x 2160) , which allows multiple "activities" to be configured so you can have desktops setup with different applications , browsers, multimedia etc....
I run kubuntu on my laptop.
Comparing desktops is a somewhat antiquated look at modern systems. The applications are what make it usable, and for productivity Linux has really grown-up.
Who wants parity with Windoze, just want it to *work*.
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The problem with clueless politicians like this, is we all know it is not possible to achieve in practice.
So instead they will pressure companies to put in back doors and using the laws that make it illegal to tell the truth, they'll pollute a computers software in some other way.
You might love your PC or Mac, but even with FOSS we are all screwed if the Govt can legislate the building of dysfunctional computers.
The only ray of hope is the Govt is not that competent, but we are still all *paying* for this abuse...
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...given enough time.
Less time if the right temperature, or if there is liquid water. But any mathematical model of evolution processes will show you once you can make any molecular copy with random interactions, even a low probability of fidelity it will rapidly converge onto an improving solution.
The issue of alien life, is not whether it exists, as we know life exists somewhere (here!). We might not even recognise it...
But whether it exists within our time-space event horizon...given how much of the universe we can not observe.
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PS We do of course we need supernovae to make the heavy atoms, but I am arguing that the evolutionary process is very powerful and therefore life of some form is inevitable.
Let me bang a drum. There is more music than anyone could ever listen to.
These companies need to hire some decent statisticians and instead calculate the ratio of new/old music consumed. That would give a better idea of the future rather than the wishful thinking that drives their greedy lawsuits.
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How about the credit organisations have a website where you can enter an amount , and you use local card reader and pin and generate a unique transaction code, that cannot be used more than once.
Barclays uses this for payments, how hard would it be to make this the default?
No CC numbers needed...
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E.coli, the lab work horse has a DNA replication error rate of approx 1 base in 105, which for a 5 Megabase genome is about 100 mutations per generation. E.coli can reproduce in 20 minutes, and occupies a volume of 1um3. So one metric ton of sea water can hold 1018 E.coli at OD600=0.6. Hence, starting with a single bacterium, this volume could be filled in less than a day - producing approximately 1020 mutations.
Even ignoring lateral gene transfer, this is a massive diversity of sequence, and demonstrates the thorough search carried about by biology every microsecond for the last 3.5 billion years. Our existence (as is all multicellular life) is dependent on microbial life. It is by pure chance that humans have adapted to be the only species that can affect all other life on Earth. A little bit of humility would not go amiss when bandying around wild guesses on the fate of the planet.
The microbes however, have absolutely nothing to lose. They were here before us ,and will be around long after us.
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I'm using Debian on my monster molecular workstation box, but I have added the Mint repos to bring in newer versions of some tools (thunderbird etc..), and I am glad to hear they are staying the course.
I am, however, using KDE and I find that to be a bit of a mixed bag. It works fine, and has some neat new features - KdeConnect will notify you of things on your phone so you can aggregate (and ignore if you want) phone things, including calls, from the desktop!!!! I cannot tell you how cool that is.
For those who have never tried linux, now is the time. Just see if it works for you, you might be surprised.
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Micheal Dobbs is listed as an Executive producer on the Netflix product, so that may explain the consistency in the initial stories. The end of season one on the DC Metro (in the BBC original it was from a building), was brilliantly surprising!
I too grew up with Francis. Spacey has had time to really gives the character some depth.
The brilliant placement of Frank Underwood as a congressman who went to a military academy in the Deep South...very cleverly done!
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This is seen all over society - wealth entrenchment.
With houses, you lobby to not build new ones so the ones you own are more valuable.
With land it is "you cannot build there".
With media it is "I made this, and think it should return profit forever" in this way the new media cannot wash away the old media.
We reached saturation probably 40 years ago, but the internet has made it possible for the average person to aggregate anything they want.
And media companies keep wanting the same prices for selling mediocre average quality into a saturated market.
What could possibly go wrong?
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