... automatically reply with "my_secret_ssid" to trick your machine into connecting to them.

This is only an issue for password-less systems or cases where the attacker knows the password, because the handshake protocol requires both the access point and the client to know the password. In either of those cases, an attacker could just as well sniff the network traffic.

Is there a scenario where (hidden_SSID + WPA2) is actually more insecure than (broadcast_SSID + WPA2)?

mortality rate of 1000 for men and 600 for women, per 100,000 ... In London alone the expected death rate on that day alonw was 219 people ...

It's a bit of an apples-and-oranges comparison. Every living person will die at some point. Comparing a single cause of death against all causes of death combined will result in a small number for most causes of death. In this case, you're comparing death rates for people who mostly had a long and healthy life behind them to a death cause that hit mostly people between 20 and 50 years old, and moreover that also involved 700 injuries. (I'd like to know how many of those 700 are actually people who were rendered severy crippled for the rest of their lives.)

It would be more fair to compare the numbers against deaths from accidents (e.g. traffic or work-related). For comparison, traffic deaths in Greater London were 204 in the year 2009; compared to that, the 52 deaths on 7/7 is not that small of a number.

... it was once innate that the earth is flat. People studying "scratch, itch, or not blink" and not too long ago smoking ...

The concept of a flat earth was never "innate", at least in Western cultures over the past 2200 years.

According to the wiki, as early as 1604, smoking was considered unhealthy, which is pretty soon given that tobacco became known after the discovery of America. Only the tobacco industry was actively trying to play down the risks of smoking.

They're checking for TATP or something similar, even though no sane person would carry it in liquid form.

You have it backwards. TATP is a solid explosive compound that can be produced from liquid acetone, liquid hydrogen peroxide, and an acid. If TSA is afraid of TATP, then it makes sense to check that people aren't carrying hydrogen peroxide.

My practice with hotels is to find the cheapest one available, and then only sleep there. ... What do you do with hotels that requires you to actually study up on reviews beforehand?

I followed this strategy plenty of times and my experience is that I will end up with a smelly room (body odor and/or smoke absorbed into the carpet and curtains), excessive street noise, a half-broken water knob(*) in the shower, noisy/drunk neighbors who also went for the cheapest option, and/or a really greasy breakfast.

I would actually prefer to stay in a hostel, but alas my SO doesn't like the idea of bunk beds and shared bathrooms.

(*) Why does each and every hotel bathroom have a different system for adjusting the water flow and temperature of the shower that involves unlabeled knobs and that requires two minutes of fiddling to figure out?

The problem with Android permissions is that a lot of apps request internet and sdcard access and there is no way to know what kind of data is going to be exchanged. Benign usage would be downloading ads and dynamic content, for the apps that are just a wrapper for a website. But for all I know, an app could be scanning the sd card for interesting data and feeding it to big brother.

"... if they took the 22,000 wire tap orders and an estimated 22 million phones and came up with that figure. That may not be accurate."

The letter states that there were 25k wire-tap orders over 2012 and that this is explicitly not the number of suspects, since some suspects use "very many" phone numbers. The letter doesn't mention 1 in 1000; that's the media spin on it.

Why does slashdot post an artocle about Netherlands at midnight local time?

I just returned from holiday in Ireland and apparently temperatures were exceptionally high. One day, my shoe soles were essentially paved (they looked like road surface) because the roads I had walked on were molten. I wonder whether this droplet has anything to do with the weather conditions.

By the way: exceptional weather means a week of sunny weather with 24-28 degrees C temperatures. Irish asphalt is probably optimized for cooler and rainier weather. :-)

word processor that you're using that does all those things BETTER than MS Word

The main difference with some of my coworkers is that I note the problems myself, curse, and fix them before asking someone else to read my work. Over time I found a work flow that tends not to generate too many issues (print to PDF via cutePDF, avoid copy/paste of text with references as much as possible, don't deal with the equation editor, don't convert back and forth between .doc and .docx).

And if I write something with lots of equations and I'm sure that coworkers will not need to revise future versions (i.e. a write-once document), I do it in LaTeX. That has its own set of disadvantages, but I find myself cursing a lot less if I use it.

... anti-ms trolls are always careful not to include a SINGLE fact ...

The documents that we deal with here contain company-secret information, so I am not going to share any problematic documents just to convince you. However, I can tell you that they are usually rather old (Office 2003) macro-enabled templates that are now being used with Office 2010. I'm sure the "error reference not found" result from bad copy/paste actions by the user, but I consider it an design error of MS Word that I never see any warning about broken references.

By the way, libreoffice (my version is about 2 years old) invariably chokes on our company Office templates (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) as well.

Also, Word works reasonably well. For example, right now I have a nearly 80,000 word document that it handles well enough

Strange; where I am sitting, I hear of and see endless numbers of problems with Word with my colleagues: Word crashing on or garbling documents with too many floating figures, equations that suddenly turn into un-editable bitmapped images, documents full of "Error reference not found" (try remembering exactly what you wanted to refer to a month ago...), "save as PDF" generating pages with a gray toner-wasting background.

Anti-reflection coatings by themselves are nothing new. AR coatings that are scratch-resistant might be more tricky. But I would be really impressed if they can make it anti-reflective even when covered with fingerprints.

AR coatings are based on thin layers with thicknesses tuned and accurate to 20 nm or less and well defined refractive indices, matched to the refractive index of the air on one side and the glass on the other side. It's hard if not impossible to make a coating that keeps working even with an undefined number of micrometers of skin grease on top.

My glasses (eyewear) have a very nice AR coating, but fingerprints turn it into a colorful reflector.

"I ALWAYS turn my phone and any other devices COMPLETELY OFF at important events"

I used to have a Nokia N82 that would wake up from the "completely off" state to sound an alarm. Only removing the battery would do the job.

Fortunately I didn't discover this while attending a concert (or worse: while being one of the performers in a choir).

I'm actually not sure whether Android doesn't do this. Nowadays I always check that there is no alarm set at an inconvenient time before going to silent mode.

"to use a single, vertically oriented digital camera with a hyperboloid mirror in front of it,"

Assuming that you mean a camera with a lens looking into the hyperboloid reflector: that would not work because such a mirror would not produce a real or virtual image plane onto which the camera could focus. Parabolic or hyperbolic reflectors can only image a point to another (virtual) point, not a plane to a plane.

In other words, you get a blurry image; in order to unblur, you would need to know the angular distribution of light intensity on each pixel; if you had such a sensor, you could just as well leave out the lens.

The blurring might be manageable if the lens is small (like a phone camera) and the reflector is very large (like a meter), but then you'd run into problems with sensor noise and resolution for a 360 degree image and there woild be no gain in portability.

There was a "study" that claimed this (coal power emits more radioactivity), but for the comparison they took the most radioactive coal that exists, orders of magnitude higher than average.

Moreover, there is no point in comparing against emitted radioactivity from a correctly functioning nuclear plant, as it is pretty close to zero. The problem is when a nuke breaks.