The military has to stockpile medication for long periods of time, so they have an incentive to find out what the real shelf life is. Our military (deliberately obscuring who "our" is since I don't know if this was made public and couldn't be bothered checking) did long-term ageing tests on commonly-stockpiled stuff and found that medication stored for a decade was still 98% as effective as fresh stock. They're still waiting for the 20-year time period to come up to re-check it again.

Damn, beat me to it. For people who are wondering about this (but my granny takes it and she says it helps), look at the results of the GAIT trial. It's indistinguishable from placebo for most people, except for a small subset that no-one can explain. This, and the placebo effect (but mostly placebo) is what accounts for the various "but it helped my dog/cat" posts on here.

And electrolytes. Don't forget the electrolytes. It's what cats crave.

That was my reaction as well. They're employing people who have knowingly signed up for a job that would require them to kill millions of innocent civilians, and then they're surprised at their lack of moral backbone when they cheat in the exam.

It's a bit more complicated than that. Connolly was head of the EC unit that dealt with European monetary policy. The book that he wrote was critical of the EC's monetary policies, i.e. he wrote and published a book criticising his own employer. He was fired for it, and appealed his dismissal. The ECJ rejected the appeal (which is kind of understandable). The opinion was justifying Connolly's dismissal by the EC, not attacking his book.

It's not so much "very smart move" as "why weren't they doing this in the first place"? I've worked on various crypto projects and I don't think any of them ever relied on a single source of entropy, unfiltered. For those systems using RDRAND the way it's supposed to be used (to feed a hash or crypt-based generator, alongside other sources), this "news" story should really read "FreeBSD developers finally do what everyone else has been doing for years".

Keep-ass-X? I guess that's one place to store them, but it doesn't strike me as terribly hygienic. Mind you it should be safe from shoulder-surfing, unless you're in the shower and bend over for the soap.

I think you're confusing that quote with one from Madame Arabella (hand-, blow-, rim-, ...), she operated a bordello close to the Ford plant.

... the CDC has offered to donate ebola to the same nonprofits. Speaking on condition of anoymity, the CEO of one nonprofit stated that "on the whole, we'd rather take the ebola".

Why hasn't the SEED cipher (RFC 4269) been reimplemented in Flash, Java, JavaScript, native code using an NPAPI plug-in (Netscape's counterpart to ActiveX, now used by Firefox), or native code using a PPAPI plug-in (Chrome's counterpart to ActiveX)?

The problem isn't only SEED, it's that the use of the ActiveX control has spawned an entire ActiveX culture in which you may need to run a dozen or more ActiveX controls to do business with your bank. Having issues with all that ActiveX running on your system? No problem, the bank's support staff will just remote into your machine (using several of the ActiveX components) and fix things for you, including installing new software and changing system configs (also known as "lowering security settings") to enable all the gunk that needs to be running. The procedure for doing online banking there is basically "set up clean VM, of XP, do your banking hopefully before you get pwned, blow away the VM again, repeat". I don't know what's a better analogy for the situation there, a toxic swamp or a petri dish, or maybe a mixture of both.

You too, since you missed the chance to pick on him for: - "first adapter"

Actually this is correct, what he's referring to is the power connector on the Korean thromdimbulator, invented by the famous slawinister Johann Sebastian First and know as the First connector. To plug this into a standard power point, you need a First adapter. Arguably it needs to be capitalised, but I've frequently seen it written with a lowercase 'f'.

What you meant to say there was:

Flew out of an airport in Croatia a few months ago, a country that has about, oh, a million times more experience with violence and terror than the US. A passenger asked an airport staff member whether he had to take his shoes off during the check-in process. The staff member said no, but if he was carrying firearms he had to notify them.

When was the last time you heard of a hijacked aircraft (or whatever the TSA are supposed to be dealing with) in Croatia?

Well I don't know about you, but I'm planning to live forever (or die trying).

I ran into the same thing trying to help a (non-technical) neighbour upgrade her PC. Unlike any other update, MS is forcing you to use the Windows Store to upgrade rather than making it a standard Windows Update. So she had to set up a Windows Store account, which she'd never done before. Then Windows Store wanted to install a mountain of crapware (Mettrash apps) that she'd never use and had no interest in. Then it demanded that she register a credit card number to cover the costs of all the apps she had no intention of ever buying from the store. Then she finally got a chance to look for the 8.1 upgrade. Problem is that no matter what she did, she couldn't find it in the store. After about an hour she gave up.

If MS doesn't make this thing available using Windows Update, they're going to have serious problems with adoption. The only time I've ever seen upgrades that were this painful was with "enterprise-grade" software from IBM.

Where'd the gold go?
(I don't know!)
Where'd the silver go?
(I don't know!)
Bitch, where the mothaf**kin' gold at?
(I don't know!)
Motherf**k!

Or, if you want a modern x86-based mini system, buy something like a Zotac barebones for a little over half the price. I realise it's cool and tree-huggy to have an open-source board like this, but in practice if I want an embedded real-world interface device I'll get an Arduino, if I want a compact x86 I'll get any one of a range of SFF x86's, and if I want something about halfway I'll get a PCEngines Alix, also at half the price.