I'm sure my story is not unique. Parent is right.
Yup. Me too. Way back when, mid 1990s, I started using Redhat, but I had too many issues with it to use it full time. (CUPS? Remember CUPS before it got the finally-it-works! makeover?) Then Ubuntu came along and -- boom! -- I could switch everything over to it. That was a version or so before Dapper Duck or whatever it was called. 2004? I loved it, loved the community, spent hours helping other noobs on the forums.
After a while, they kept changing default packages to something stupid instead of seeing what you had and respecting that. It took more and more time to fix upgrades. Then they moved the buttons around AND were snooty about it. That's when I started ditching them. Unity was the final straw, with its nasty tracking by default and with its "Customizable? Whaddya mean, customizable? You'll eat your gruel and like it, jerk."
I've been on LinuxMint Debian going on three years now because LM smooths out some of the tough spots in Debian for noobs. But if LM loses its mind too at some point, then straight Debian, here I come. Together with the five or six people for whom I'm tech support.
An identity theft service that sold Social Security and drivers license numbers — as well as bank account and credit card data on millions of Americans — purchased much of its data from Experian, one of the three major credit bureaus, according to a lengthy investigation by KrebsOnSecurity.
... [A]ccording to Martin there were other signs that should have alerted Experian to potential fraud associated with the account. For example, Martin said the Secret Service told him that the alleged proprietor of Superget.info had paid Experian for his monthly data access charges using wire transfers sent from Singapore. “The issue in my mind was the fact that this went on for almost a year after Experian did their due diligence and purchased” Court Ventures, Martin said. “Why didn’t they question cash wires coming in every month? Experian portrays themselves as the databreach experts, and they sell identity theft protection services. How this could go on without them detecting it I don’t know.
With everybody from the NSA to Splunk getting into our business to "help" us and "protect" us, you'd think, since they're so worried about us, they'd be real concerned about keeping our data out of the hands of (obvious) criminals.
“Anybody who is skilled in the art and understands what he’s proposing is going to have this dumbfounding reaction: ‘Oh, well it’s obvious it’ll work,’” said Darnell, a biochemist with an extensive background in thermodynamics.
...
A major stumbling block for solar thermal energy devices invented to date has been that, as temperatures rise, increasing amounts of energy escapes, or radiates away, from their receivers. At 1,650 degrees Fahrenheit, currently designed receivers would radiate as much energy as they collect, sinking their efficiency to zero, solar experts say.
In his patent application, Ace wrote that his invention amounts to “a high-temperature blackbody absorber”....
The key, he said, is his trap’s ability to absorb nearly 100 percent of the sunshine that hits it, while allowing only a tiny percentage of energy to escape, even at ultra-high temperatures.
Such a feat would astound many solar experts, who have had little success combating radiation losses in pilot solar plants, which use fields of mirrors to redirect and concentrate sunlight on common receivers.
The technique uses drugs called HDAC Inhibitors, which are more commonly used in treating cancer, to drive out the HIV from a patient’s DNA.
... The scientists are currently conducting human trials on their treatment, in the hope of proving that it is effective. It has already been found to work in laboratory tests. ... In vitro studies — those that use human cells in a laboratory — of the new technique proved so successful that in January, the Danish Research Council awarded the team 12 million Danish kroner (£1.5 million) to pursue their findings in clinical trials with human subjects. ... “The challenge will be getting the patients’ immune system to recognise the virus and destroy it. This depends on the strength and sensitivity of individual immune systems.”
But the really interesting bit is this:
The Danish team’s research is among the most advanced and fast moving in the world, as that they have streamlined the process of putting the latest basic science discoveries into clinical testing.
Cutting edge molecular biology and bureaucratic breakthroughs. How cool is that?
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. -- Doug Gwyn