From what I've read/heard, the long drop hanging may snap the neck, but does not kill those hanged. It may snap the neck rendering the hanged a paraplegic, but death occurs due to strangulation. It's not known if the hanged is conscious. In an interview with Johnny Carson, Truman Capote who witnessed the hanging of the In Cold Blood murderers it took at least 20 minutes for death to occur. Again, no one knows how long it took for strangulation to cause unconsciousness under these circumstances. Sometimes hanging goes wrong. The execution of the main characters in the Nuremberg Nazis, the hangman was incompetent and some were decapitated and the next up for the rope had to clean up the mess before they were hanged.

IIRC, it has been posited by the Innocence Project that 50% of persons convicted using eye witness accounts are not guilty of the crime of which they were convicted. Take a look at the number of people released over the past few years after dozens of years in prison who were found not to have committed the crime that put them there. One of the problems for the many innocent folks in prison is that there aren't many people willing to put in the effort to research their situation since there's little profit in doing so. And once an innocent has been put to death it's even less likely that the case will be reconsidered. So, what's the percentage of executions done on innocent prisoners? Who knows, but it's likely much more than 4%.

And by then the sun will be a red giant with a radius as large of not larger than the earth's orbit. We're going to be pretty well fried by then.

Open source code is only as good as its writer and those who check it. Apparently the Heartbleed got through to its users from an error by the code writer and the one person checking it didn't find it. Probably the same problem with closed source software. Why only one person checked the SSL/TLS code is a mystery to me.

I love it when information gives the time of day but not the time zone. Is this 10:20 PM in Eastern Australia or U. S. EDT or what?

Maybe I have watched too many WW II movies, but here's my take on why Germany "lost" WW II:

1. Germany's invasion of Russia in September was a bad move because they ran into the Russian winter. Had they invaded in the Russian spring they would have had a whole summer for action against Moscow and maybe Stalingrad.

2. Germany ended up fighting a two or maybe it can be called a three front war: Britain and western most of Europe, Russia and southern Europe (Italy/Mediterranean/North Africa). If they had just conquered Russia first, then the West may have had trouble beating them what with the resources they may have gained from Russia including oil, steel works, technical know how, manufacturing capacity, and man power.

3. At the battle of Stalingrad Hitler split his forces - one to take the city and one to go for the southern oil wells. The Germans should have gone for one or the other but not for both. Of course, Goering promised he could supply the German army there, but that didn't happen. Of course, by item 1 above, a three or four month head start might have been successful considering the winter situation.

4. The Germans were in love with technology and size. The tanks developed and used in the Battle of the Bulge were enormous and inappropriate for the forested/hilly/river containing terrain on the way to Holland. These tanks couldn't cross bridges because they were either too heavy or too wide and they used a lot of fuel. The Sherman and successor tanks weren't the technological marvels of the German tanks, (and those of the Russians) but they were reasonably reliable and repairable by their crews, large in numbers, maneuverable and more fuel efficient. Other choices by the Allies about what to manufacture in huge numbers and appropriate quality were also important.

4. And of course the incredible cryptanalysis capability of Bletcley Park that resulted in the defeat of the U Boats and kept the supply chain running to Britain and Russia from the U. S. as well as the defeat of the Germans at Kursk the the Russian advance west.

I'm sure others can add additional "mistakes" made by the Hitler-German war machine that resulted in Germany's defeat including the nature of the German army's culture of following orders, even if they came from a mad man.

Maybe off topic a little, but today (4/2/2014) the New York Times has an obituary for the last living Bletchley Park codebreaker. Jerry Roberts worked to break the code used for Hitler to communicate with the highest field military officers, Field Marshals. Apparently the Germans used an ultra type machine with as many as 12 rotors for that purpose rather than the simpler device with three or four rotors. The code he and his coworkers broke they called Tunny, not Ultra, as in tuna fish since one of the German operators was called fish.

It's an interesting read: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...

Not quite. The situation might be a good business opportunity for countries with high tech capability like Japan, Germany, maybe even Poland. Make the infrastructure hardware that's absolutely unhackable. That might put Cisco, Juniper, Dropbox, MS Azure, etc., out of business.

What about the Voyager spacecraft the left the solar system a few months ago?

Google has a reputation for cancelling its services. When will Google Drive be pulled and I won't be able to get my stuff back since it would take more than my monthly data cap to do so?

American agriculture uses three units of energy to produce one unit of food energy. Much of this comes from methane to produce ammonia. Other energy uses in agriculture are pretty obvious such as fuel for tractors, harvesting combines and transportation to storage elevators. Liquid propane is used by farmers to dry their corn to a low moisture content to prevent it rotting or keep fungus away. This last energy use has affected those who heat their homes with propane this last winter because of its price increase because of the high demand by farmers and the wet autumn. So indirectly much if not all of our food comes from carbon compounds coming out of the ground, not just the carbon dioxide in the air.

Some has or will come up with a test for this fungus, the Pichia Test. Dentists will take a swab of your mouth and either perform the test or send the swab off for analysis. If you don't have the fungus you can come back and be inoculated with Pichia. This might be something like inoculating the bowels of patients with the bacteria they're missing because of anitbiotic treatments that killed off their digestive system flora. Of course, skeptics will figure dentists are being coerced by some three letter government agency to collect DNA samples for whatever purpose they want.

And there was Clippy.Yikes!

Perhaps Mozilla knows that the Metro Start screen and everything about Metro will eventually be disposed of by Microsoft, which is what should happen, in some future update or new version of Windows. Maybe Windows 9. Smart, Mozilla!

...with little to no mention of the ISPs.

Check out the fairly active thread over at DSL reports vis a vie Comcast subscriber's problems with Netflix including some non answers by a Comcast employee: http://www.dslreports.com/foru...