In fairness, I saw Terry Tao get half-way through saying that 27 and 29 are twin primes on the Colbert Report the other day, before he caught himself. (Just after the 3 minute mark).

Teletype? Luxury! My mother learnt to program when she was in secondary school by posting punched cards across the country to Manchester University and getting the results back a week later.

If you ever look at a document.xml extracted from a .docx file you'll be astonished at how much crap there is in there just to support revision tracking.

Apparently so.

For some things. But a lot of the units which people in the US call English are different sizes to the units with the same name in England. And the UK certainly doesn't use $ for its currency, which I think is what the GPP was talking about, although I think they may have overlooked a context switch from the UK beta tests to the US launch.

If they're highlighting Google Play then I can see a new anti-trust investigation in the near future.

Depends on what the problem with the colo server is. It's not entirely unknown for police to seize an entire rack of servers from a colo. (E.g. 1, 2, and I half-remember incidents in other countries too).

Indeed. Now that I've trained it to treat unsolicited e-mails from Twitter as spam, I hardly see any.

I was more struck by the hostpots. I'm not entirely sure what they are, but I think it probably means that the owners of the cafes where OP does his web browsing serve their own fingers for cannibalistic patrons.

Yes. And dolphins are apparently classified as toothed whales, just to completely confuse things.

I quoted the part of the article where the reporter states that the security firm made that forecast. But as often happens, the headline makes claims which don't match either the truth or the body of the article. It's far from unknown for reporters or opinion writers to get a nasty shock when they see the headline which the subeditor chose to put on their copy.

If the issue were the length of the headline, a 20% saving could be made and the accuracy improved by rewriting it to "Online attacks could lead to deaths, warns Europol".

The first link in the summary is to a news report with the headline "First online murder to happen by the end of 2014, warns Europol". When you read the story, what it actually claims is

The study, which was published last week, analysed the possible physical dangers linked to cyber criminality and found that a rise in ‘injury and possible deaths’ could be expected as computer hackers launch attacks on critical connected equipment.

The assessment particularly referred to a report by IID, a US security firm, which forecast that the world’s first murder via a ‘hacked internet-connected device’ would happen by the end of 2014.

And the reference that it mentions is right here and says

With more objects being connected to the Internet and the creation of new types of critical infrastructure, we can expect to see (more) targeted attacks on existing and emerging infrastructures, including new forms of blackmailing and extortion schemes (e.g. ransomware for smart cars or smart homes), data theft, physical injury and possible death [188], and new types of botnets.

No mention of 2014. No assertion that it will happen: just that it might.

TL;DR: Europol isn't predicting an online murder in 2014. That's just a subeditor who either didn't understand the plain English of the reporter or who chose to outright lie when writing the headline in order to sensationalise it.

No. The software isn't the hard part. The hard part is the requirements gathering for the data schemata (aka archetypes). For example, suppose you want to create an archetype for blood samples. At a minimum you need to talk to phlebologists and GPs, but you probably also need input from other specialists who might refer someone for a blood sample to see what they need from the data. Then you work out the indivisible chunks of data, run them past your domain experts, fix any bugs they spot, repeat. And even with a lot of input from experts, unless the standards for blood sampling are universal you risk creating an archetype which doesn't quite fit the way the hospitals in the neighbouring province do things.

If you're that worried about it, why don't you run a local mirror and point your hosts file at it?

His role on most of the papers was probably just to write the grant request.