Why should THE MAN want to brick your phone, when instead they can just track you - that's what they want - then they can brick *you* as needed.

Given our track record with Juniper, "drop everything and patch now" is a foolhardy approach, especially with something as important as a border router or firewall. I wouldn't apply any of their patches without seeing a long track record of safety. With heartbleed there was an unknown level of risk that they would be attacked; with any given Juniper patch there is a known risk the network would just go down.

Of course, given the choice, I wouldn't select a Juniper device to route packets to a doghouse, and would never place one as a mission critical node on any network. Then again, that's not my choice to make, just one we have to live with.

"3D room painter "

That's called explosives...

Apparently the sound from your mic and the echo from your gyroscopes were both parsed by your speech-to-text converter. I guess it works better than we thought!

Apple fixed that problem. The iPhone has no battery door, so it can't be removed in case you don't want the phone to spy on you.

When you look at the technical advancements in agriculture, they're composed of small features integrated in to (or bolted on to) existing equipment. You don't need a new tractor, you just need to mount a GPS receiver and a database onto your old one. A processor no bigger than a cell phone can do lots of that. Adding electrically operated valves to an existing fertilizer or pesticide spray system? Again, very small. It doesn't have to auto-steer, it just has to know where it is, and where it's been.

The makers don't have to build the tractors, they just want to improve them.

Launch and land a "pep boys" on mars...

I realize reading the article is considered bad form, but if you read it you'd learn they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. That's somewhere between zero to two months. Lots of big shops have a monthly patching cycle, and you don't just drop every patch into a mission critical system the day it arrives.

They said they think they were breached sometime between April and June. Heartbleed was announced in April. The window was zero to two months, not five.

And it's not that data security is a low priority, it's just that it may not be as high a priority as network availability. This is health care, where problems in communication might affect patient outcomes. "Hey, sysadmin, Doctor Green couldn't respond to his page last night, and the patient died as a result." These are the kinds of arguments that are thrown at the IT departments at every health care provider. Whether or not we consider them rational or valid is irrelevant.

So in that backdrop, we might try to understand that they probably don't just slam in every patch that the vendor has to offer, at least not without a giant process circus. I would guess that they have a patch intake process, where they have to run the patch by some engineering team that evaluates the nature of the patch, and devises some kind of testing plan to execute in their lab environment. They then have to pass it to the testing team who will set up and execute the patch process in the lab, document all their findings, and then turn the patch over to the production network team. They'll put it on their list, and they'll have their own manager who says "whoa, why are you security guys rushing to slam this patch in to my border router? Let's slow down and think about this one."

I could easily see it taking a month in a big, regulated corporate environment.

Black tanks in greenhouses are used as thermal storage to heat the greenhouse during cold days. 55 gallons of water in a black tank that the sun hits all day long, holds enough heat to keep a small greenhouse at or above 40 degrees for almost an entire winter day where it is bitter cold outside. IT will actually keep it above freezing for over 3 days.

We used to fill 55 gallon drums full of water and paint them black to hold up shelving, we had a small 10X20 greenhouse and 4 barrels of water kept the greenhouse warm for a week during a bitter cold snap. Water is an awesome heat storage medium.

Actually no, Society is not OK with that. Only the most horrible pet owners let their cats out like that. It's the scumbag fringe of society that is OK with it.
Many cities are trying hard to fight the scourge of bad pet owners letting their cats out.

"Photovoltaic has still many recent discoveries for great efficiency improvements, and more are likely to come."

Except you can not exceed the solar power that hits the surface of the planet from the sun. Sorry kids but once again that damned law of physics get's tin the way.

Solar has a Maximum you can not exceed and that is if the sky is clear on a low humidity day and not pollution in the sun belt. Everywhere else is drops off drastically. Solar is awesome for a supplemental power source or to offset consumption. On homes that are grid tied and allowed to back-feed it can do a lot to offset Air conditioning power, but on cloudy days or in winter solar is worthless so you need other sources as your main power supply.

Yes you CAN go 100% solar, but that means oversize installations. 5X the solar needed to capture and store as much power as possible for the longest historical 10 year no sunlight stretch. in some places that is 2 months, so you also need battery storage to handle 2 months plus 15% and a solar installation that can charge up that 2 month supply within a few days.

So no, Photovoltaic will not be the answer, too low of energy density even if it was at 100% efficiency.

Anyone have video of the birds bursting into flames? Because there is less than a 200 foot radius from the tower where that can happen. Solar death ray in action setting birds on fire as they fly through the beam!

This sums up the core MS issue better than anything else I've ever read. MS has never been innovative, but worse: It has never been a company that likes change. Their world-view is static and stationary. While they acknowledge the world is changing (reality can be quite persuasive), they don't see movement, they see a succession of stationary status quos.

They will now throw everything at becoming the perfect company for the picture of the world they have. And in five years look out the window and see that the world has changed - again.

It's also the reason we all hate MS - due to their still existing stranglehold on computing, they keep much of the rest of the world static with them. The damage done by preventing innovation and progress is easily ten times MS net worth.

All because some people don't understand that life is dynamic.

There are the ethics of the money collected, but that can be fixed. I'm more concerned about the inequity of the penalty. If I had to pay a $300.00 fine for a red light violation, it would be slightly annoying. If my unemployed neighbor had to pay $300.00, he'd fall further behind on his rent, or possibly go hungry. Conversely, if I had to unexpectedly sit in jail for a day, my projects would suffer, my employer would have no sympathy, and my job might be at stake; while my neighbor would simply wait out his days with little else of consequence. So if I know the penalty is monetary, I can afford to run the occasional red light. If we know the penalty is to serve time, my neighbor might run a red light just to get three squares.

How to best create a fair penalty is a difficult proposition.