Thereby disadvantaging the non-technical user once again.

No. Apparently, Swartz does too.

I'm a little skeptical that this will revolutionize IT. How is this an improvement over a system on a UPS with a lot of RAM and aggressive caching? Data centers, which seem to be this product's first market target, already have this in place.

I guess we'll have to wait for version 2.0.

And this is why: regular people aren't qualified to evaluate good research. They also aren't qualified to evaluate research progress. I don't think you can produce a sustainable system for funding without review from your peers. You need experts to look at a carefully designed research project and decide whether it's feasible, worth the investment and whether the researchers are qualified to do the work. A system built without peer review may be successful at first, but ultimately, it will lead to disappointment and wasted money. (That said, it would be better if there were a mechanism to donate your money directly to the NSF and NIH extramural research funding agencies with targets for, say, AIDS research or superconductors.)

Yes, and according to this article, that lightsaber cost $700, which answers his question from the first article, "why would someone steal a lightsaber?" -- because, apparently, someone is willing to pay $100-$5000 for one (or lift one from a bar that is being passed around.......)

I had a 1 year subscription to Pandora, and last month, I switched to Spotify. I found Pandora's rotations to be too limited for a given radio station. With Spotify, you can listen to whole albums and actually choose what you'll listen to. It has a related artist radio function, just like Pandora, and if you pay the $10/month subscription, you can download all of these tracks to portable devices like iPods--up to ~3300 or so tracks offline at a time. Now, instead of buying a few CDs (which I may or may not like), I'll just download them to my iPod with my Spotify premium subscription. Their collection has only been limiting in very few cases for me.

note: I'm not affiliated with Spotify. I'm just very happy with the switch, and I think more people would do online streaming--whether video or audio--if they had access to vast collections of media and the ability to watch or listen offline.

Thankfully, the EULA's short and easy with only 10 items, but it still has you signing over your life.

I've been using PGP for a few years, and on the odd occasion, I'll send an encrypted email to myself. Part of the problem is that no one knows how to use PHP. I've been sending email to thousands of people in an academic setting, and I've only encountered one other person using PGP.

The reason I keep using PGP, however, is because of digital signing: there's a good guarantee that signed messages were actually sent by me. Headers are fairly trivial to spoof. With PGP, a 'hacker' can only impersonate me if they have access to the private key, which requires physical or ssh access, and he or she must be able to decrypt that key.

That said, I wish more people would encrypt their messages. This should be a no-brainer in a lot of fields, including human rights and for health and human services, and I think the barrier to commit to email encryption is still too great.

It occurred to me shortly after posting that a simple hash could easily be forged, and that a key signing of sorts would be needed to make it secure, though the system would have to be able to sign its own log messages without giving the hacker access to the signing key.

Signing log messages does not need to be complicated or incompatible with current text-based logging. Hashing messages is incredibly easy to do, and there's really no reason not to do it. I just implemented this in python in less than two minutes.

>>> from hashlib import md5
>>> log = lambda last_message, message: "{}: {}".format( md5(last_message).hexdigest(), message)

The output hashes the last message with the current message:

8a023b9cbebe055e4b080585ccba3246: [ 19.609619] userif-2: sent link up event.
649a2719064f7f276462464527b48a69: [ 29.680009] eth0: no IPv6 routers present

No binaries, still grepable, single host and most importantly, there is now a trail that can be verified.

Actually naturally-occuring protein knots have been known for some time now. See knots.mit.edu for example. This appears to be one of the first synthetic knots.

Police officers are already trained to cover their hearts with a hand in the event of a shooting. A clipboard may already be in-hand, it offers a larger surface-area, and if it catches bullets, the officer stands a better chance of surviving.

I hate to reply to my own post, but I forgot to mention one important detail. I'd advise using the 2D unity interface--not the default 3D unity interface built on compiz. The 2D interface is built on metacity (from Gnome 2), and it's considerably faster. To install:

$ sudo apt-get install unity-2d

And select it in the lightdm login screen.