...to do this is to make your cell phone act as a key to the vehicle. When the car is in anything except "P", then the cell phone cannot make or receive calls and automatically goes to voicemail. Even this system needs to be well thought out to endure emergency action. A modern car probably knows when it has crashed, when it is stopped, etc. The car should be able to active/deactivate the phone based on these factors.

I feel that you may be underestimating the power of the social search. By definition, Facebook exists because people *want* to be connected to each other. Social gaming platforms push the latest details of someone's accomplishments, people are constantly being invited (or otherwise) to groups they may have an interest in. Basically, any social context is now at the mercy of crowd-wisdom. I think social search is going to enable more of this behaviour, and I think if you dismiss it so easily, you just don't get social networks.

Nope. My bad. Since the SHY character is used as a way to dictate line breaks, it obviously isn't used to forge domains or anything similar. Presumably then, the SHY is used to ensure that patterns such as "Viagra" can be written as Viagra and not be caught by simple pattern matchers? TFA was light on actual examples.

And, as TFA points out, this is a valid tactic because "modern browsers" (ambiguously non-committal) do not render the character. I assume, spammers are writing URLs as: http://m­i­crosoft.com/ (eg. m-i-crosoft.com, but rendered onscreen as microsoft.com). This, of course, tricks folks into thinking that they are clicking on a valid microsoft.com URL.

The holiday of course! And you know what? The saying "i only drink on days that end in 'y'" still applies!

Perhaps the question is incorrect. If i have a volume with data and a volume with encrypted data, then the encrypted data can be discerned from the non-encrypted data by virtue that there will be patterns detectable in the non-encrypted volume. So technically if you have a drive and there is random data on it but no discernible patterns, then there is either encrypted data on it, or it is an empty drive. It is likely not even factory default since that it likely to have some structure imposed upon it as well. What is the point of carrying around an encrypted volume with the ability for plausible deniability if that plausible deniability requires you to have random data as a volume? The existence of random data will render your plausible deniability claim useless since, by definition, your claim is no longer plausible.

It's basically the same situation that arises when a developer tries to talk to the business. Many developers just don't know how to speak in plain english (or language of choice) when it comes to describing technology. As a result, developers don't seem to "get the business" and the business doesn't seem to "get technology". Enter the business analyst: the BA is the interface that has the ability to speak both technology and business.

In the case of the media, they seem to lack really gifted technologists who can also convey the *meaning* of the science without losing their audience. Let's face it: most information consumers want the basic facts as well as the bit of novel "shiny" associated with the science. Sometimes the journalist has to understand the science *and* it's place so that they can come up with the novel bits for the audience. It takes a gifted journalist to do that, and many, obviously, fall short.

I've always wondered if there was any (automated) way to at least give developers a fighting chance when dealing with out-of-date documentation.

My only experience using a source code manager is CVS -- sorry. But I'm sure SVN and Git are similar. CVS understands the sections of code that have changed. There are also numerous ways to parse languages. Can we not combine the two to determine if there is a so-called "significant" change (where this is a highly questionable quantifiable value) and, if so, reject the check-in unless the comment directly above it, beside it, (or whatever) has changed as well? Perhaps there are already tools that do this? I am not aware of them and I would be most interested if anyone has anecdotal stories about things they use at their workplace to try to automate this.

Of course, nothing will stop a motivated developer from eventually getting around such a stop-gap system, but this would be designed to HELP, not PREVENT.

I posted the title. Unfortunately, Slashdot titles are restricted in length. If the titles were longer, we might get more accurate descriptions. As it is, you can't and you do the best you can.

This isn't news. This is how it's done. Ignoring the fact that it's about degrading performance, split testing is designed to attempt to optimize one variable. Sometimes it's difficult to isolate said variable. In this case, microsoft spends inordinate amounts of time and money to keep a high volume site snappy and responsive. The question is: are they spending *too* much money. So, they are attempting to answer that question using ye-olde-standard split testing methods.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

Air Canada (for all of it's financial woes now) and possibly WestJet (haven't flown them in 6 months, so I cannot be sure) has 3-prong 110 volt plugs built into the seat backs.

Then you haven't used it to track EVENTS (that affect more than one person) of personal importance to you: the first snippets of information to come out of Mumbai were via Twitter. Last night I used it to track snowfall (and traffic conditions) in Vancouver, BC. Coupled with instant upload of phone cam pictures, it was an amazingly realtime view of my personal geographic area.