Totally OT, I'm afraid, but the "bigdata" tag reminded me of this music video for Big Data Shoes that I discovered just yesterday. It's funny. Watch it.

Couldn't he have just displayed a Goatse and have been done with it? What he did was in poor taste; don't security researchers have any professionalism any more? Seriously, there should be a law against this sort of thing...

I believe that effect is also called "Timbit drag"; discovered by the great Canadian scientist Tim Horton. Incidentally, he was also the individual who discovered the effect of non-uniform doughnut hole decay; that is, the tendency of old fashioned plain doughnut hole variants to persist for hours or even days after the glazed or chocolatey variants have long since disappeared.

Hey, that's it! Thanks man.

This post made me remember an old short-story (whose name I've now forgotten) written by Larry Niven. The gist of the story was that some time way in the future when humans had colonized space and things were so peaceful and hunky-dory that they no longer fought wars or weaponized their spaceships, a human spacecraft came upon an alien ship manned by an unknown aggressive and warlike species (the Kzin, maybe), which began to attack them without warning. Despite lacking any weapons with which to defend themselves, the humans were nonetheless able to win the battle and return home to warn the rest of humanity by basically turning their ship around and allowing their thrusters (based on some sort of ion drive like you described in your post) to slice completely through the enemy ship like a giant laser.

Anyone else remember the name of the story or from what book it came from?

Who cares? Isn't the critical question always what editor they should program with? Everyone knows that real programmers use vim. Long live vim!

Here: something to distract you while I go duck under a desk

I bet you they could have improved voter turnout if they had introduced a negative vote button, like the "Thumbs Down" button on youtube. Sometimes you just don't know who to vote for, but would be glad to use your vote as a form of protest, and to send a well-deserved message to some cretinous politician or political party.

I've personally never gotten this response from anyone. On the couple of occasions in the past where I've challenged people regarding their poor use of the passing lane, the response I got was "but I was going above the speed limit!". These same people also seem to call the passing lane a "fast lane" and are firmly of the belief that if they travel even a little above the speed limit they should be in that lane, regardless of what the average speed of traffic is around them, because they are going "fast". Getting a response like "because I pay taxes and it's my right" would be an improvement as far as I'm concerned, because it shows that they understand what they are doing and are conscious of it, even if they are being complete jerks.

Around where I live, a lot of drivers already seem to be bosons... Especially the ones that camp out in the passing lane on the highway, oblivious to those that pass them on the right. Seriously, I wish those bosons would just get off the road already. Maybe having them all drive through a diffraction grating is a good idea after all...

I wonder how many customers ask for extra anchovies on their pizza?

No no, the answer is to cancel your own Comcast service and mooch off your neighbours who don't know any better. Unfortunately you'll be hurting your neighbours, but in return you'll be hitting Comcast where it hurts not once, but twice: once for having dropped your service, and once again for using essentially the same service you used to pay for via their new city-wide free WiFi.

Seriously, what idiot thought this would be a good idea? Punish your customers and give moochers, criminals and cheapskates free and anonymous internet. Brilliant...

Well, you're asking the wrong guy, because I'm not at all into comics. But since you asked, I do have fond memories of reading Astérix as a kid. Astérix was translated into English and many other languages, so even if you don't speak french, it shouldn't be a problem for you.

What? You were hoping for a suggestion involving some sort of masked, tight-wearing super-hero that obtained their superpowers because of a bite from an irradiated insect? Oh, please. Astérix may not be masked or tight-wearing, but he has a winged hat, a fantastic moustache, and is absolutely fearless in battle. Furthermore, his friend Obélisk does wear tights (or at least some kind of tightly fitting, blue and white striped half-body-tube thing), and I challenge you to find another super-hero that is as strong as him, as funny as him and who has as voracious an appetite as him. Seriously, all those DC comics are for chumps; you should read Astérix, or at the very least, buy the comics for your kids so that at least they will grow up having known a real hero....

*ducks*

I *do* have mod points, but can't mod him any higher, as he is already at 5. The most I could do is mod him down so that somebody else could come along and show how awesome his post is by modding him back up, but that doesn't seem like a very efficient use of mod points...

The supercooling is apparently done using lasers, so something that is man-portable is maybe realistic

Does that also include the "Super Vagina" from Prometheus? Was he responsible for that? Truly disturbing...