So I usually embrace a technology or product right before it gets canceled, sold, or radically changed. I can pick that moment without fail. (Someone ought to be able to make money off of that talent, but it isn't me.)
I am enraptured. It's got a touch screen interface with pop-top symbols of each flavor of soda. Touch Coca-Cola, for example, and the screen changes to show all the different kinds of Coke: Diet, Cherry, Zero, Classic, etc.
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 1: We don't use sudo
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 2: We use vi, not emacs, and definitely not pico or nano
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 3: We wield regular expressions like weapons
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 4: We're inherently lazy
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 5: We prefer elegant solutions
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 6: We generally assume the problem is with whomever is asking the question
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 7: We have more in common with medical examiners than doctors
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 8: We know more about Windows than we'll ever let on
Veteran Unix admin trait No. 9: Rebooting is almost never an option
Where others may see intractable, overly difficult methods, we see enlightenment, born of years of learning, experience, and most of all, logic.
Even Grandma, who is not into tech toys, saw it and got excited. She can read books, look up recipes, flip through pictures of the kids, and get her email on one little simple device.
Call me an Apple Fanboy if you want, just keep passing the Kool-Aid!
[Popular Mechanics] But the possibility that a vehicle could go from idling at a traffic light to terrific, uncalled-for and uncontrollable acceleration because the guy next to you at a traffic light answered his cellphone? Or some ghost in the machine or a hacker caused a software glitch that made your car run away and the brakes suddenly simultaneously fail? Not in the least bit likely.Remember how some people were caught being liars and gold diggers? Then there were the graphs and interpolations of data that showed that old people were disproportionately victims of Sudden Unintended Acceleration (SUA) - a not so subtle hint that the geezers were pushing the accelerator when they thought they were pushing the brake. Oops.
These throttle-by-wire systems are very difficult to confuse—they're designed to be robust, and any conceivable failure is engineered to command not an open throttle but an error message.
In the United States, the federally-mandated On- Board Diagnostics (OBD-II) port, under the dash in virtually all modern vehicles, provides direct and standard access to internal automotive networks. User-upgradable subsystems such as audio players are routinely attached to these same internal networks, as are a variety of short- range wireless devices (Bluetooth, wireless tire pressure sensors, etc.). Telematics systems, exemplified by General Motors’ (GM’s) OnStar [service].Oh, and then they did the whole thing over again by remote control. Yeah.
Fuzzing. Much to our surprise, significant attacks do not require a complete understanding or reverse-engineering of even a single component of the car. In fact, because the range of valid CAN packets is rather small, significant damage can be done by simple fuzzing of packets (i.e., iterative testing of random or partially random packets). In- deed, for attackers seeking indiscriminate disruption, fuzzing is an effective attack by itself. [source]
Ok, that's fairly nice. Say, that fish looks pretty good, but I don't really know how to "pan sear" fish. What's that in the left corner over there? Is that a link to a tutorial on how to pan sear seafood? Gosh, that's comprehensive.
If you click "Select Ingredients to Add to your Shopping List" you get this screen. The ingredients are all laid out separately and you can increase quantities as needed. From there you can name your Shopping List, view, print, or save.
Wegmans has got this whole thing figured out and then some. They are taking away all my excuses of why this Can't Be Done.
A co-worker who is a security researcher was talking about the new "choice screen" for Internet browsers that has been popping up all over Europe lately.[NYT] "Rivals of Microsoft's market-leading Web browser have attracted a flurry of interest since the company, fulfilling a regulatory requirement, started making it easier for European users of its Windows operating system to switch.
The screen displays links to a dozen browsers, including Explorer, Firefox, Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Opera."
[ABCNews] Angie Jackson says nothing is off-limits on Twitter, not even the details of her abortion [to] chronicle her experience taking RU-486, commonly known as the abortion pill, in an attempt to "demystify" abortion for other women.I'm not sure what is mystifying about the abortion drug, unless it's the idea that it's either safe, painless, or doesn't kill a child. One has to be willfully ignorant to gloss over the basic science and purpose of RU-486.
Already the mother of a 4-year-old son with special needs, Jackson, who lives in Tampa, Fla., with her boyfriend, said that after a difficult and life-threatening first pregnancy her doctors advised her to not get pregnant again.
"I had made a decision when my son was born to try to not get pregnant again, and if that failed I'd planned that I would get an abortion if I needed one," Jackson said.
"It's not that bad. It's not killing a child." she says in her YouTube post.
Jackson adds, "I'm not trying to ignite a culture war, I'm just offering one person's personal experience and true story."Here is where the story starts to unravel. Jackson's Twitter handle is "AntiTheistAngie" -- not atheist, anti-theist. She signs off her posts, "Hope everyone has a Godless day". People who are "not trying to ignite a culture war" don't throw grenades. I don't believe in little green men, but I don't spend much time and energy trying to debunk those who do.
I wanted to write about my own experience taking Mifeprex, the abortion drug known as RU-486. Our baby had died at some point during the previous week.Like she said: Women Deserve Better.
[...] Really, I just wanted them to give me the drugs and let me go home. I didn't want to spend 24 hours on the maternity ward listening to the cries of other people's healthy babies and wait for my own heartbreak to begin. I have been in labor a few times and thought it was reasonable to think that I would know when to come to the hospital. I was told I could bleed to death. I stayed.
Labor began for me about 3 hours after I took the first dosage. It was administered both orally and vaginally. Within the first hour, I understood why I couldn't have gone home. I began to pass blood clots. They came in steady succession as if on a string. They ranged in size from the size of a chicken's egg to as large as my fist. Every time I moved another clot would become loose and come out. I thought I was hemorrhaging; I thought I was going to bleed to death. It was horrific. I forgot why I was there for a while and just sat on the bed crying and shaking in fear that my 4 living children would grow up without me. I have no idea how much blood came out of my body. I stopped counting clots at 20. After 20, it just didn't seem to matter any more. I asked the nurse if my experience was normal and she assured me that this was what an RU-486 abortion looked like and that I was fine.
Our daughter's body was delivered four and a half hours after the first contraction. She was the size of my hand. She was smooth and shiny and pink with perfect fingers and toes. Heartbreakingly small and achingly perfect. Our midwife wiped her clean and laid her on a blanket before handing her to me. I have never seen such agony as I saw on my husband's face when he heard her whisper, "It's a girl." His face looked like it folded in on itself. Our baby was really and truly dead. Somehow it didn't seem real until we held her in our hands and looked at her through our tears.
It wasn't over yet. I still had to deliver the placenta. It took another two hours for it to let go and come out of me. The doctor who was supervising kept coming by to check and ask "Is it out yet?" in a strangely cold voice. I later learned from my midwife that she performed abortions herself and was deeply disturbed by our pain. She told our midwife to get us out of the hospital as quickly as possible because we were upsetting the staff, and that she didn't understand why we were crying over something which was little more than a tumor in medical terms.
I can not imagine being 14, at home, trying to hide this from my mother, and having this experience. My brain can't even get to that place of fear. A child, scared and alone, passing blood clot after blood clot, thinking you're bleeding to death, but afraid to tell in case you aren't. And then, delivering that impossibly small body. Perfect, lifeless, and undeniably human. What does a little girl do when her body hurts that much, and her mind fears that much, and her baby lies dead in her hand? How is this okay?
I am not sure what the answers are, but I do know that women deserve better than to be treated this way. Our bodies and our minds deserve better protection. People can chant and scream about the rights of women, but I know that women and girls have a right to something better than this. They have a right to something better than abortion.
[NYT] Nathan Myhrvold, [...] has assembled commonly available technology — parts used in printers, digital cameras and projectors — to make rapid lasers to shoot down mosquitoes in mid-flight. If bed nets are the low-tech solution to combat the deadly disease — caused by a parasite transmitted when certain mosquitoes bite people — the laser is a high-tech one.
He estimates that the devices could potentially cost as little $50, [and] that normally the lasers could shoot down anywhere between 50 to 100 mosquitoes per second.
Scheme of experiment 
(Source) The Quantum Hacking group works in the field of quantum cryptography and quantum information. In quantum information science the information unit is not a bit, but rather a quantum bit – qubit. A qubit may not only be zero or one, but also zero and one simultaneously!
In our work, we use photons as physical representation of qubits. Quantum cryptography is a method of secure communication using qubits. Such communication is based on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. If an eavesdropper listens to qubits, she changes them, which is inevitably noticed by the legitimate users. That is, any attempt of eavesdropping will be caught.
