The optimist in me hopes HornWumpus accomplishes his goal atop the Oyabashi space elevator.

Two years ago, Obayashi corp announced its intention to have a space elevator up by 2050. Part of that design involves solar panels transmitting energy back down to terra firma.

Apple doesn't care about the 'bug reports'... They're looking at kernel dumps and other crash reports automatically submitted by the users' computers. From there, they can reach out to third-party developers with suggestions on how they can update their software to work on the next OS release.

This is more to help third-party developers than to help Apple developers. In the closed beta, it's common for many third-party apps to fall through the cracks if they don't have a large enough user-base to have some participants in the closed beta.

I'm not convinced this wasn't an intentional effort to backdoor OpenSSL.

Code was submitted on new year's eve. A moment when the fewest people would be available to review it. Many people are on vacation and likely to gloss over the pile of code submitted while they were gone.

Just because he's a professor doesn't mean he wasn't compromised. A common page out of spycraft textbook would be to get an agent to seduce the professor and then document his infidelity. With this hanging over his head, he'll plant the requested vulnerability and even after it's discovered, he'll stick to the cover story to prevent those photos from being sent to his wife. For further reading on this topic, see the wikipedia page on Julian Assange.

I've spouted it a hundred times, here's #101:

Intuit's QuickBooks package is in desperate need of competition. It's thoroughly entrenched in the accounting industry such that the interface is nonsensically-antiquated. Yet, it's become one of those industry standards that Intuit refuses to modernize it or introduce any kind of improvements for fear it will alienate the armies of accountants that have been compelled to learn it.

If google were to launch a cloud-based bookkeeping app, this would be a tremendous benefit to small business owners worldwide.

How would you tell someone to prepare for their first year at Burning Man?

It's absolutely identical to the Gathering of the Juggalos, but hugely more pretentious.

I'd have to say it probably has more to do with being shown the Kennedy assassination tapes prior to the stroke of the pen that put it into action.

More specifically, the Kennedy assassination tapes that were shot from a completely different angle than the Zapruder film and hasn't been released to the public.

I'd like to know your perspective on the future need for programmers while automation technology continues to displace workers in many industries.

If someone is watching an episode of the smurfs where it is raining, you will notice a difference.

Could performance be improved if Amazon were to offload rendering of the raindrops to the client? I'm thinking if the Roku or AppleTV box had to compute the transparency of the raindrop over the skin of the blue smurfs, it might alleviate these performance hits you're seeing on EC2. Either that or replace the raindrops with snowflakes which are more complex due to every single one being unique, but not having transparency issues to manage might speed things up. I suppose the feasibility would depend on the Smurfs episodes' storylines, however.

A long while ago Yahoo tried to compete with eBay offering YahooAuctions. Their heart wasn't in it, and they killed it off. The potential there was huge and because there is no competition, eBay has enjoyed enormous profits at the expense of anyone trying to sell stuff. The commission they take off every sale is huge. Yahoo could shave the commissions down just a bit and still make a healthy profit.

Oh, and it would be trivial for Yahoo to make a craigslist competitor. I wish they would. Heck, with flickr, they've already got the photo hosting set up. Users would be attracted by improved interface and excellent mobile buying and selling app. At present, Craigslist doesn't care about either of these things and deserves to be knocked off its laurels.

Back in 2005, I had a personal blog site defaced. I didn't even know it had happened.

The way I spotted the issue was through an open terminal window that was tailing the apache access log. I'd glance at it every once in a while as traffic trickled over the blog. I saw a request come in from the PENTAGON domain. I thought it was odd because my blog was about skateboarding and didn't think it would be of interest to anyone working at the Pentagon. I looked at the referrer and it was a site I was unfamiliar with: http://www.zone-h.org/.

So I browsed over to that server and saw that the page linking to my site was a list of defaced sites. Then I checked my own homepage and sure enough, Wordpress had been compromised by an exploit and someone had posted an article on the front page.

So, it seems like someone at the pentagon had a script scraping the defacement indexing sites and was then visiting each affected server and scraping that. Never got an email or phone call or anything.

Wow. John Carmack quit his job at iD (Zenimax) to be the CTO at Occulus Rift and then in less than six months is probably getting a few dozen millions of dollars.

Talk about knowing where to be at the right time....

Same with Marc Andreesen and his VC cash infusion of $75 million just a few months ago. Those guys are going to turn that $75 mill into a bunch more through this turn and burn deal. Not so much a 'burn,' but it is a very quick harvesting on their investment.

Knutsi- I agree with all your points, but wanted to extend your comment a bit.

Probably that last line is the most significant motivator for both parties--

For Oculus, Sony was raising a threat. Also, supply of displays from Samsung might prove to be an unfeasible constraint. Especially if Samsung decides to create their own VR googles. With FaceBook money, they can build their own OLED factory if need be.

For FaceBook, they have to really worry that a technology on the horizon might take their hundreds of millions of eyeballs off FaceBook html and point them in a different direction- just like FaceBook took eyes away from network television. They just bought what might have been a FaceBook killer in the future. Maybe they aren't planning to weld Oculus rift onto the FaceBook homepage. Maybe they'll let it crush facebook, but they won't care because they'll be riding on top of the beast that stomped it to death.

Awesome work here.

I used to play the old Robot Wars game on my Apple II+ as a kid. Super fun and that was basically requiring us to write in assembly. Glad to see someone has brought this type of competition back to the public. Major kudos!!

I'm curious about the choice of javascript. I personally don't have a criticism against javascript, but I've recently been working with beanshell and python, so I'm wondering what's driving the javascript decision. Plans to support python or other languages later?

The pings that were recorded after the other communications gear was shut down were emitted by the Rolls Royce engines. The engine vendor apparently wants to maintain records separate from the black box (might not be recovered) in the event of a crash. This way they can document exactly when their engines stopped. If it's at point of impact, then they avoid blame.

So, I do not believe that anyone inside the plane could have shut off the engines' transponders without shutting down the engines.