I don't think it's Google's hatred of anonymity so much as a poor seed for the autocomplete engine (you spelled/typed it wrong).

I take your point on the real names policy, but I think your comment about the web already having a social network was really hitting the nail on the head. I never understood what Google+ was, how it was different, what advantages it might have had over the market leader (Facebook) seems to me their marketing was ill-conceived or non-existent.

The NSA has been involved with NIST and industry to produce a series of NIST Special Publications ( http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/PubsSPs.html ) which include BIOS security. This includes 800-147, 800-147B, 800-155, 800-164 etc.

I have no idea how many manufacturers implement these -- but there are some really gnarly issues there. It isn't even clear what BIOS means in the context of a blade server with multiple processors, management engines etc.

The TL;DR for these specs is that a BIOS update should not be accepted by the system if it is not signed by the BIOS manufacturer. This is a step in the right direction. Of course, it doesn't protect you from someone with access to the BIOS signing keys for a particular BIOS vendor (and there aren't many BIOS vendors around). I don't think that if 800-147 is implemented that it makes anything easier for the NSA, except that it might engender a false sense of security.

As a fifty+ year old coder/designer/architect, I just went back to do another startup where I get to write code again and to mentor the rest of the team. The reason to write code is that I want to build something and have it used by customers (preferably paying ones). I can have the biggest impact in a small startup where we want to change the world (or at least a small, profitable, segment of it!)

At 50+, your priorities do change somewhat -- family and kids are more important -- but these all encourage you to work smarter rather than longer. You also gain (through experience) an intuitive feel for what will work, and what will not.

The good news is that, in a court, if one party destroys evidence, the court is required to assume that the evidence is favorable to the other party. I.e. if the cops destroy a video, then the court assumes that it would be in favor of the defendant.

As far as I know, most of the home routers today are based on open source platforms. [Yes, I know that some models use proprietary operating systems as it allows less RAM to be provided on the box]

I'm just about to install networked thermostats into my house. The current model is that it connects to a central server somewhere, and, in order to control my thermostat, I also have to connect to that site. This is crazy. I should be able to talk directly to my thermostat (over v6) from my smartphone (without needing to type in a v6 address!) Somehow my home firewall (without configuration) has to know that it can let my traffic in, but not other people who want to change the setting on my thermostat.

The trick is finding a way to make this happen securely and without configuration. On the face of it, this seems like a challenging task.

Philip

If legislation is passed that requires websites to be shutdown based on copyright infringement accusations, then I doubt that any of the RIAA member companies websites would last for long. They use a vast amount of copyrighted material all the way from the music that they think they have rights to (but what about all the samples used) down to the individual icons used on a web page, and the javascript to control the cheesy animations. If *any* one of these is used without permission, then it is a copyright violation.

I know websites that have ripped off my work (though I normally grant free permission if they ask in advance).

The bigger they are, the harder they fall.

+1 for the brultech stuff. I have 4 ECM-1240s and also a TED device. The brultech stuff is much more useful -- though it doesn't agree with the TED device on the actual power consumed by the house. I need to do some experimentation to see which is right...

I picked up a used Tektronix 7904 for under $100. Of course, the four probes that I needed cost rather more than the scope, but that's life. The 7904 (with the modules that I have) is a 350MHz unit -- which is great for doing radio work. This setup could easily have cost $10k new.

Buy one of these online and the shipping will kill you. You need to find someone local who wants to get rid of one.

Surely the school didn't purchase a bunch of new heart monitors because it might improve the calorie-burning of their students.

If you haven't been paying attention this summer -- fat people are the new terrorists. It seems a lot more plausible to me that a school is implementing a weight control plan than that they're expecting a gym teacher to diagnose cardiac abnormalities with a heart rate monitor, something a cardiologist couldn't do usefully.

Thinking this over some more, though, I'm more sympathetic to the asker's paranoia than I was at first. If school's can embrace policies of publicly weighing and humiliating children, they might well decide that the heart data might be shared in some inappropriate way, although the insurance thing seems unlikely.

Back in the olden days, we used to monitor our pulses in gym class using a finger and a clock. No, there's nothing suspicious about this, and anyone who used common equipment in gym should understand the benefit of buying your own strap instead of digging through a box to find the least sweaty one from the period before.

Last night, Evan unprotected his twitter account and Reifman began to follow him, under the disguise of a fembot.

Twitter seems as appealing to me as gluten-free pizza, so presumably a "fembot" is some Twitterism with which I'm unfamiliar, and not an actual fembot?

Don't talk to the police, or the FBI, or any authority without your lawyer.

Everyone knows that, but how many people have the number of a criminal defense attorney when they've never needed one before? Talking to the police (especially if you think your innocence is obvious) is an attractive option compared to sitting in a police station while you research lawyers or wait for Legal Aid to show up.

Of course, if I'd accidentally walked out with ultra-secret Goldman Sachs code while trying to download vi from an internal server, I'd be one of those people!

The men, who appeared to ProtesterHelp to be either Iranian or Lebanese...

I'd take that to mean that he's guessing that they were Iranian or Lebanese. There's no common element in those two ethnicities that distinguishes them from Jordanians, Syrians or what have you. You might recognize an Iranian by face, dress or (obviously) language but not "either Iranian or Lebanese".

A "blue moon" is a second full moon in a calendar month.

so if Linux can be considered directly responsible for killing Microsoft, which I think is some peoples objective, that puts their market capitalization at $400B - $153B = $247B.

I'm thinking there's more to the decline in Microsoft's market cap between the peak of the dot-com bubble and today's apocalypse than just Linux.