And Boulder is one of the most bike friendly cities in the world where drivers are used to cyclists and he's still had several major and potentially life threatening injuries (if it was enough force to break a collar bone, he could have broken his neck if he'd landed differently). Image what it's like elsewhere.

The part most folks are missing that while you could do this on certain custom roms, almost every phone maker has the NFC sensor turned off unless the device is unlocked. While I use tasker and NFC quite a lot, I can't make it do this without installing a custom rom that enables the NFC. Now the flip side is that if the device is processing NFC when locked, that means someone can bump into you and have your phone activate website URLs or trigger things like google wallet depending on your settings.

I have to do this all the time for work as I used to manage an large HR unit's IT needs - and they really do need your SSN, on every damn piece of documentation... Find a secure service or hosting option that meets your security requirements, there are hundreds out there. Personally I tend to use LastPass's secure notes or if it's not super secure data I'll just use Evernote w/ attachments and send them a private URL. Again, if you don't like those options, there are literally hundreds of others including roll-your-own services, I've used Accellions (clunky but it works), Box.net and Dropbox or even just spinning up your own web server w/ a required password you give them over the phone. All of varying levels of security and hassle to the end users. To them, it's just an email with a link and perhaps they have to enter their email or go through a sign up process the first time. It doesn't have to be that hard.

Keep in mind, it's Colorado, permitted growing is allowed currently for medical and will soon be available for recreational as well. Sadly as a resident of the state, I'm in the loop as I used to work on a university campus.

While I don't have ADHD, I work adjacent to a call center and find it completely unbearable. I often use music, but the noise level would be so high that it could lead to hearing damage for 8 hour shifts unless I also paired it with extremely bulk isolation cans which I don't find comfortable. For about $100 you can get Active noise canceling headphones on Amazon. They work even if you are not listening to music and will actively negate the noise with opposing sound waves from the area giving you a highly muffled experience and I can speak from experience that it handles human voices well as well as things like jet and train noise. (disclaimer: I'm not a sound engineer so do your own research). I use the Sony ones, but other brands may be good as well.

No idea about others here, but nearly all of our peripheral boxes got pulled into virtualization projects and the "private cloud" thing management bought into. Seems to increase reliability in our systems since they get "free" piggy back rides on high availability systems so one DC failure doesn't take down our even our semi-important systems. To access them we just fire up the VPN with two factor auth over wireless at Starbucks from our laptop/tablet/phone if we need to log in. Beats the hell out of sitting in the chill, roar or heat of the DC.

Even if you don't want it in the cloud, CrashPlan has a good PC to PC software (Free) that's very friendly and allows version control. Either way, you are a fool if you don't have an offsite. Most thefts or things worthy of an insurance claim would destroy or make unavailable your backups. Find a family member or friend with an acceptable internet connection, trade them external hard drives and allow reciprocal backups over the wire. Reality though, maintaining multiple TB drives is more expensive per year than paying a cloud service.

No need to rebuild the wheel, most data centers have various monitoring capabilities ranging from WebServer enabled monitoring systems (personally I like the units from ITWatchDogs), SNMP trapping to hand written scripting. Just borrow that functionality for your lab equipment. Here's what I do to monitor temp, security, water leaks, fire etc: Purchase a sensor unit that supports SNMP trapping or is able to push email alerts (WeatherGoose II ITWatchDogs was about the cheapest I could find for DC rack monitoring needs I had that supported lots of external devices, dialers etc). Since it supports various external sensors, you can make your own and tie it into the monitoring system (temp, humidity etc are built in, but smoke alarms etc are extra add-ons that either you buy or you can make as long as it's the right voltage). If using SNMP, have a monitoring server that can react any number of given ways, mine sends screen shots of the room from the security camera as well as and various alerts for too high temp, water leaks etc. If it's fire, it CC's our emergency fire system. I also use other things like "Site Uptime" monitors and such from 3rd parties on the email front, but that's more targeted at mail servers. For email alerts, I have a couple rules in Exchange (on the server level) to distribute it accordingly. I do use Tasker heavily to automate my phone, but really I don't rely on it as being mission critical as you never know when you'll be out of reception. Instead I try to use the servers to handle responses to the rest of my team and use Tasker to control when and when not to wake me up in the middle of the night.

Mountain Grove Missouri closed their entire school system that day. I distinctly remember having a new NES game and being particularly annoyed that I was explicitly told not to stay inside at any point of the day for more than a few minutes.

A lot of us car nuts have been hacking our car computers for years. There's systems that go light years beyond the factory systems. 10 years ago, I was able to use my Palm Pilot II to modify my fuel trims while driving, monitor horsepower and adjust an electronically controlled boost controller for my turbo. That was all on a 1990 Talon AWD so it didn't even had ODBII yet. My new model actually fully replaced the EEPROM chips in the ECU and has bluetooth capabilities to be controlled from my smartphone, controls the doorlocks, radio, moonroof etc. In theory, it would be a trival bluetooth hack to not only cause the engine to stop but to detonate the engine (destroy - not actually cause an explosion) by pulling the fuel trims too lean. The bluetooth module was a snap on vampire chip with a tiny lead to a receiver. The whole system looked 100% factory and was tiny. It would be a trival system to integrate a remote kill and unless they were specifically looking for a technology related problem, investigators would likely never realize that it had been installed.

I'll admit, I only skimmed the article, but wouldn't it make a lot more sense that the immune system would be boosted from the physical act of them taking the "Before" sample? The fact that you're missing blood is something the body would definately sense and react to. Not saying it's implausible, but it seems like a rather large hole in the logic.