California was debating requiring a serial number on home made guns independent of how they were made.

Actually, the legislature passed that. But, in a fit of sanity, governor Jerry Brown vetoed it.

Anyone familiar with California politics will realize how extrordinary that is. B-)

That seems to have been a problem only with Windows XP. I didn't have it with Windows NT 3.1, NT 4, Windows 2000, or Windows 7. (I skipped XP).

Ubuntu Linux seems to have an incredible number of background processes that aren't really necessary.

Right. It's ordinary industrial automation. It's also strange that Intel would have CPU testers that weren't networked and reporting to some machine aggregating statistics and looking for process variance. It's pretty much routine in factories today to network the machines. That's been going on since the 1980s.

The Mitsubishi C Controller mentioned is just a CPU board packaged as a Mitsubishi Electric industrial automation module for convenient mounting in industrial automation cabinets. "It includes two Ethernet ports, an RS232 port, a USB port, a CompactFlash card slot and a 7-segment display for debugging and diagnostics. The (Intel Atom) CPU comes with the Wind River VXWorks real time operating system pre-installed." It's programmed in C.

"Only about 100 missing-child reports each year fit the profile of a stereotypical abduction by a stranger or vague acquaintance." Those are the real kidnapping cases, and there's usually no identified suspect whose phone law enforcement could dump.

Seems like a big flock of pigeons over a big crowd would be an effective way to spread a virus that is contagious between birds and people.

Don't worry about Ebola, though. It doesn't do "airborne transmission". (Yet.)

However, the Ebola Reston strain is airborne though only dangerous to monkeys.

I have oftten wondered whether the Reston virus had mutated to be spread by things like sneezes, or if it might be another matter entirely.

A number of monkey species throw feces (and/or other bodily secretions) when under stress and perceived attack. (I don't know if this is one of them, but assume for the moment it is.) Might being confined to cages along with others provoke such behavior? Wouldn't a sick monkey's feces, and tiny particles separated by airflow during the flight, carry an ebola-family virus just fine, without any mutation to make it, say, shed into nasal mucus and be carried by a sneeze?

(Granted this might fit the literal definition of "airborne transmission". B-) )

I guess that explains it. I haven't been pulled over in years... but I do hear a lot of cops laughing if I happen to drive by them.

Rank of this problem in things we need to worry about: 4,534,211.

Low-cost terahertz radar imaging is going to be very useful in handheld devices. You really can see a short distance into many materials. Great for seeing pipes and electrical wiring in walls. The day will come when that's a standard tool one buys at Home Depot.

Until that's working, a cooled IR imager would be useful. Those are great for finding heat leaks in houses, but currently cost too much.

People who aren't baseball fans may not be familiar with this, so I refer them to the maps of the various teams' "home regions" that determine whether you can watch a team or not.

But in your hypothetical case you also wouldn't expect the story to refer to all "automotive" recalls - you'd expect it to say "Toyota".

The lede from this story says "Today the Federal Communications Commission eliminated its sport blackout rules, which prevented cable and satellite television providers from showing sporting events that were blacked out on a local station". But the FCC hasn't eliminated all blackout rules... only the ones specifically pertinent to the NFL.

Major League Baseball has one of the most draconian and bizarre blackout policies even conceived - and it's not mentioned in that document at all. So I am wondering how a ruling about the NFL's policies is being interpreted as "FCC rejects blackout rules".

Oh, and MLB also has an exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act.

That's not the issue: Since virtually all (x86) systems built later than 2010 are 64-bit, the expected case is 64 bit UEFI. Contemporary linux distributions don't even bat an eye at booting on a 64-bit system with 64-bit UEFI (well, there are a lot of ugly details under the surface, probably enough to keep several devs more or less permanently alcoholic; but the user doesn't need to see that).

However, there are a few edge cases that really haven't gotten enough attention and/or love to smooth them over: Apple has some older models with 32-bit EFI, and 64-bit CPUs, that are a bit weird, and there was a period where MS/Intel was using 32-bit Atom processors, with UEFI and no BIOS fallback, in order to hit aggressive price points for 'win-tablet' systems. These are a huge pain to boot to anything except the OS they were designed for; because distributions with good UEFI support almost always expect 64-bit CPUs, and 32-bit distros almost always expect BIOS booting.

There may be others; but the 'clover trail' based hardware that uses Z2760 or similar atom processors is what I'm talking about.

Then eBay can become a bank. In exchange for more regulation, they get to do lending and can borrow from the Fed.

The laptops are based on the Celeron N2840, with 2GB of RAM. I can't seem to find much in the way of benchmarks; but I suspect that they are surprisingly adequate. What is a bit surprising is that the the N2840 has a quoted tray price of $107, so either Intel is cutting HP one hell of a deal, or I don't even want to know what HP cobbled the rest of the system together from...