Probably to check for ricin and anthrax.

This is the first I've ever heard of either of these accounts and after glancing at them I still fail to see why anyone would give a crap? It's like staring at a random word generator. Neither intriguing nor captivating. Giving them a day of fame here is a waste of my time and undeserved food for their troll of a project.

Slashdot: News for twitter-obsessed tweens?

I read the article. The impression I got was that it will still take the same time today that it would have taken yesterday to break encryption, but it turns out that the metric used to demonstrate an algorithm's effectiveness at hiding information was inadequate for electronic communication. In a nutshell, the latest math explains that most encryption systems are vulnerable to side-channel attacks, even if you might not have realized it. But side-channel attacks have been employed for a long time, so those who do security already knew this anecdotally.

Once the idea is tested and youâ(TM)re comfortable with the design, you can add type annotations.

I've been doing this with comments since 1999 and it works great! Of course I still haven't gotten around to that final step of going back and adding all those comments but I love the flexibility!

Unless you like bugs, type-checking is a good thing. Lack of type enforcement encourages what -- lack of forethought?

I used to not see the problem with GMO too. If the motivation is to make a better crop or otherwise improve the farming industry, then I'm all for it. Unfortunately, the real motivation behind GMO is profit. Look at Monsanto's litigation record to see what it's about. Monsanto would have every farm have to buy their seeds from Monsanto every season as well as the pesticides. If even a single Monsanto seed winds up "accidentally" falling off a truck and growing in a farmer's field, he will be sued into oblivion and forced into being a Monsanto shop. The only reason to hide GMO on the labels is to take away our power as consumers to vote at the register. I like to know what my food is made of, where it came from, when it's going to expire. Stop eating the line of bullshit the mega-corps feed you and quit voting for corporate interests over your own.

The flies in my part of California don't bounce off the walls. WTF? Sure, they fly back and forth and in circles, but bouncing off the walls as a form of navigation? I have my doubts as to whether this was truly nature-inspired.

This phenomenon and all the proposed solutions (tarpitting, port knocking, fail2ban, rate limiting) are old news. This whole headline is old news. I've seen coordinated distributed robo-worm port scans and brute force attacks on every service of every port of my servers since ages ago. Fail2ban ultimately does nothing since the source IPs switch every few seconds to a random country. All it ever did was eventually lock myself out for 20 minutes when I typo'd a password.

The only real solution (which we can't implement) is to shut down the bot nets and disconnect infected hosts.

There's no uC or accelerometer visible in the cube, let alone a cellular radio to send the text message. This is either a complete hoax or at the very least it is misleading in that it doesn't describe the electronics outside of the cube that do the real work (over a nearly line-of-sight IR link).

Meh.

There are 1,008 in-state power plants in California, 2 of which are nuclear (though one of them is offline this year).

Are you just completely ignorant or what? Apparently you know how to use a computer but still haven't figured out Google yet.

Reading the summary, I thought: "Open the gate and let loose the quackery!"

Inviting EVERY random idea seems more like desperation than progress. For this to ever be effective, they'll need to filter out the previously debunked nonsense.

Is it really altruism if you're doing it because you figure you'll be dead before you suffer any ill effects? Seems clearly rational to me.

This message is encoded using the English alphabet, but it is not encrypted.

They actually teach Engrish instead of English in Japanese public schools, which perpetuates the problem. Your anecdote is sadly one of so many... I forget her name, but there was a well-known native English foreign exchange student in Japan who had English class with them and the teacher would "correct" her English until she spoke Engrish....

Except that there is a very slight pitch accent that can help distinguish ambiguous words like hashi and hana... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_pitch_accent

But yes, it's infinitely more reliable if you rely on kanji instead.

Bzzzzzt! (That's my bullshit-buzzer). They don't read the bible. They go to church to have it read to them and interpreted for them.