I know there are all kinds of chronic health problems that can emerge from extended stays in space - heart problems being the big one, since the heart doesn't like going from microgravity to Earth gravity abruptly. Yet, it doesn't seem like there's a whole lot to be done about it unless we find a way to generate gravity in space. Has any research been done on mitigating the effects of space?

I, for one, welcome the day I can get a degree in alchemy. That way, when I attempt to convert basic chemicals (acetone, pseudoephedrine, etc) into gold using methamphetamine as an intermediary, I can tell the cops I'm doing my doctoral thesis and everything will be perfectly legitimate. Whoever said you can't convert base chemicals into gold was wrong - they just weren't doing it right.

If they're going to be teaching creationism in schools, they can hire ICP to teach. I can see the classes now, where they teach the children that everything from quantum mechanics to tectonic plate shifts are caused by miracles, regardless of what anyone else says. Magnets? They're like, double miracles man. Miracles on top of miracles.

From the article:

The UN panel since September has published three separate reports into the physical science of global warming, its impacts, and ways to fight it. The study leaked yesterday, called the “Synthesis Report” intends to pick out the most important findings and present them in a way that lawmakers can easily understand. (Emphasis mine)

Why do I have a feeling the report to the politicians will have to read a lot like the Simple English Wikipedia, to the point where it might not be a bad idea to get the writers for that on it.

"Global warming is a bad thing that causes lots of problems. Burning stuff causes global warming. If you keep burning stuff, you will have a bad problem."

Now I'm inclined to believe the typical explanation of "A wizard did it". God dammit, Dresden, I thought we told you to stay away from the datacenters.

From the article:

Police can also use the tool, but only under the conditions of the existing section 7908 of the California Public Utilities Code. That gives police the ability to cut off phone service in certain situations and typically requires a court order, except in an emergency that poses “immediate danger of death or great bodily injury.”

I have this image in my head of someone buying a robot to do something simple like prepare food, having it browse YouTube for any mention of food and finding one of those ASMR videos of some random girl whispering into the microphone while she does simple household tasks, determining that this is in fact the correct way to prepare food, and then dragging the owner into the kitchen so it can whisper in their ears.

First off, I think we should put PSAs over Bennett's stories. It might give people a reason to click them, especially if Dice donated some small amount of money to whatever charity group has the PSA out.

That said, "snuff" videos do educate people. One of the most famous (which was circulating as "Faces of Death: Senator Suicide" on Kazaa back when I was in middle school and was the talk of all of the kids on the bus) is Budd Dwyer's suicide by self-inflicted gunshot, which was recorded by a bunch of TV news crews who had come expecting him to resign from his position as a state senator after he was charged with corruption. Instead, they watched as this guy read a statement and then pulled a gun out of a manila envelope. If you watch the tapes - the unedited ones - you can hear people in the background pleading with him to drop the gun, because at the time they thought he was going to shoot at them. Then, he turns the gun on himself, while TV cameras are capturing the entire event.

The professor of one of my first college classes (I was a journalism major and don't regret it even though I can't find a job) started his class off with that video - and I think I was the only person in the room other than him who knew what was going to happen. The footage is horrifying, but it proves a point in that you can never go into a story expecting anything, and what happens if something like this occurs. Many of the media outlets that recorded Dwyer's suicide refused to show any of the footage at all, even before he pulled the gun out. Others showed it right up until the gun came out - I think one went so far as to show the manila envelope that had the gun in it but not the gun itself.

I learned two valuable things that day - the first that you can never take a story for granted. No one who was there that day thought it was going to be anything more than a minor politician reading off a prepared statement, and were only there to get perhaps 5 seconds of footage - Dwyer saying that he would be stepping down as a state senator. Instead, they wound up with a national-level story on their hands and one of the most well-known ethical dilemmas of journalism. The second was never to trust a manila envelope. Those things are nothing but trouble.

I thought that Rohypnol had been regulated so heavily that very few people can get their hands on it, and that those who can are also capable of getting something stronger and harder to detect. To me, this sounds like giving people an easy way to test for polonium poisoning in their food - sure, it might help if you're someone who has pissed off a foreign intelligence service (or the Russian government) but it's a non-issue for the vast majority of people... that and if they really want you dead, they have other methods.

As great as that sounds, it's actually not the case here. The article states that the girl's father is an infectious disease researcher at UCLA and she was sending the samples to a lab at Duke to be DNA-sequenced. It seems like most of what she did was collect samples of the fungus for her father - an interesting summer project, but not exactly hard science.

Don't worry, I'm sure they could get a few million dollars if they built an office with a window that overlooks the NSTX machine and an oversized mahogany desk and rented it out to all of those rich Bond villains out there. I hear Dick Cheney is in the market for a new lair of evil.

I just don't get why someone would be willing to commit criminal activity like they did just to annoy some people. It's not exactly a show of skill - PSN has been a low-hanging fruit for DDoS attacks since forever - and it's clearly not making them any money. I'm sure there's also ways they could've annoyed people more without having DHS coming after them for calling in a bomb threat. If I had a DDoS-capable botnet I'd at least do something fun with it, like spam mobile email addresses with fake CNN updates purporting that Christ has risen and he's declared the Year of the Linux Desktop.

I've heard from people that work in retail that it would be better to pay off 20% of your customer base to not shop with you than it would be to take their business due to how many complaints they're going to make and how much time they're going to take up doing it.

I don't think that these bug reports that the NSA is making are actually leaks. My theory is that these exploits have already been used by the NSA, and are believed to be at the end of their useful life cycle (ie; the NSA suspects that someone else has found the bug and may report it) so they go ahead and report it - it boosts the NSA's image because they're supposedly reporting zero-days, but in reality they're just getting rid of what they don't need anymore.

As gruesome as the video is, it is now part of the historic record - whether the police in the UK like it or not. The same thing happened with the Budd Dwyer suicide video, where a bunch of studios chose not to air any footage at all from the suicide, not even the parts that did not contain gore. Fortunately, as bad as that video is, copies have survived to become part of the record, which is important in understanding things like how the media reacted to the first suicide ever recorded on television.

Years from now, when the history books are trying to teach kids everywhere how brutal groups like ISIS were, this is what they will have to show them - how the Islamic fighters were so enthralled with the idea of turning Iraq and Syria into islamic states that they were willing to forego their humanity and behead a man who had done nothing to them, simply because he wasn't of the same religion as they were.