It's a relatively interesting article, especially the bit about the Micro SIM it supposedly uses, which is not in use anywhere in the US right now. But in any case, one can't help thinking that the reviewer at Gizmodo would pay good money to vigorously and servilely pleasure Steve Jobs. From TFA:

Only can a true fanboy turn the phrase "like a Braun product from the 70s" into a compliment. Because we all want to show off our new iEpilators.

You could pay for massive upgrades to child protective services, social security, medicare, etc. with $100 billion. You could put a million pedophile priests in jail for $100 billion. You could reinvigorate Detroit and create tens of thousands of jobs for $100 billion.

The point is that you could do a LOT of things with "just a small cut in the military budget", but it wouldn't sit well with the electorate. Obama already takes enough shit for being "soft on terrorists" and "elitist". I doubt he'd want to completely botch his re-election with a snooty re-allocation of military funds ("purtecctt amurreriicaa") to the space program ("scieencee and la dee daa").

Geez, will you at least RTFS?

The main site serves visitors from the US. Thus, measuring speeds from multiple locations around the US is probably the best thing to do. They're presumably measuring speed from all their datacenters (their crawlers are likely to be distributed across the country (and world), so recording the average speed over multiple crawls would be a good approximation when you're dealing with the scale of Google and the Web).

Did anyone think about the poor sod whose job it was to burn the mice? I mean, it's difficult to catch mice that have just unsuccessfully rushed into burning buildings, or set themselves on fire by accident.

Then again, I know a guy who works in tissue engineering whose job is to "harvest" mice, as he calls it. Keeps their heads in a jar above his desk. Apparently, they bob around all day with a smiling expression.

You have to get your hands dirty for a lot of science...

Maybe you should actually, you know,...use Linux before you attempt to troll about security.

Nobody uses the root account in Linux for everyday activity. In Ubuntu, root login is even disabled by default (you have to sudo). So no worries about the system in general. Although it's pretty devastating to issue a "rm -rf ~" to delete the user's home directory, it's on par with Windows. Then you say that most malware doesn't even need root access to function, but on all the millions of XP boxes out there, it's already given root access by default.

Windows has a pipe function too, in addition to being able to zoink your whole file system with a simple "del". It also comes with ftp and telnet, which are handy replacements for wget. In short telnet+response file = download an .exe from the web = any sort of functionality you might want using Unix command line tools.

Your comment, sir, is vapid.

Not only that, only nerds would get excited about a STOCK response from HR about discrimination, and then post it on slashdot. Not trying to troll here, but HR folks aren't lawyers, and are trained to be extremely careful when it comes to possible litigation. In short, even the bad publicity makes it worthwhile for HR to apologize to this "Jedi" instead of saying something like "we only recognize jedis on active duty, with working light sabers".

Initially, the idea of "code bubbles" sounds intuitive -- isolated, self-contained, easily testable pieces of code, with well-defined inputs and outputs. Then you could build a complex program by stringing these bubbles together (in theory, anyway).

Then TFS mentions something as banal as "wrapping long lines of code"....and my bubble bursts.

This is not so much about calling the researchers' methods and findings into question as the ISPs motivation for funding the research. As far as I can tell, the research seems to be sound and pretty neat. The question is WHY are ISPs interested in FUNDING this sort of research?

One possibility that the submitter didn't consider is the fact that many researchers list their funding sources on all published papers, regardless of whether the funding was given to fund that specific project. So it could be that ISPs generally fund this particular research group in any case, and they happened to put out a paper that analyzes BT. In other words, there might not be anything sinister going on.

Speaking as a "real" computer scientist, I think you might have underestimated the time requirement. Most problems in automatic verification are either undecidable, or intractable.

Never mind the use of 'professional orange and purple'. From TFA:

Why do "design documents" always have to be so banal? I mean, "visually, light is beautiful"?!!? Seriously?

Given the amount of money and time CNN has invested in gadgetry and web-whizbangery, over any other network by far, they would be fools to (a) draw too much attention to this unless it becomes a serious problem, and (b) NOT cover it calmly, and without resorting to fear-mongering. I suppose that answers GP's question, at least as far as CNN. Now, Murdoch-owned Fox News is a different story altogether....

There, corrected that for you (an old and tired meme, yes).

You're not too far off. I worked at the research wing of a phone company, and I can tell you that "tracking" a person using a cell tower is pretty coarse, even in urban areas. Given that most people go to work on weekdays, I'd say that a lot of your "movement" could be predicted on this level by just predicting your average movement. Add in a weekday/weekend variation, and 93% is hardly surprising.

This isn't even one of those "well duh, in RETROSPECT everything is obvious" studies -- anyone who has ever worked with CDR (mobile phone) data knows that this is pretty obvious even before running the experiments.

And for the people who bring up the MIT Reality Mining experiment, keep in mind that they tracked about 100 *individuals*, all of whom were MIT students with pretty regular routines.

Yes, but I think what this study was trying to test was how basic the task has to be for the fear response to have a measurable effect. Turns out, pretty damn basic.

Not really -- I haven't felt the squeeze of 500 MB yet, and the central repository is a plus for me, but I'd be happy to pay for more space.