If there were large areas with different dielectric constants, they would have stars in them, at least occasionally, and we'd have noticed the weird stars.

True, but not for serious physical security. Combination locks in general are not high-security products, and Master locks usually have a number printed on the back that a lock smith can use to just look up the combination, simple as that. It's a fine solution for a locker room. (Heck, most keyed Master locks have a number printed on them that a locksmith can use to make a key.)

So, sure people still buy them, but physical security experts know the deal, and use something else where it matters. Computer security experts know the deal with crypto with backdoors, and know it's not appropriate anywhere it really matters.

Hey, it just happened to me too! Here's how you move past it, emotionally: recite the following magic words to yourself until they sink in: "I get paid the same either way".

My great disappointment for the past six months is that I was slacking on hobbies, and on working out. Don't let the important non-work stuff slide in your life while getting paid the same either way. I upgraded and further overclocked my gaming box over the long weekend, and already I feel better about having made some progress this year.

stay away from milk, sugar and gluten.

You were doing pretty well right up until you mentioned gluten. This near fanaticism with avoiding gluten is approaching the same level of thinking organic foods are more nutritious.

Gluten comes from certain grains. Despite this fact, I have seen products, including fruit itself, labeled as "gluten free" which do not use grain in their production. This article spells it out very nicely:

The researchers noted that many symptoms attributed to gluten may actually be caused by sensitivity to other components of wheat flour or other ingredients found in wheat-based foods like bread, pasta, and breakfast cereals.

Symptoms that have been attributed to gluten sensitivity include diarrhea, abdominal cramping, bloating, headaches, fatigue, and even those associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

Di Sabatino and Corazza write that some people may experience these symptoms when they eat foods containing gluten simply because they believe these foods will make them sick.

They conclude that common sense must prevail to "prevent a gluten preoccupation from evolving into the conviction that gluten is toxic for most of the population."

This is a fun device that can show you what can be done with 3D printed plastic. That said, it's useless. It would be really cool if I could apply 1 pound of force to the crank, turn it a Million times, and have it apply a Million pounds of rotational force at the other end. But it's made of plastic, so it won't do that. Indeed, the fast-rotating parts would wear out before the slow-rotating part made a single turn. So it's not even good as a kind of clock.

All that said, it's a good conversation piece, and probably worth the price for that.

What happened is that people who used the system very day, day in and day out, became so fast at entering the machine settings the rate of UI events exceeded the ability of the custom monitor software written for the machine to respond correctly to them.

Which is still to some extent a UI issue.

But the literal "killer" is what happened next:
  1) The machine detected that it had screwed up.
  2) But the UI reported this by a cryptic error message: "MALFUNCTION nn" - where the 1 = nn = 64 error codes not only weren't explanatory, but weren't even included in the manual.
  3) And if the operator hit "P" (for "proceed") the machine would GO AHEAD AND OPERATE in the known-to-be-broken mode, giving the patient a fatal (high-power, not-swept-around) electrons rather than a 100x weaker flood of x-rays, with NO FURTHER INDICATION that something is still wrong (unless you count the patient sometimes screaming and running out of the room.)

If 2) and 3) aren't user interface problems, what is?

According to wikipedia, that had software problems that ended up killing people What's that got to do with UI changes and user experience?

The original post was about bad user interfaces causing harm to people. Changes breaking the user experience was only one of the issues.

In Therac's case the bug WAS primarily in the user interface:
  - Due to a race condition, if a button happened to be pressed at the wrong moment and the menu filled out in a particular order, the device would configure the electron beam for x-ray generation rather than electron beam generation (high electron beam current, no scanning) but not position the target, flattening filter, collimator, or ion-chamber x-ray sensor in the beamway, resulting in a configuration that irradiated the patient with beta radiation, rather than x-rays, at 100x a normal dose.)
  - The machine DID detect that there was a problem. But it reported it as "MALFUNCTION nn" - where nn was a number from 1 to 64 and not explained in the manual. If the operator entered "P" (proceed), it would then go ahead and operate in the improper mode anyhow.

Both the second part and most of the first part sound like user interface problem to me.

Nope. Dark energy is that: we have a large-scale measurement we can't explain, but we have to call it something, and since it might not actually be constant, they didn't want to call it "cosmological constant".

Dark matter explains galactic rotation rates and lensing, and also predicted the CMBR data with some precision: the predictions of dark/familiar matter made from galactic rotation matched the observed ratio in the early universe measured by the CMBR probes.

Lots of black holes were among the MACHOs theories for dark matter, but the CMBR data confirmed the WIMPs theories had it right. We may not no much about these particles, but black holes, brown dwarfs, and so on are right out.

And lots of people have left Greece. But there are limits to that even in the US which doesn't have language barriers.

Someone started uploading all the HackingTeam source code to GitHub ... There are also some signing keys for kernel drivers in here.

IMHO:

Anyone with a project hosted on git hub should pull a backup copy NOW!

Hosting this leak on git hub could lead to moves by authorities to contain it - which could have the side effect of making GitHub and/or some projects on it unavailable - temporarily or permanently.

Better safe than sorry.

... will this help bona fide security researchers with their work on fighting exploits on all platforms ... ?

I wonder if this will also help people trying to write open software for closed devices? Signing keys, driver sources with spyware installed, ... Not only does it expose the malware bypassing the user's security, it may also expose the internal details of how the devices are driven and/or how to compromise the malware's and devices' anti-user "security".

(I have often wondered how many of the closed-driver devices have the code closed just for business reasons and how many are closed because that's where the spyware has been installed and they can't let the source out - even sanitized - because that would lead to the spyware's exposure.)

There's no difference between "area where time moves slower" and "gravity well" in general relativity, which shows great robustness as theories go. "Time moves faster" (or a large anti-gravity well) wouldn't cause the lensing we see.

Anyhow, dark matter explains the CMBR data and galaxy rotation rates and lensing, which is pretty good. Any alternative proposal would need to explain all three.

If you haven't read Penrose's book on his cyclic cosmology, you might enjoy it - it reconciles the Big Rip with the Big Crunch (there's no difference if there's no distance scale, and there's no distance scale if all particles are massless). Entertaining if not convincing.

It's impossible to tell the difference between the most crazy hyperbole and sincere SJWs these days. That's what makes the Reddit game "Stormfront or SJW" so much fun! We're beyond Poe's law now to some surreal place through the looking glass.

The goal is to intimidate the makers of such designs. Arrest first and ask questions later, when such designs get out.

It's also to make it harder for "the common man" to arm himself - in case a Schelling Point is reached and a LOT of people suddenly decide that they need to arm themselves against the government or its puppeteers. By slowing them down, and reducing the number and quality of designs available, the powers that be have more time to react and try to divide and reconquer.

Of course intimidating designers is a big part of that.