The article is confused about ARM chips, which are practically never socketed. It wouldn't make any sense because ARM CPUs are highly integrated---they tend to include on-chip equivalent of North Bridge, South Bridge and many peripherals such as video hardware, USB, Ethernet, I2C, serial and parallel I/O ports, timers, counters etc. In fact, that's the main problem with Intel in the embedded and enthusiast market: it's hard to make a small/low cost platform like Raspberry Pi because you need an expensive CPU... _and_ the chipset and peripheral chips. The cost difference is staggering---there are ARM microcontrollers that cost less than a dollar (admittedly, not the ones that you can run Linux on, due to lack of virtual memory, and small flash/RAM).

The Reinheitsgebot isn't such a blessing you make it out to be. Of course it prevents commercial drek laced with oil refinery products, but it also excludes lambics and other flavored craft beers (Midas Touch, blackberry witbier, etc, etc). I really like the beer selection here in the US, with educated public rewarding small craft breweries who put out surprisingly good product.

If you ever saved a file under a name such as mypage.html.Jun12 or, worse, mypage.html.old, you basically used a ghetto Version Control. You already agree that it is useful, so let me show how easy it is to do it properly, in a way that will remember everything about who, when, and how changed every file, and will prevent accidental overwrites and editing conflicts.

It's not quite right that USADA relies entirely on rumors. Their spokesman claimed that they have blood test results that can only be explained by blood transfusions, which are classified as doping, are illegal and were denied by Armstrong. I am just repeating what I understood---please correct if you can.

So, for starters, people appear to confuse secure boot functionality in UEFI with secure BIOS upgrades. The former is required by new Windows 8 hardware profile and is provided as specified by the UEFI standard. The latter is what the NIST spec is talking about---to prevent firmware malware attacks. The idea is simple---during normal operation BIOS is readonly; firmware updates write the new image to a temporary area, and upon reboot the old firmware takes over, realizes that there's a new firmware available, cheks the crypto signatures to ensure the provenance of the bew image and flashes it if they're OK. Unfortunately, there's no single implementation and AFAIK no common signing scheme---this stuff is proprietary and board-specific. NIST spec might make it saner, by requiring conforming implementations. Does it prevent firmware exploits? Not quite, because there are option BIOSes that reside on PCI cards and such, and AFAIK they are not covered by the BIOS spec. Is it better than a jumper solution proposed here? I believe so: I don't want to go back to the old days of having to crack open the box and boot DOS from floppies; they may work for a single machine or two but are not scalable for realistic largish deployments.

Ebay has inexpensive stereo microscopes resembling this one: http://www.ebay.com/itm/20x-Stereo-Microscope-for-Gem-Coin-Stamp-PCB-Hair-/140757697961?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_203&hash=item20c5d005a9 I have a similar one that I got new for around $40. The magnification is a modest 50x, and it has fairly short focus length and depth but it serves well for electronic and mechanical repair and minor surgeries (splinters, hang nails)

True, and it's written by the same guy, Corbin Champion. Addi is a subset of matlab (or octave) written in Java.

It is rather unlikely that you have a massive corruption of actual data in multiple files--for that, you'd need a sustained write activity hitting all over the disk. Possible, but not very probable. Instead, I think you have metadata corruption, so that the filesystem points to wrong blocks. The glimmer of hope here is that the actual file data is mostly contiguous, so that you can scan through the image and identify individual files even without the filesystem information. There is a forensic tool called 'foremost' that does exactly that: rips through the binary filesystem image and as it finds headers of known data types (jpeg, gif, doc, mp3, etc. etc.), it tries to find as much following data as is consistent with known file layouts. The result of course has tons of cryptically named files of each type foremost knows about---not all of them are legitimate, even---but it's better than nothing.

Both Lowe and Home Depot stores in my area (suburban DC) have regular sales on a $9 standard pear-shaped E26 LED bulbs like those ones: http://slickdeals.net/forums/attachment.php?s=31e54508f1333ca3124e8f09193b7d10&attachmentid=1150528&d=1334012983 Even when there's no sale, there's a selection of LED bulbs in mid-$20 to mid-$30 price range. What is so novel about this one?

Apparently Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster have agreed to settle out of court, while Apple, MacMillan, and Penguin apparently mean to contest it. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCgQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.webpronews.com%2Fmacmillan-ceo-john-sargent-responds-to-doj-lawsuit-2012-04&ei=vu6FT8LLK9H4ggfzvozWBw&usg=AFQjCNGWnKvqJJnBbXAkg-k9tADur-eSJw

Similar sentiments here---and a sad comparison with Steve Jobs who as far as I can tell didn't do much charitable giving, and apparently was quite good at finding tax loopholes so he didn't pay much in taxes either.

Some of my Scout parent friends are military doctors and they told me that better field latrines were a measurable factor in WWII. All armies had established procedures for setting them up, and the fastidius Germans did a solid job of it, if you pardon the pun---but the Americans added an additional step of covering the latrine box with a burlap sack as a fly barrier. The flies are a major disease vector, and as a result American troops were healthier and more combat ready.

It's great that the RSAremote hack helped, but there's more work to do. For instance, SELinux developer Dan Walsh is struggling with RSA's PAM module for SecurID: http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/48571.html/ RSA recommends turning off enforcing mode, instead of fixing whatever the underlying problem is--not exactly the excellence you might expect from a prominent computer security outfit.

Read the blog---Walsh suspects there's more shenanigans lurking in their code.

FWIW, my favorite charities, in the order of how much I donate:

• Doctors Without Borders -- because they just go and help
• Amnesty Inernational -- because they have a track record of defending human rights
• EFF -- doesn't need explanation here
• WAMU -- local public radio station
• Miriam's kitchen -- local homeless food
• local community child care for their need-based grant fund

In 2006 there was an earthquake in Basel, Switzerland, caused by geothermal engineering. They drilled a 5km deep bore and injected water under pressure, which is very similar to what's done for fracking. Strangely enough, Switzerland has tectonic zones---Basel was wiped out by a major earthquake in 1356:

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/Home/Archive/Man-made_tremor_shakes_Basel.html?cid=46232