From the source Wired story: the arsonists were drug dealers. One of them arranged to meet some other criminals to buy a gun, but instead got mugged and had their iPhone and other stuff stolen. So.... That's why they took matters into their own hands rather than reporting the theft to the police, I think.

You need a new keyboard. Your @ key is stuck.

From the actual blog post, "If you look at the timestamps on the articles, you can see that the problem was fixed in November 2009, just a few months after Windows 7 was released in July 2009."

The VPN app I use appears as "suspicious" in this analysis because it uses READ_EXTERNAL_STORAGE. So far as I can tell, this is needed to access downloaded files. The way I configure my VPN connection is to download a config file from a website and import it into the app. The config file includes certificates to a) authenticate me to the server, b) authenticate the server to me. Typing in a long binary string for (a) is not going to work, so the app needs to be able to read downloaded files. I think this counts as "core required functionality" rather than "suspicious behaviour"

As well as the point about sensationalist journalism (as plenty of others have already pointed out), current estimates are that there are 2.5 million scientific papers published each year (http://blog.cdnsciencepub.com/21st-century-science-overload/). Obviously, only an incredibly small fraction of those get any coverage in the wider media - the vast majority of research that gets done is the "long tail" of work that is generally rather dull and unremarkable.

He showed up a workshop entitled "High Energy Theory and Gender", where attendees expected to "discuss issues of gender and equal opportunities in the field." It sounds like the topic of his presentation was appropriate for the workshop.

Pro tip: go to filezilla website, go to the download page (left hand menu). Ignore the big green "download from sourceforge" button, and go for "show additional download options". The Windows installers linked to *there* are clean of all the sourceforge-bundled crap (well I only use the 64 bit exe version, but I presume the others are OK too)

The paper is entirely numerical simulation, despite what the linked blog post says. I quote: "In this paper, we numerically demonstrate an approach..". I'm not denigrating numerical simulations: I'm a computational physicist. Just, you know, RTFA?

Faux isn't phonetically similar to fox, though. You do realise that faux is a French word, and that pronouncing it like "foe" is entirely consistent with other French pronunciation, don't you?

I'm so glad to know they examined the *acoustic* sound (or the acoustic *sound*, even) instead of any sort.

Did you build your own compiler? If not, how can you trust the binaries it produces? Have you dissected your CPU? How do you know it's executing the instructions you want and not quietly running other instructions too? As others have said, you have to draw the line somewhere. Personally, I have no trouble running a binary distribution (not sure why you pick on Ubuntu and not Redhat or Suse or Debian or FreeBSD, but meh)

The HTCondor (formerly known as Condor) distributed computing project has always been free to use, but transitioned from a closed-source to open-source license a few years ago. Development of the software has been continuing unaffected, so far as I can tell. So: yes, it's definitely possible.

Indeed. It is an "experimental technique" rather than a "theoretical technique" or a "computational technique", say. It's frustrating to read an abstract of a physics paper which sounds like the authors have performed a nifty measurement, only to find that in fact they are proposing an idea, or have performed a simulation, or theoretically analysed the problem. (Don't get me wrong, they're all equally important things, but not the same as performing an experiment). Thus, it's nice to emphasise one's "experimental technique".

http://www.withouthotair.com/ Great book which performs a detailed analysis and discussion about energy usage (written by a Physics Prof who is also chief scientific advisor to the UK Government's Dept of Energy), freely available for download as a PDF (Off-topic: he's also the author of a brilliant textbook on Information Theory, also available as a free PDF)