John Kiriakou, the whistleblower went to jail.

Most doctors don't take the Hippocratic Oat.

Nearly half of the students aiming for a bachelors or masters degree in mathematics in Germany are women. I had assumed that it's the same internationally, but actually this seems not to be the case. Interesting.

We do have gender equity in math. Is that because math is more "societally meaningful" than CS or engineering?

I've written a somewhat popular Android app and most of its crashes are either the fault of the runtime or of vendor specific customizations.

The Developer Console provides excellent reporting on both uncaught Java exceptions and crashes in native code. Most often, the Dalvik VM crashes during garbage collection. The Dalvik class loader is also flaky and has issues with multithreading that only got worked around in newer versions. I've also seen the libchromium crash inside my app from adverts delivered by Googles Admob service, which is somewhat scary from a security perspective.

Another issue is that apps using Googles compatibility library now crash on HTC devices running Android 4.1 as soon as the user presses the menu key. HTC is no longer providing updates and Google simply states that it's not their fault and therefore not their problem. Now thousands of app developers have to independently find out about the issue and work around it.

So when an app crashes, there's a good chance that it's not the fault of the app developer. On a brighter note, the ART VM used in Android 5 and newer seem to be rock solid.

AFAIK, Stingray is based on an IMSI catcher. It simulates a cell tower and gets cell phones in the area to connect to it by providing the strongest signal. It then records the data of all connected cell phones and forwards it to the network.

Since IMSI catchers are well understood, all this secrecy is a bit surprising. It makes speculation about additional capabilities plausible. It could use exploits in the modem software to install malware. Such malware could do all sorts of things like reading local files, including contacts, messages, browsing history and possibly passwords. It could also store files on the device. It could provide side channels for encrypted communication from https to WhatsApp calls. It could also turn on the microphone and camera. All this is pure speculation, but it seems plausible.

SpaceX made similar claims and reduced the dependency from suppliers by producing as much a s possible in-house.

Forensic analysis methods are not scientifically validated in general. AFAIK any forensic evidence is admissible if the the judge decides so. The general standard is that is sounds plausible.

The Soviets never shot people for looking funny at the Kremlin. Mathias Rust pulled a very similar stunt in 1987. He was sentenced to four years, but released after one year as a sign of political goodwill.

I'm afraid this is a bit too technical for senators. Who will be able to see their dick picks?

Politicians have voted on science before: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

The intensity of these problems varies a lot between users. For many people, they lessen over time. Oculus claims to have solved the hardware and driver side of the problem (at least on the Rift) so that anyone can have an experience without sickness / feeling dizzy. However, this also requires that the software holds back and doesn't show any extreme movements.

Thanks to smartphones and tablets, we now have compact and affordable displays and sensors. And GPU shaders now allow us to correct lens distortion and aberration with relative ease.

Do you have any idea of what you're talking about? The US army employs numerous muslim chaplains and has been doing so since 1993.

This reminds me of the Graffiti input method Palm developed for its devices. It was used on a small touch pad, before larger touch screens became available.