The experiment was setup to validate a foregone conclusion. The (probable, as I can't read the Danish complete report) untested control factor was the impact the different rooms had in the absence of the routers. Retesting both samples without the presence of the routers could fix this issue.

Anyway, it is good science (it is testable and verifiable) but bad journalism.

Unless it can be reproduced or its mechanism explained, it is nothing but fuel to add to the "communication radiation exposure is bad" hysteria.

First: wtf is this doing on tec.slashdot.org?

Second: this red line was crossed a long time ago: Syria used chemical weapons in Homs, US state department cables reveal It's just that the world won't care unless it was the scary beaded guys that did it, when Assad did it last December the world pretended it didn't happened

Third: don't pretend you care, the death toll is reaching 100.000, Assad launched everything in his arsenal from cluster bombs to SCUDs, about 1.000.000 people were displaced. Unless something spills over the Golan heights nothing will be done except strong worded letters to all parts involved

Bottom line: move along, nothing to see here

From TFA:

But there was no victim in the case â" all of the works were staged with willing actresses and a combination of fake blood, latex and silicone to create life-like, horrific images.

Anyone remember(...) Napster (...)?

FTFY

That's exactly the original purpose of Orkut, the (almost defunct) original Google social network site. Orkut Buyukkokten (the Google employee that came with the idea on his 20% paid "free time") was the "Kevin Bacon" and the breadcrumbs of the site used to show the smallest paths between you and Orkut.

It was a fun experiment in the beginning because not only the path between you and Orkut was drawn, but the path between you and anyone you looked at the profile.

But then, when the first batch of geeks (who else, considering Orkut invited his geek friends of Stanford and Google first) started inviting the first batches of "civilians", in a couple of generations the experiment was not viable anymore because of the sheer amount of processing power needed to calculate the paths, the expansion of the network and the commercialization of the content.

Fun days were those when a social network by geeks, for geeks thrived (with lasers!).

From TF Paper

Subject: Thanks

I was writing a document in Word this morning, and after about an hour of unsaved work, Word went into an infinite loop that made the application completely frozen. So, having listened to your talks too many times, I got my debugger, paused the program, changed the program counter to a point a few instructions past the end of the loop, and let it keep running from there. Word went back to working as if nothing had ever happened. I was able to finish my document, save it, and close Word without problems.
So thanks,
Armando.

If that's a real use case scenario, thing must be really different in MIT than they are in the real world. Users, even with a technical background don't have a clue about what an infinite loops looks like, let alone open a debug and move out of it.

If that's the target audience, not having the overhead of the automatic detection for the other 99% and letting the tech savy fend for themselves with the debugger. Also, the scope is too limited.

As the application executes, Jolt compares the current state with the state from the previous iteration. If the states are equal, Jolt has detected an innite loop.

As the paper itself says, it doesn't "detect loops due to recursion or unstructured control ". It could probably be fooled by some busy waiting loop.

Doesn't seem like a serious paper, or something that solves a serious problem.

Here is the tl;dr version for the ones that won't read TFA:

You can't have a distributed system that creates an unique and arbitrary resource without cooperation between the peers. Without communication among them there will be duplication. People that think it is possible are fools.

For the iPhone you have no excuse, anything you need to do while driving you can do with the headset shortcuts. Play / pause / stop / skip / go back / fast forward / rewind the music, make / finish / answer / ignore calls.

Anything else and you shouldn't be doing while driving.

(emphasis mine)

TFA: "The group stresses that the as-yet-unnamed platform should not be seen as a competitor to WikiLeaks but as a different approach, the newspaper wrote."

Title on Slashdot: "Wikileaks competitor in the works".

The only part in TFA that mentions the word "competitor" is the sentence stating what this new site won't be.

My reaction to it was the same as with the AwesomeBar:

First I loathed it. It makes the input box to jump while the text is being typed. It also makes it very hard to focus on typing while a multitude of information is flashing on the screen at the same time. That effect increases if you are a fast touch typist.

But I was too lazy to disable it, so I didn't. I then started (without even noticing) to adapt the way I use it and it proved itself to be much easier: I start typing whatever I'm searching and pause for just a second to inspect the suggestions google makes. More often than not, I can simply stop typing because the search result is already what I'm looking for.

In the few cases it is not, I finish typing and use it "the old way", pressing enter to retrieve the search results.

I love my iphone, but I miss being able to just reach into my pocket and dial a call, or skip a song/rewind, etc. Having to pull my phone out every time I want to do anything other than change the volume is damned annoying.

If you are using the default iPhone earbuds, you can do all that using the middle button (the one between the up and down volume buttons):

One click to play/pause, two clicks to skip to next, three clicks to go back to previous, click and hold to activate Voice Control (where you can make calls, play albums, playlists, etc.).

That is a life saver feature that should be more publicized, took me a while to figure them out.

how he had someone else stand in line for him Saturday to pick up his iPad

First Murdock displays his love for it, now the CEO of Verizon not only says he wanted one, but send one of his minions to pick it up for him. If someone were trying to paint the iPad in a bad light, couldn't get it better than this.

Now what, someone using the iPad to kick puppies and stomp kittens?

Most companies doesn't care about the best technical solution for a problem. They also take in account availability of workforce to use that particular solution, suppliers interested in working and giving support and a some other factors, like cost. Take the example you mention, the LAMP stack. PHP programmers with knowledge of MySQL are a dime a dozen, and you can filter through them to pick and choose the real competent ones. Most hosting providers already have an already optimized and time tested stack that supports these technologies, so companies can filter through them to choose the cheaper and more reliable. It gets the job done so other potential better solutions gets overlooked. Technical merit is not the only factor when choosing the right tool for the job.

This is by far the best article I read on Slashdot, and one of the most insightful cautionary tales about open source and the convoluted world of software patents in the U.S. Congratulations to Slashdot to let this indeed delicious article to filter through the usual two minutes of hate, and also to Bruce Perens, for writing this simple and concise summary of what must have been a neverending story of legal slapfest.