If you've ever done any grocery shopping, you'll know this is already somewhat common.

Just like how many dairies sell their milk in containers prominently labeled "These cows were not given bST".

Barley is a glutinous grain, so - is the resulting rice still gluten-free? I have no trouble with gluten (thank goodness - I absolutely love bread), but I know several people that are have problems with it.

Given that the vast majority of seeds I see in catalogs are F1 hybrids, it's unlikely that your statement is even remotely true. Most of what is sold to home gardeners is the same varieties being sold to commercial growers. Most home garden catalog vendors are in turn purchasing their seed from the big boys that supply farmers - Northup King, Stokes, and so on.

There are a few - Territorial Seed and Johnny's Selected Seeds come to mind - that to some degree also actively work on developing their own seed stocks; but even with them, most of the seed is being purchased from a handful of huge companies.

The only places I see heirlooms dominating a company's listings is in catalogs from companies specializing in open-pollinated vegetables - Seeds of Change, Abundant Life, etc.

Can someone explain why the program handling interaction with assorted media files would be so closely linked to the rest of the system working? I understand that parsing the ghastly mess of different standard and pseudo-standard formats out there, as poorly or even maliciously interpreted by various 3rd parties, is a difficult and dangerous task; so I'm not surprised by the fact that there is a bug in the media component; but if it is known to do such a dangerous job why isn't it compartmentalized more aggressively? Why does losing the mediaserver process make a mess of the phone, rather than just causing it to mark the file that killed it as tainted, restart the process, and carry on?

It's not an invasion; it's just defense in a different direction.

The article named the phone as the Motorola C123. Apparently that model has an atypically well-understood baseband, which is probably why it was picked; but that handset is dumb as a rock except by comparison to the utter antiques from the age of analog cellular or something. I don't even think it has one of the teeny little JREs that phones used to have.

I think that it works both ways: the campaign gets face time and spending money from assorted big names in tech because of the hope that it will make programmers cheaper; but it gets buy-in from educators and parents and politicians looking for feel-good photo ops because of the hope that somehow every kid can be a well paid knowledge worker.

Compare to H1-Bs. Those are similarly favored as a way to drive labor costs down; but are more or less politically toxic; so they have none of the popular chatter. The major tech employers are in favor of both; but only one has the buzz in the other direction as well.

These 'zOMG, everyone should STEM up and become an app entrepreneur!!!' stories aren't really about the desirability of everyone having a career in software development. They are more a reflection of the fact that plucky optimists looking for what kids should do to be successful when they grow up are...not exactly...swimming in options. Yes, they are also letting the fascination with shiny trendy things distort their perception of the options, hence the fascination with who will make the next Social Twitfriend app, rather than who will write unbelievably dull line of business stuff; but in broader strokes they aren't pushing this because it's a good idea, they are pushing it because it's an idea, and they don't have another one.

The pronouncement that 'software is eating the world' may have been a bit hyperbolic; but it sure isn't doing the life chances of people without advanced qualifications any favors. "Everyone writing apps" sounds slightly better than "Everyone selling each other securitized bullshit", so it gets more face time.

Why don't publishers put the ads in a section of the page that can allow the rest of the page to load and render before the ad loads and renders?

Because you could stop the loading once the content you wanted was rendered, thus skipping the ad.

So the pages are set up so the ad loads and renders first.

SMS-based approaches are certainly better than passwords alone; but I have a few areas of dislike for them:

They require an active cell link and a live phone, so are bad news if you are trying to log in in the bowels of some structure, with a phone that has a dead battery, or while travelling outside your non-ridiculously-priced service area. It also tends not to be a problem in practice; but SMS is 'best-effort', so if the system is being flaky then that's just too bad. Essentially, it isn't a 'second factor' at all; but a secondary channel that is assumed not to be compromised.

Then there is the matter of the site needing your phone number. For some applications, that doesn't matter: your bank already knows way more than that about you, say. For others, I'm not so enthusiastic about providing a relatively persistent, and spammable, identifier(also fairly robustly tied to me by payment data, unless I get a burner specifically for dealing with auth issues) to any lousy little website that wants it.

Finally, I'm not terribly confident about the medium-term security of SMS if it becomes a common '2 factor' authentication method. Mobile OSes tend to be a bit more locked down than desktops; but hardly infallible, and the security of SMS gateway providers(who sites using SMS auth presumably employ to interface with the phone network) is an unknown and possibly not comforting factor.

RSA fobs are ultimately an inferior option because they cannot be safely shared across multiple systems, and carrying a fistful of the things is ridiculous(plus, the pricing is usurious); but smartcard/NFC cryptographic authentication has none of these weaknesses. The hardware is cheap, it doesn't require a secondary channel to be available, certificates are relatively tiny so you can carry an enormous number of them without issue; and you can implement certificate auth with varying levels of connection with user 'identity'. On the relatively anonymous side, the user can just generate a keypair and send the public key when they create an account. Trivially handled on the client end, no interaction with outside entities. At the other extreme, hierarchical PKI systems make it possible to robustly verify the user's affiliation with a given organization if the situation requires it. The trouble, of course, is the lack of card readers/NFC pads on a lot of contemporary computers and mobile devices. A great pity.

Unfortunately, as our fine folks in the TAO group have apparently proven on multiple occasions, even people with fancy access control tend to have very little power until the package shows up at their loading dock. What happens earlier in the process is less encouraging.

It isn't a standalone hack, since placing the implant is left as an exercise for the reader; but exfiltration is a necessary ingredient of hacks in situations where a network connection either doesn't exist or can't safely be used.

It isn't conceptually novel; but doing a practical TEMPEST attack with nothing but a dumbphone, with a fairly unobtrusive software modification, rather than a relatively classy SDR rig or some antenna-covered fed-van is a nice practical refinement.

Really, how many 'tech news' stories are actually conceptually novel, rather than "Thing you could lease from IBM for the GDP of a small country in the 60s and 70s, or buy from Sun or SGI for somewhere between the price of a new house and the price of a new car in the 80s and early 90s, is now available in a battery powered and pocket sized device that shows ads!" Conceptual novelty has a special place, of course; but one ought not to scorn engineering refinement.

Worldwide, Google+ is far from a failure. In fact, it has more users than Twitter.
I think a lot of Slashdot readers' comments are biased by an amerocentric point of view.

We could've just engraved a URL onto the side of each Voyager.