While I agree with others worried that a kill switch could be abused (by carriers / government / MPAA / RIAA / etc), I'm now wondering if it would be a handy way to counter (un)lawful search and seizure of a device by various authorities? Say you're transiting through the US and a TSA agent decides they want to confiscate (and presumably search) your smartphone. If the kill switch is easy to activate (maybe a number you call and enter a code, or via your laptop or friend's smartphone), you could wipe your device before they get the contents.

I don't think the submitter understands math. One mile is about 1.6 km, so 6,000,000 km^3 of lava would cover an area of 3,750,000 km^2. Yet when I check Wikipedia (and Princeton, and the other top 5 Google results), they all say the Contiguous United States has an area of just over 8,000,000 km^2. That's an awfully big mistake. I hope the actual Stanford paper is of better quality than the Slashdot summary.

I'm on m.slashdot.org with my iPad, and there's no video. Not even a placeholder for a video (if they were using Flash or Silverlight.) So I also checked the CES Unveiled link in the summary, but it just goes to the schedule, no details. Not impressed guys...

I didn't see anything in the stories saying the pins were all exactly four digits. The examples of bad pins given in one story were four digits long, but most debit systems in North America accept larger pins. For the past 25 years, I've banked primarily with RBC (the largest bank in Canada), and I've always had a 6 digit pin. I have travelled a fair bit in that time, and the only place I had problems was at the ATMs for smaller banks in New Zealand, which had GUIs limiting pin input to 4 digits.

That summary is misleading. It's based on an NSA response to a FOI request, worded as follows:

(emphasis mine)

That could be network folders (ie: directories) and Word documents, they never said anything was on "paper". The way I read that quote was that they've got heaps of contracts, stored in lots of directories, and even if they did a search they'd have to read each document returned to see if it was a contract pertaining to the FOI request. They're trying to say that's too burdensome, which in theory gives them a way of not supplying the information. In practice, a judge might decide they should be able to do the search in a reasonable amount of time, and force them to comply.

This update might be the death knell for the Java4K contest. That would be a real shame - lots of great developers have submitted games over the years, such as Markus Persson of Minecraft fame. But after the recent changes and now this red text warning, I'd bet most casual users will turn off Java in their browser (and who can blame them?) A contest with only developers can still be fun, but not as fun as having several hundred or thousand people play your game.

I thought it was because your hand creates a big buffer of air in front of it, like a bow wave. The fly is so small, it's easily buffeted ahead and aside, so any manoeuvring gets it out of the line of your hand. Even easier when your hand approaches a hard surface - then the air squishes out to the sides, and the fly goes out with it. This is probably easier to visualize in a body of water - float a cork or a small piece of plastic in your sink, put your hand in the water, then try to squish the item up against the side of the sink. It won't work most of the time, as the bow wave will push the item off to one side, and it only gets worse the faster your move your hand.

I expect that's why fly swatters are just a mesh - so the air can flow through without creating an air buffer.

Looks like a rehash of the story we saw here a couple of years ago. I've only read the first few paragraphs of this new article, but I haven't found anything different from the previous one. I'm not suggesting plagiarism, I'm just saying it looks like the author just took the information from previous stories and rewrote it in his own words, without adding anything new.

A working link: http://news.sciencemag.org/evolution/2013/07/scienceshot-new-shrew-has-spine-steel.