The spores germinate only in very alkaline environments — concrete has a quite high pH. The article is vague on details, but notes that "[the bacteria] have a built-in self-destruct gene that prevents them from proliferating away from the concrete target."

Now, What Could Possibly Go Wrong and all of that, but the bases are nominally covered.

You're missing something. It was simple and fast, and gave results head and shoulders above those returned by the competition. Now, it's true that the competition had given up on getting better results and was instead working on trying to make money off of you while it tried to convince you you didn't want to leave the site anyway (so never mind those search results anyway -- please stay at our "portal"). But Google did more than just minimalism. Suddenly, the Internet was useful, because you could find what you needed, even if it was on some obscure page.

And how did Google make that work so well? Well, precisely by doing what you're worried about: organizing the results in a way which matches their algorithm's guess as to the most helpful response for your query.

After all, there's always been wget -r and grep.

The bit I was replying to was convoluted enough that I probably shouldn't have referred to it that way. I meant the whole of "It was probably not ppp, but a rather unfortunate password whose md5 is the same as for 'ppp'." as the former and "they'd actually put in a password like that." as unfortunate but probably true.

Since the former is statistically improbable to beyond-astronomical degrees, the latter is, unfortunately, more likely.

And therefore, it's interesting that the chose to use a license that explicitly offers a Grant of Patent License.

Well, maybe. All fluorescent bulbs give off light at specific points in the spectrum, not broad almost-black-body radiation like sunlight through the atmosphere. And the cheaper ones are, as a rule of thumb, worse. It might wake you up, but it's unclear if it has the same effect on mood. It might -- more study needed!

s/text release/press release/

It's a gimmick. There's no gigantic artificial whole-town sun or anything. Certainly nothing "ultimate".

Philips makes an alarm clock that includes a gradually-increasing bright light. They're couching this in the terms of an "experiment", but there's no actual science being performed. They just picked a north-of-the-arctic-circle town and gave away some of the product as a publicity stunt, and then sent out a text release, which is being published as news.

I live in Boston, which is north enough for me. I have a different Philips lightbox product, and I think it does provide a useful regulation of my mood in late winter afternoons. But I don't think the science behind it is particularly well developed, even if it seems promising. I thought for a second as I started to read the aticle (after I realized it wasn't the giant artificial sun thing) that it was a real scientific experiment with control groups and so on. Even then, it'd be hard to really control, because you can't exactly do a double-blind study. But, it's actually even lamer than that.

Okay, fine -- I'll post to undo the moderation.

It's four colors, but they're four completely different colors in completely different shapes. The MS Windows logo has red-orange, green, blue, and yellow, in different window-pane-like configurations depending on version. (In older versions, the orange was more red, and the blue and green were darker -- clearly the four perceptual primary colors.)

The Fedora glyphs are a navy blue, a magenta-tinged pink, definitely orange, and bright green. They're decidedly off-primary, and not in the same way that the Windows 7 and other recent MS logos are.

If you think I'm being pedantic, look at them actually side-by-side and you'll see that the comparison is ridiculous.

Surprisingly, Microsoft doesn't actually own the concept of using four colors for a logo. It reminds me of this silliness. So yeah, I thought you were trolling. And I'll give you a half apology, because even if you weren't trolling, it's pretty silly.

It's workable, but barely. There's already a bunch of SSH clients in the app store. If you want to actually interact, you need to have an app which has a translucent keyboard, and that takes some getting used to.

Good point. They need to read up a little bit on http return code 402.

And then your session-cookie can be hijacked.

Because the bookstore is part of a whole picture — book browsing, eccentric finds, local businesses, basically a whole ecosystem, and their pricing takes that into account. Same thing happens with sports tickets — the Red Sox benefit from having tickets priced so that their regular fans can actually go to games, just just the super-wealthy. The scalper can come and go and doesn't care about any of that. If whatever they're leeching from collapses, no problem, they can move on to suck blood from something else.

I think that's more annoying than scary. But there's legitimate uses for similar technology. For example, the Yubikey generates one-time passwords that work with open source server software.

The Fedora Project now accepts this as an authentication method for contributors. See: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Yubikey.