"Affected" gets downgraded to "vulnerable" in the article. Percent of web users "affected?" Let's guess .001%.

...while it's data that is giving people fits. When I say "people" I mean "me."

The term "automation" can be vague. It can mean stuff happens without human intervention or it can mean stuff happens under my control without me leaving the couch. I have a mix of DIY stuff centered around these building blocks: - Homeseer - Elk home security system - Z-Wave light switches (Leviton) - Aprilaire Thermostats -Panasonic IP Cameras -Logitech Squeezeboxes - Denon AV receiver with built-in web server - Universal brand IR/RF remotes Homeseer does the programmatic stuff and talks to the Elk, light switches and thermostats. The Elk has many, many motion sensors wired into it so I throw in a bunch of rules at Homeseer around motion control of lights. The IP cameras are super baby monitors for the nursery and common areas, and cover entrances. Zoneminder (running on an old box with Ubuntu server) is an open source DVR for the cameras. The AV chores are handled by the Denon receiver and the Universal remotes. The Receiver, cable boxes and squeezebox are in the basement and an RFtoIR blaster delivers the remote commands. The key thing to note about all this is that it is not all tied together with a unified interface on a touch panel, or suchlike. The interfaces for AV, security cameras and lighting/climate are separate. BUT, virtually all of it is IP-based. No legacy X-10 stuff or proprietary wiring. This means everything has a web interface because all of the hardware ganglia :) have web servers built in. So rather than get up from the kitchen table to change from radioIO to Radio Paradise, we can do it from our iPhones. The wife isn't 100% fluent in all this geekery but she can get to the Tivo stuff, and listen to music, and bring up the nursery cams on the netbook, so she's pretty happy.

Yeah, the ship sank long ago and if we raised it we wouldn't want to sail in it. Still, I never tire of these nostalgic reveries that the occasional Amiga article triggers. I'm not a musician or an artist or a programmer, for that matter, but the Amiga allowed me to be quite the dilettante and be part of a community where we felt like we where really pushing the envelope. I was writing Mandelbrot set generators, sampling and sequencing music, rendering 3D animations with image-captured texture mapping, etc. (and there was a lot of etc). Ahh, good times...but no big deal by today's standards. There is one feature that I wish would catch on in the PC arena - inter-application scripting. Why can't Excel talk to Photoshop? By 1990, just about every Amiga application could talk to each other using ARexx. I commend Microsoft for implementing VB scripting across Office apps but wish this had caught on. I use past perfect tense because I think this ship has sailed (to reuse the sailing metaphor). With everything moving into the cloud we are seeing incredible mash-ups of apps, but it is all out of the hands of the casual user.

Isn't the headline wrong? How can "gains in life expectancy may be pretty much over" if the "The culprits [are] largely preventable." On the contrary, the headline should be "Large Gains in Life Expectancy Still Possible." I'll leave the politics and policy aside but "preventable" means preventable.

PROCEDURE Beep; BEGIN Sound(880); Delay(250); NoSound; END; [Sigh] Life used to be so simple. I don't know how DevCo makes much money but I am happy to see the word "hobbyist" used again. The ubiquity of the internet has driven the focus of the hacker community to web-this and web-that. Back in my day the focus was on elegant algorithms. Byte and Dr. Dobbs introduced me to disciplines I never would have seen through code. Fractal Geometry, Cartography, Langugage Processing, Queuing Theory, Ray Tracing, usw. Now, what? Google Maps mashups? Bah! Kids today...[shuffling off to Amiga, grumbling, drooling, smelling badly]