The panopticon effect. If the bad guys know that the police will only use highly visible Crown Vics, they know exactly when to be on guard. If the police also occasionally uses unmarked cars, criminals can never feel safe, because there is a chance they might be watched.

10^-27cm (the spherical error in the article) is 10^-29m. The upper bound on the electron's radius is 10^-22m (Wikipedia). The solar system is roughly 1.5*10^13m in radius (Wolfram Alpha), so 3*10^13m in diameter. If you'd inflate the electron to the size of the solar system, scaling by 3*10^35, the spherical error would be 3*10^6m, which is more than twice the diameter of Earth, according to my calculations.

Viola!

This conflates the right of a people to know what an elected government is doing in their name, with the reasonable right of a person to hold personal secrets. One form of openness increases liberty, the other decreases it. Disclosing to the state the secrets of the people is much more heinous than the reverse.

To be honest, I read it for Bruce's commentary.

You're not a programmer, are you?

I distinctly remember that they weasled out of making Osama bin Laden their Man of the Year 2001, even though he marked that year like no other.

I'm Dutch and I concur. Comparing De Telegraaf to The Sun feels about right. I won't comment about this incident, but De Telegraaf is not known for being nonpartisan and rigorous, to put it nicely.

Cool stuff; this allows the automatic creation of chroot environments.

Armanian; noun; someone who wears Armani suits when committing High Crime.

Congrats on Slashvertising your app. In Holland we've had www.openfietskaart.nl for a while already. There's also www.opencyclemap.org. Yes, open mapping is cool, no, this is not news.

John Calcote is a senior software engineer in Novell's Linux business, who after slogging up the steep learning curve the Autotools triad poses to those packaging software according to the portable GNU conventions for the first time, very kindly decided to make the experience easier to newcomers by sharing his years of experience and carefully crafted bag of tricks.

The book opens with John's experiences in adopting the Autotools, and quickly offers what is in my view a very important word of caution that is often lacking in the few tutorials I have seen on the Net: the Autotools are not simply a set of tools but foremost the encoded embodiment of a set of practices and expectations in the way software should be packaged the GNU way.

Good heavens, I'm all for sentences with body, but this is terrible. I actually stopped reading the article after the second one. You know what this site could use? Editors.

The station is so hypnotizing because the broadcast constantly changes around the basic beat: there's static, sometimes the signal will fade in and out, and sometimes you hear strange things. Listening to this unpredictable thing broadcasting live can be quite a trippy, tense experience.