>> patch of woodland just north of Livingston, Louisiana

The most annoying part of the introduction was the fact that it made it sound like this was going on in somebody's still, rather than a highly funded research project run through nearby LSU. Also it's partial due to work in California:

>> Key design elements of LIGO came from Ronald Drever, project director at Caltech from 1979 to 1987, who, Thorne says, “has to be recognized as one of the fathers of the LIGO idea."

>> pushed into building artificial worlds because making in the real one is hampered by (indecipherable sniveling)

Take a minute to Google "Dungeons and Dragons" and you'll see how my generation did reality-avoidance.

I'd expect lots of cross-over branding crap. Look what happened to Legos: you can barely avoid the Star Wars, LOTH, Disney Princess and Marvel (and yes, even Minecraft) branded tie-ins over there.

15. Someone drops the Red Matter

16. No one can speak "whale song" in 400 years

17. Vger can't find Decker

Extreme climate change
Nuclear war
Global pandemic
Major asteroid impact
Super volcano
Ecological catastrophe
Global system catastrophe
Synthetic biology
Nanotechnology
Artificial intelligence
Future bad global governance
Unknown consequences /karmawhoring>

Kind of weak list, IMHO. For example, where is "overpopulation?"

...cause that technology is about as magical as this silly notion:

>> Could we all one day soon have virtual backups of ourselves that we can access and have new body parts 3D printed on demand?

Why does it look like a fleshlight?

>> it was simple; only two pieces to fit together

To me, the Linux experience has been based around the use of simple, command-line oriented tools that could be easily scripted together. That's the opposite of "only two pieces fit together" - just like Legos you have thousands of pieces that could fit together to make billions of different things.

>> Hard To Imagine Consumers and hobbyists signing on to a perpetual Microsoft tax

Why? That's how cell phone providers and cable TV providers and ISPs already do it. You just bury the cost of the OS and office environment in the service charge and...Voilà!

Mr. Farrell, is that you?

Check out http://www.knex.com/. If you're basically just building frames, it might be the better toy^bol.

The "Department of Justice" sounds nice, but it's this a fight that any one vendor could still take straight to court (since DoJ is just a wing of the administrative branch)?

(Seriously - IANAL...or anything close to it!)

>> in the wake of the past year's tragic violence involving professional astronauts...the open access to such lethal hardware needs reappraisal

Good thing there's no other way to die on the way to, in or on the way back from space.

As I understand the analysis, this exploit could be used to turn Fuelbands into data mules. It could also let someone temporarily brick all the Fuelbands within range (could be fun at the start of a marathon or at the gym).

>> Cmd_Bootloader: Set the device to bootloader mode ( basically it locks down the device, the official app won't work either ... only resetting it with the usb cable will unlock it ).
>> Cmd_SampleStore: Use the device memory to store a custom object (!!!)

>> In my experience it is not the budget but the politics.

Politics are usually about budget. You really can't separate the two.

>> Is your company's security worth the expense of an additional tech? Or are office politics the reason you cannot get an additional tech?

This is an entry-level "think of the children" argument. Come back when you can express your needs for an additional tech in downtime, lost customers, etc. (i.e., money).

>> Does whomever is in charge of your technology have the authority to say "no" to requests from other departments? And the political capital to make it stick?

Surprisingly, they often DO have the authority, but they're smart enough to know that a cost center that says "no" too many times is a cost center begging to to replaced.

>> Retrofitting security is not the answer.

Unfortunately, it usually is, because replacing all systems and processes from scratch would be significantly more risky, expensive and (wall clock) time consuming.