Slashdot Mirror

colin_faber writes "Right on the heels of the Bill Gates BusinessWeek article discussing the importance of disease prevention and cure over technological deployment is news from CNN that U.S. researchers may have a viable vaccine for malaria. If true, this could change the lives of up to 3.3 billion people living in malaria danger zones and allow us to do away with this disease, which kills hundreds of thousands of people."

New submitter kc9jud writes "The BBC is reporting that NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has been granted temporary asylum in Russia. According to his lawyer, Snowden has received the necessary papers to leave the transit zone at Sheremetyevo Airport in Moscow, and the airport press office is reporting that Snowden left the airport at 14:00 local time (10:00 GMT). A tweet from Wikileaks indicates that Snowden has been granted temporary asylum and may stay in the Russian Federation for up to one year." Reader Cenan adds links to coverage at CNN, and other readers have pointed out versions of the story at Reuters and CBS.

rullywowr writes "CNN reports that a recent government study found TSA misconduct has risen sharply in three years. Most have heard of the problems such as stealing, but the report also notes that some employees are sleeping on the job, taking bribes, and letting friends/family through the checkpoints without screening."

An anonymous reader writes "Oilfield services giant Halliburton will plead guilty to destroying computer test results that had been sought as evidence in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the Justice Department announced Thursday. Company officials threw out test results that showed 'little difference' between the number of devices Halliburton said was needed to center the cement casing in the well at the heart of the disaster and the number well owner BP installed, according to court papers. The issue has been key point of contention between the two companies in hearings and litigation ever since the April 2010 blowout. BP and Halliburton are still battling over responsibility for the disaster in a New Orleans federal courtroom. BP had no comment on the plea agreement Thursday evening."

First time accepted submitter Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Reuters reports that under a cost-saving plan by the US Postal Service, millions of Americans accustomed to getting their mail delivered to their doors will have to trek to the curb and residents of new homes will use neighborhood mailbox clusters. 'Converting delivery away from door delivery to either curb line or centralized delivery would enable the Postal Service to provide service to more customers in less time,' says Postal Service spokeswoman Sue Brennan. More than 30 million American homes get door-to-door delivery and another 50 million get their mail dropped at their curbside mailboxes. But the Post Service, which is buckling under massive financial losses, sees savings in centralized mail delivery. Door-to-door delivery costs the Postal Service about $353 per address each year while curbside delivery costs $224, and cluster boxes cost $160 per address. But unions say it's a bad idea to end delivery to doorsteps and will be disruptive for the elderly and disabled. 'It's madness,' says Jim Sauber, chief of staff for the National Association of Letter Carriers. 'The idea that somebody is going to walk down to their mailbox in Buffalo, New York, in the winter snow to get their mail is just crazy.'"

New submitter marcushoward writes in with news of Apple's quarterly results. From the article: "Apple on Tuesday reported fiscal third-quarter revenues of $35.3 billion and profits of $6.9 billion, or $7.47 per share. The revenue number is basically even with Apple’s results from a year ago, but its profits were off by almost $2 billion. Revenues were mostly in line with Wall Street’s expectations of $35.09 billion and slightly above its earnings per share expectation of around $7.31. Apple itself had predicted revenues between $33.5 billion and $35.5 billion." Compared to this quarter last year, sales of Macs are about even, iPad sales dipped slightly (14.6 million vs 16 million), and iPhone sales are up quite a bit (31 million vs 26 million).

AmiMoJo writes "A recent job posting by MI5 seeks to recruit 'Data Exploitation Specialists.' The core of the role is described as 'provid[ing] tactical solutions and operational support to business users of information exploitation systems.' In other words, industrial espionage. This open admission comes at a time when the UK and its partners are accusing China of the same thing. Pot, meet kettle?"

An anonymous reader writes "Winthrop University in South Carolina is testing out iris scanning technology during freshman orientation this summer. Students had their eyes scanned as they received their ID cards in June. 'Iris scanning has a very high level of accuracy, and you don't have to touch anything, said James Hammond, head of Winthrop University's Information Technology department. 'It can be hands free security.'" I wouldn't want to be locked out a building because of a scratched lens or a system outage, though.

Bob the Super Hamste writes "CNN Money has an article on computerized trading; specifically, the non-public markets that are often used to execute orders. The company that the article discusses executes 1/8 of all stock trades in the U.S., or about 900 million trades a day. For comparison, the NYSE executes about 700 million trades. The article discusses 'dark pools,' or private markets where quotes aren't disclosed to the broader public markets. If the company is unable to fill an order from within its own dark pool, it will submit the order to the broader public market (13 public exchanges), as well as up to 20 other private dark pools. The quotes offered by the private dark pools, by law, have to be the same or a better quote than those offered on public exchanges. There have been recent questions about whether the quotes provided by dark pools have been the best for customers and there is a current investigation by FINRA into the methods used by market makers and dark pool operators to fill orders."

Asiana Flight 214 from Seoul crashed while landing at San Francisco Airport today. Early reports suggest the plane was unstable as it touched down, which led to the tail of the plane breaking off. There are no official casualty reports yet, but passengers were seen walking off the plane. Preliminary estimates say one or two dead and 75 being transported to area hospitals. (Others are reporting two dead and several dozen injured.) Eyewitness report: "You heard a pop and you immediately saw a large, brief fireball that came out from underneath the aircraft," Anthony Castorani said on CNN. "At that moment, you could see that that aircraft was again starting to lift and it began to cartwheel [Ed: he likely means spinning horizontally, like a top]. The wing broke off on the left hand side. You could see the tail immediately fly off of the aircraft. As the aircraft cartwheeled, it then landed down and the other wing had broken." The media has estimated about 290 people were on board the plane. The top of the cabin was aflame at one point, but it's not known yet whether that affected the passengers. "Federal sources told NBC News that there was no indication of terrorism." Some images from the news make it look like the plane may have tried to touch down too early, hitting the seawall just before the runway.

First time accepted submitter aBaldrich writes "Edward Snowden was offered 'humanitarian asylum' by Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela. The country's official news agency reports (original Spanish, Google translation) that the decision was taken after a meeting of the presidents of Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Suriname, Uruguay and Venezuela. Maduro denounced an attempt to 'colonize' several European countries, and that he is acting 'on behalf of the dignity of the Americas.'" The Guardian confirms.

cold fjord writes "This might be useful. From CNN: 'Recent evidence from NASA's Curiosity rover mission to the Red Planet has revealed that astronauts on the round-trip would be exposed to high levels of radiation from cosmic rays and high-energy particles from the sun ... this would clearly be bad for your health — and it is proving difficult to find a solution. ... [S]hielding to completely block the radiation danger would have to be "meters thick" and too heavy to be used aboard a spacecraft. In contrast, ... science fiction fans have once again got used to the ease with which Captain Kirk gives the order for "shields up" and the crew of the Enterprise being protected instantly from the hostility of space. Perhaps though, a real Star Trek shield may no longer be science fiction — scientists at the UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) certainly think so. They have been testing a lightweight system to protect astronauts and spacecraft components from harmful radiation and working with colleagues in America to design a concept spaceship called Discovery that could take astronauts to the Moon or Mars. "Star Trek has great ideas — they just don't have to build it," said Ruth Bamford, lead researcher for the deflector shield project at RAL. ... The RAL plan is to create an environment around the spacecraft that mimics the Earth's magnetic field and recreates the protection we enjoy on the ground — they call it a mini magnetosphere." Related: 'Deflector Shields' protect the Lunar Surface.'"

12 U.S. states have adopted same-sex marriage over the past decade, and many other states have adopted legislation specifically intended to prevent same-sex marriages from being performed or recognized within their borders. The landscape has just changed on that front, though: the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, which barred federal recognition of same-sex marriages, has been ruled unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court; here's the ruling itself. From the NBC News version of the story: "The decision was 5-4, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy. “'DOMA instructs all federal officials, and indeed all persons with whom same-sex couples interact, including their own children, that their marriage is less worthy than the marriages of others,' the ruling said. 'The federal statute is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.'" One major area this affects is tax law; that's one of the salient points in U.S. v. Windsor, the case that drove the court's conclusion. There's more on the story at many major news outlets, and at law-centric sources like SCOTUSblog. The Boston Globe is also live blogging various reactions.

Update: 06/26 16:58 GMT by T : In a separate decision, the court disappointed supporters of California's Proposition 8, a law passed by voter initiative, under which "only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." The court ruled that the private parties which had taken up the Prop 8 banner did not have standing to do so; as the story says, "The 5-4 decision avoids, for now, a sweeping conclusion on whether same-sex marriage is a constitutional "equal protection" right that would apply to all states."

Contributor Tom Geller writes: "I recently wrote an article about Bitcoin and the law for Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery. In researching it I ran into plenty of wishful thinkers, ridiculous greedheads, and out-and-out nutbags promising a rosy future. I also found the expected blowback from vehement naysayers who think the best way to combat crazy is with more crazy. But despite that, I walked away believing that Bitcoin — or a decentralized cryptocurrency like it (let's call it "Coin") — is here to stay. As an interested outsider to the Coin economy, and a long-time technology commentator, here's what I think its future holds." Read on for Tom's predictions. Coin's primary use will continue to be in international transactions.

While people wonder "When will I be able to pay for groceries and utilities with Bitcoin?", that use might never come. But Coin already shines in international transactions, where it provides a clear advantage over current systems, which are expensive and complicated hassles. That's why PayPal has become the go-to solution: it just works, albeit with typical fees around 3-5%.

Coin reduces that fee to a small fraction of 1% (when sent directly), and is available in places where PayPal fears to tread (Zimbabwe, Pakistan, etc.). Coin transactions occur instantly, with no intermediary, and — for better or worse — without recourse.

That leads to Coin's second primary use: to store liquid value in places where other stores (such as national currency) are unreliable. For all the cries that Bitcoin is "unstable", it seems to have settled quite nicely after its April spike. Certainly it looks appealing to anyone in an unstable country, and it's even tempting for those in places where the currency's been on a long, slow slide, like Argentina.

Coin's big vulnerability is its interface with national currencies ("real money").

None of this matters if you can't get your money out again. And that's where governments are taking a close look at Coin — with good reason. First, Coin exchanges have a terrible track record; second, such points of exchange are bottlenecks through which financial crimes often flow.

In the U.S., the government's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued guidance asserting its right to regulate "Money Services Businesses", and defining exchanges dealing in virtual currencies (including Bitcoin) as such. That's a problem for many existing Coin exchanges, as the costs for complying with regulations are high. But if there's not a stable and reliable way to get national currency in and out of Coin, its value will plummet.

Conversely, Coin's value is likely to shoot up if this interface gets easier. Right now, it's surprisingly hard to buy Bitcoin (et al.) directly with U.S. dollars. Most methods require bank wires, tricky multi-step workarounds, and high fees. (I found Coinbase to be the most accessible, albeit with long delays and a bank verification procedure similar to PayPal's.) If Coin becomes as easy to buy as a gift card and redeemable at every bank, its practical utility will soar for everyday people.

No government will make Coin illegal.

Despite bloviation by a few politicians and baseless statements in the press, Coin is not per se illegal, and there have been no serious attempts to make it so. The FinCEN guidance mentioned earlier explicitly says that ordinary users — those who buy and sell using Coin — are "not subject to FinCEN's... regulations for MSBs". It's possible that other government agencies will continue to claim authority, but there doesn't seem to be much support for it.

A lot of noise has been made about Coin's use in illegal business, for example on Silk Road (where it's the only currency). But law enforcement is realizing that the currency isn't to blame, much as they've started to say that Craigslist isn't responsible for crimes organized through its ads. I predict that that distraction will continue to surface from time to time, but will essentially die soon.

Even if governments attempt to illegalize Coin, there's only so much they could do to criminalize ordinary users. Again, Coin's real vulnerabilities are higher up the chain. However....

If Coin succeeds, governments will get involved — for the better.

"Noooo!!!" scream the cryptoanarchists who are Coin's pioneers. "Keep the government out of this! Coin can't be controlled! Nobody can take away our freedoms!" What they don't realize is that this attitude doesn't reflect the values of Coin's future users. The benefits of "freedom" matter to the innovators; convenience and safety matter to those who follow.

"Government" in this case could also be a government-size corporation, syndicate, or other entity. The important thing is that it's big enough to administer, back, and enforce initiatives to protect the Coin economy. Whatever that "bully entity" is, Coin adopters will welcome it because of two major flaws currently in (Bit)Coin's design.

First, Coin is ridiculously easy to destroy by accident. If you lose the private cryptographic key that identifies your coin, it's gone. Not just stolen, but removed entirely from the economy, so nobody will ever own it again. Consider these stories on Bitcointalk.org, where within a few messages the cumulative total tops 10,000 BTC — currently valued around a million dollars. A central authority could address this in several ways such as tracking, restitution, etc.. People don't care that their cash is anonymous when the rent money disappears.

Second, the entire system is vulnerable to a brute-force attack. Without getting into the specifics, Coin (well, Bitcoin) works because it assumes that at least 50% of the computer power on the network is held by honest players. But a recent 51% attack on Feathercoin (a Coin with much lower capitalization) showed that it's possible for a single party (or syndicate) to trump that.

Let's do the math for Bitcoin, the Coin with by far the highest capitalization, at just north of USD$1 billion (1 x 10^9). To reliably overwhelm the network, you'd need computing power delivering about 100,000 gigahashes per second. Computers optimized for Bitcoin processing are currently available for about $1,000/gigahash, so sufficient computing power can be bought for $100 million. Electricity cost for the deed would be about $200,000/day.

O.K., it's not something a basement hacker could whip up. But there are over 400 people, and thousands of syndicates with a billion dollars in the U.S. alone. Perhaps at least one of them is crazy enough to drop 1% of the wealth to partially control (or completely destroy) a billion-dollar system. (Hell, one of them recently spent 1/10th of that price tag on his wedding.)

Those are only the two biggest technical concerns. Then there's the galaxy of financial services (such as insurance) that's available for fiat money, but which would be hard or impossible to provision for Coin without a central authority. Time could overcome these barriers; a bully entity would overcome them faster, and with greater public buy-in.

Bitcoin is not the end game.

Along those lines, I don't believe that Bitcoin will be the ultimate winner in this game. It's the 1.0, and a brilliant first effort at that. But it's not perfect, and several pretenders to the throne already claim to fix some of its bugs. In fact, shifting conditions may require periodic issuance of new Coin as a matter of course. (As I said before, I believe such issuances will involve a central authority.)

These predictions all assume that Coin will grow, and there are many reasons it might not. However, I'm bullish on it for the long-term. It's already proven its value in use; the public is used to handling Coin-like money (viz. Square Wallet); and its first major hurdles are in the past. Now it's ready to enter a fascinating future.



- - - - -
Tom Geller (tomgeller.com) writes about technology and business. He's best known for Drupal-related work that includes eight video courses for lynda.com, a book for Peachpit Press, and corporate work for Acquia, Commerce Guys, and others. He first became involved in computers as a grade-school student in 1976, playing "Hunt the Wumpus" on a 100-pound monster that spewed tractor-feed paper onto the floor. He lives in Oberlin, Ohio.

The Superman reboot Man of Steel broke the record for the biggest June opening weekend ever with a whopping $125.1 million. Reviews have been mixed so far, ranging from: "DC and Warner Brothers have opted to produce a movie that foregoes a character-driven story. Instead, we're left with a trite blockbuster that holds beautiful special effects, an inspiring music score, a story that panders to the movie-goer who refrains from looking deep into the story, and neglects to define Superman as character, leaving him only as a hollow symbol and stock character, which ultimately leaves the movie about the events that transpire rather than the characters involved in them," to " What this version of the iconic DC Comics superhero does is emote convincingly. Thanks to director Zack Snyder and a serious-minded script by David S. Goyer (who shares story credit with his The Dark Knight collaborator, Christopher Nolan), Man of Steel gives the last son of Krypton an action-packed origin story with a minimum of camp and an intense emotional authenticity. Not bad for somebody who spends half the movie wearing blue tights." Personally, I found it to be the best 2-hour action sequence with 30 minutes of stock romance involving Superman that I am likely to see this summer. What did you think?

Zothecula writes "Polish architectural and deep-sea engineering company Deep Ocean Technology has inked a deal with Ridgewood Hotels and Suites Pvt. Ltd. to build its futuristic part-underwater Water Discus Hotel just off the shore of Kuredhivaru Island in the Maldives. 'The luminous hotel features two large disc-shaped lounges seven-meters above the water, housing a luxury restaurant and spa. The lounges are connected to a glass tunnel plunging 30-meters below the water, leading to 21 opulent bedrooms. Not only does the hotel look like a spaceship -- it actually moves like one, with the largest underwater saucer-shaped room able to slide to the surface in emergencies. 'If you need to replace a window for example, it's very difficult underwater,' explained Podwojewski. 'So we wanted to build a building that can surface any time for maintenance or safety.'"

larry bagina writes "You can't make this stuff up — 'Cameras, recording devices, and other electronic devices, such as smart phones, will not be permitted at the [2013 annual shareholder] meeting.' Maybe it runs afoul of their rules on sexually explicit material?"

An anonymous reader writes "Cyber espionage, crime, and warfare are possible only because of poor application or system design, implementation, and/or configuration,' argues a U.S. Air Force cyber security researcher. 'It is technological vulnerabilities that create the ability for actors to exploit the information system and gain illicit access to sensitive national security secrets, as the previous examples highlight. Yet software and hardware developers are not regulated in the same way as, say, the auto or pharmaceutical industries.' 'The truth is that we should no longer accept a patch/configuration management culture that promotes a laissez-faire approach to cyber security."

theodp writes "In The Unexotic Underclass, C.Z. Nnaemeka argues that too many smart people are chasing too many dumb ideas. 'What is shameful,' writes Nnaemeka, 'is that in a country with so many problems, with such a heaving underclass, we find the so-called 'best and brightest,' the 20-and 30-somethings who emerge from the top American graduate and undergraduate programs, abandoning their former hangout, Wall Street, to pile into anti-problem entrepreneurship.' Nnaemeka adds, 'It just looks like we've shifted the malpractice from feeding the money machine to making inane, self-centric apps. Worse, is that the power players, institutional and individual — the highflying VCs, the entrepreneurship incubators, the top-ranked MBA programs, the accelerators, the universities, the business plan competitions have been complicit in this nonsense.' And while it may not get you invited to the White House, Nnaemeka advises entrepreneurs looking for ideas to 'consider looking beyond the city-centric, navel-gazing, youth-obsessed mainstream' and instead focus on some groups that no one else is helping."

theodp writes "Big Bloomberg is watching you. CNN reports that was the unsettling realization Goldman Sachs execs came to a few weeks ago when a Bloomberg reporter inadvertently revealed that reporters from the news and financial data provider had surveillance capabilities over users of Bloomberg terminals. 'Limited customer relationship data has long been available to our journalists,' acknowledged a Bloomberg spokesman. 'In light of [Goldman's] concern as well as a general heightened sensitivity to data access, we decided to disable journalist access to this customer relationship information for all clients.' Business Insider is now reporting on allegations that Bloomberg reporters used terminals to spy on JPMorgan during the 'London Whale' disaster; Bloomberg bragged about its leadership on this story."

In the U.S., subsidized phones are the norm: for post-paid, long-term contract use, getting a low up-front price on a phone is one of the few upsides. New submitter Apptopia writes "After T Mobile mostly did away with subsidized phone plans, the other major carriers (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint) are paying attention. Carriers lose money with phone subsidies for high-end smartphones (particularly Apple's iPhone). If they do away with the subsidy, you will have to pay full retail price for phones, but your monthly bill will be lower." If people had a better idea what they were paying for, though, manufacturers might fight harder on price. There are lots of well-reviewed, multi-band, unlocked phones on Amazon and DealExtreme from lesser-known companies, and Nokia's new Asha 501 (though limited in many ways, including availability, having just launched in India) shows that the "smartphone" label can apply even to a sub- $100 phone.

An anonymous reader writes "A Methusen, Mass. high schooler, who goes by the rapper name 'Cammy Dee' has been arrested after posting lyrics that police felt were 'communicating terrorist threats.' This wouldn't be the first time rap lyrics were investigated, but if formally charged for 'communicating terrorist threats' this would a set a chilling low bar for terrorist investigations."

Jeremiah Cornelius writes "Bruce Schneier, security expert (and rational voice in the wilderness), explains in an editorial on CNN why 'Connecting the Dots' is a 'Hindsight Bias.' In heeding calls to increase the amount of surveillance data gathered and shared, agencies like the FBI have impaired their ability to discover actual threats, while guaranteeing erosion of personal and civil freedom. 'Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through. The television show Person of Interest is fiction, not fact.'"

Dawn Kawamoto writes "Yahoo rolled out an expanded maternity/paternity policy that doubled the family leave for moms to 16 weeks. But new dads at Yahoo get only 8 weeks. It turns out that Yahoo is not the only Fortune 500 company to short-shrift news dads. But, really, do new dads think it's worth crying over? Hmmm...changing diapers or cleaning up code — both are messy, but one smells less."

colinneagle writes "A 3D-printed gun capable of firing multiple rounds may be unveiled soon. Cody Wilson, the 25-year-old founder and director of nonprofit organization Defense Distributed, recently told Mashable that the end product of Wiki Weapon, the initiative to create an operational 3D-printed gun, may soon be ready to unveil to the public. In a March interview with CNN, Wilson said he hoped to have a printable gun ready by the end of April, so his most recent comments suggest that he may fulfill that promise. While Wilson was sparse with details, he did tell Mashable that the prototype would be a handgun consisting of 12 parts made out of ABS+ thermoplastic, which is known for its durability and is commonly used in industrial settings. The firing pin would be the only steel component of the 3D-printed gun, which will be able to withstand a few shots before melting or breaking. Wilson reportedly anticipates making an official announcement soon."

"Quirky.com has generated a lot of buzz," writes frequent contributor Bennett Haselton, "but it's hard to see how it could ever be more than a novelty unless they change two key features of their process. Fortunately, they already have all the infrastructure in place for bringing inventions to fruition, so that with these two changes, Quirky really could deliver on their early promise to change the way products get invented." Read on for Bennett's thoughts — which seem more sensible than quirky.

You've probably read about Quirky in one of many articles that read like valentines to the company and the concept. I do think the vision is brilliant — regular people who have smart ideas, but no experience with patents or marketing, partner with an invention company that manufacturers the product and splits the profits with them. But the hype seems oddly out of proportion to what Quirky actually makes — if you received a catalog in the mail with pictures of these products, would you remember the catalog a week later?

OK, I know, the hype is based not on the products, but on the process — regular people getting a shot at inventor stardom. Certainly the fairy tale has come true for some of the community inventors (who, not surprisingly, are spotlighted by Quirky quite a bit). But if you look at the overall numbers, the "About Quirky" page claims a community of "399,000 inventors" and "325 products developed," a pair of statistics that may reveal more than they intended — and indeed the odds are even worse than that, since only 74 of those products are being sold in their store and making the inventors any money, and only about half of those have made the inventor $10,000 or more. (For reasons explained here, some products selected by Quirky never actually get manufactured.) If you're tempted to think that it's a meritocracy and those 74 products really are the best ones anyone has ever submitted -- do you really think the Glide knife cleaner (12 units sold so far) is more useful than the nearly 400,000 other ideas people have sent in?

So if the products themselves are not changing the world, and from the "community inventor's" point of view it's a lottery that most of them have no chance of winning, then what is the big deal about Quirky?

Not surprisingly, there is an undercurrent of frustration that keeps bubbling to the surface on the Quirky message boards — frustration with the high odds against winning, and the lack of transparency about what products do make it. But I think the frustration can be traced back to two key problems with Quirky's process — both of which could be fixed (one of them quite easily), and which could take the arbitrariness and lack of transparency out of the selection process, and result in more inventions getting selected, all while making Quirky more money.

First, in the existing system, a user submitting a new idea probably doesn't realize that less than 1 in 1000 submissions goes on to be selected by Quirky as one of that week's "winners," and only about 1 in 10,000 ideas has ever gone on to make the inventor more than $10,000. On this page you can see a scrolling list of the most recent submissions; I wrote a script to poll that feed and count up the new submissions as they appeared, and the total averages about 1,500 per week. Of these, only two get selected by Quirky at their weekly staff meeting, and, as noted above, most of the selected winners do not end up in their store anyway.

Quirky also charges $10 for each idea submission, which comes to $15,000 per week, or about $150 per employee — hardly enough for each of them to live on, but not trivial. According to the text I copied from an old version of Quirky's FAQ: "We ask for $10 when submitting an idea for three simple reasons: to make sure you are serious about your submission, to be sure that you're an actual human, and most importantly: to assure that the quality of submissions remains high." Notably missing from that list was "To make Quirky some extra money." But from my experience when running a paid service that offered the first month at a reduced rate, asking for $1 and asking for $10 achieved about the same goal of filtering out the people who weren't serious.

Now, however, Quirky's FAQ answers that question by saying:

Well, you've got to ante up to give your idea the fair shot it deserves. Best case scenario? Your $10 investment takes your idea from a tiny sketch to a professionally manufactured product found on shelves worldwide, earning you a heckuva lot more. Worst case? That 10 bucks gets you extensive community feedback on who liked and didn't like your idea, which serves as focused consumer market research. You then have the option to resubmit your idea, or you can use the feedback you received to make it on your own.

That's not a trivial change, because that statement is actually wrong — the $10 doesn't "get you" any "community feedback". Which brings me to the next problem with Quirky's current system.

When I gave Quirky a test drive by submitting an idea for a standalone smartphone-battery recharger (something I wished for in my article about the usefulness of spare batteries), after I submitted the idea and my payment, I was left on a page without any information about what to do next. How, I wondered, was I supposed to get "votes" for my idea without spamming the message boards or other users? The FAQ didn't — and still doesn't — answer this question, odd for something that would be one of the first things on every submitter's mind. But it referred me to the forums, where I found a post by quirky user Matthew Fleming, whose invention was actually picked up by Quirky, summarizing advice from himself and other Quirky experts on how to get votes (and, presumably, how he himself did it):

"(1) Posting your idea is the designated Pimping Zone. [dead link]
(2) Getting your Facebook friends or Twitter followers to check out your idea.
(3) Promoting to all other people off site (including Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Reddit, emailing, texting & calling your friends, finding relevant forums elsewhere online).
(4) Putting links to your idea in your profile, then being active in other areas of the site, such as helping other people's. People may check out your profile and look at your ideas.
(5) When adding a link to your submission in # 1 or 4, make sure your link is clickable typing in the html code (OR you can use this handy link generator to generate the HTML code to then paste directly into your post).
(6) Promote in other Quirky hangouts, like:
Quirky Inventors on Facebook
As Seen On Facebook [dead link]
Quirky Products on Facebook"

My heart sank like a rock when I read those words. Here I had really believed that — despite the considerable odds against any given submission making it into the production stage — Quirky at least had a system in place for identifying the best ones. But it turned out that those who had played the game successfully were basically admitting that the only way to win was to act as an unpaid Quirky promoter to your friends. And more to the point, it meant that the winners would not be the best inventions, but rather just the inventions that met the minimum requirement of not being embarrasingly stupid, whose inventors were the best at playing the promotion game.

So it is in fact misleading to say that the $10 entry fee "gets you" any community feedback. The only way to get community feedback is to try bringing up your idea in forum threads (which risks pissing people off if you violate some rules that are never clearly explained), to post it in designated areas where idea flooding is encouraged (which are clogged to the point of uselessness from everybody else doing the same thing), or to recruit new people under you in the Quirky pyramid.

I didn't do any of those things, so my idea got a grand total of 8 views and 3 votes, before expiring at the end of the 30-day vote-gathering window. Far from being surprised that I got so few views, on the contrary I don't even have any idea where those 8 views came from, since I didn't rope in any of my friends to sign up and vote for me.

If Quirky wants to essentially limit the winners to people who agree to promote Quirky to their friends, that's their right, but then they shouldn't claim that their system actually identifies the best new ideas, or even what "the community" thinks are the best new ideas.

Meanwhile, the products that do make it into production, seem to bear out the prediction above — they're good, but not great, and many of them look like they made it as a result of a combination of luck and playing the promotion game. The $13 "Pluck" egg yolk separator looks cool, but do you really need it when the grocery store sells an egg separator for $1.59? Well, I don't cook much, so maybe I'm more qualified to evaluate electronics accessories. I actually did just order one of Quirky's "Cordies" for holding cord extensions on your desktop (if it works out, I can let you know in a follow-up to my much-beloved article about low-tech hacks!), but there are gizmos on Amazon that do the same thing. The Pivot Power Strip also looks cool, but it seems simpler to me just to use power strip liberators, which are cheaper per-plug, can be divided across multiple rooms, and light up to show when the power is running.

And the truth is that of all the gadgets I saw in the Quirky store, there's nothing I would choose over having a portable charger for spare cell phone batteries. I may be biased, but what would you rather have — effectively unlimited phone battery life, or an egg yolk separator that happens to look like an egg?

What's frustrating about all of this is that there are two simple changes that Quirky could make to their selection system, which would immediately make the "promotion game" obsolete, and almost by definition would select the inventions that the greatest number of people would actually buy. The first change is the same basic system that I've advocated for reforming the White House "We The People" website, for halting cheating on news aggregator sites, for detecting abusive content on Facebook, and multiple other problems: random-sample voting. In other words, when you submit a new idea to Quirky, the idea would also be presented to, say, 20 other users selected at random. Each user votes on whether they would buy the product if it went into production. (Quirky could simply require that, as a condition of keeping your account active, you have to vote when they ask you to.) The ideas that get the most "yes" votes out of those 20 randomly selected users, are judged to be the most marketable. (Well, 20 is a small enough sample that some would get high ratings just as a statistical fluke, but an invention that cleared the first hurdle could then be sent to a voting panel of 100 users.)

Of course, users who have expertise in particular fields, could weigh in at any time to point out that an invention would be impractical, illegal, in violation of someone else's patent, or redundant given another product already on the market. But to answer the basic question of how many people would buy a product if it cleared all those other hurdles, asking a random sample of users is a rather more valid research method than "texting & calling your friends".

Unusually for one of my "random-sample-voting" lobbying efforts, someone has already made essentially the same point on the Quirky message boards — community inventor Clinton Fleenor wrote a post making essentially the same argument. I would quibble with him in a couple of points (there's no reason to bring in "a million+ impartial, non-submitting voters" per day, since a smaller sample size is good enough), but he got the key point exactly right:

"What happens if the system is distributing the submissions to voters one at a time instead of allowing voters to self-select?
Answer: No submissions are buried."

(Clinton's posts since that date have expressed an increasing disgust with the process, most recently calling Quirky "glaze-eyed lazy asses" — and this was from someone who actually won at their game. You can imagine how the people feel who don't win.)

In fact, you could even use the random sampling method to ask people not just whether they would buy a product, but to give them the option to pre-order it, Kickstarter-style, with the money to be returned if the product doesn't get enough pre-orders to justify production. Which leads to the second change that could revolutionize how Quirky works: Rather than picking two "winning" products every week, put every product into production that receives enough votes and/or pre-orders to indicate that it would be profitable.

For example, suppose you have an idea that can be made and sold for $10 per unit, but only if the product sells 10,000 units or more. Assume there are 100,000 Quirky users who can be polled to ask if they are potential buyers. Quirky takes your idea and presents it to 100 randomly selected users, and asks them to pre-order it for $10 if they're interested. If 20 of those 100 users do in fact pre-order, then Quirky presents the idea to all of their 100,000 product-buying user base. Assuming that the original sample of 100 was representative of the population of 100,000, then they would expect that 20,000 users would also pre-order. Now you've exceeded the minimum required order of 10,000 and the product can go into production. On the other hand, suppose only 5 people pre-order out of that sample of 100. Then Quirky could expect that out of their total population of 100,000, only about 5,000 would pre-order the product — not enough to justify production, so they never push the pre-order to the rest of their customers, and the original 5 who placed their pre-order would get their money back.

More realistically, suppose Quirky makes most of their sales through retail and not to their own users, but they also know that sales to their own users are a good predictor of retail sales — for example, that they sell 3 times as many of a product through retailers as they do to their own built-in user base. Then if a product has to sell 10,000 units to be profitable, they put it into production if they determine, via random sampling, that they would sell at least 2,500 units to their own users, and count on roughly 7,500 more orders from retail shoppers.

This system has several desirable features:

• If an idea doesn't appeal to a high enough percentage of the user base (as determined by asking the random sample that are asked to pre-order), then the vast majority of users never get bothered with the pre-order request, since it dies after not making it past the hurdle of the initial 100.
• On the other hand, if there are enough potential buyers among the user population, then barring any statistical flukes, the initial sample of 100 randomly selected users will reveal that. Thus almost all of the time, any idea that does get pushed to the entire user population, will get enough pre-orders at that point to go into production.
• The system can't be "gamed" by promotional shenanigans like "texting & calling your friends".
• It's scalable — any product that receives enough pre-orders to guarantee the desired profit, can go into production, no matter how many such products clear that threshold in any given week.

(If Quirky's patent lawyers are in danger of getting overwhelmed from all the ideas that clear the pre-order hurdle every week, the idea is still scalable for any invention where there's enough profit to pay for the lawyers. Suppose it takes $2,000 worth of lawyer-time to clear all the patents and other paperwork to market an invention. Then any invention that gets enough pre-orders to pay for the production cost, plus $2,000 for the lawyer, can still go to manufacturing. That process can be repeated as many times per week if you want, as long as there are lawyers who want the work.)

Kickstarter doesn't use random-sample-voting to identify the best ideas on their site, but they do use pre-orders to solve the scalability problem -- if enough people make a pre-order pledge on Kickstarter to meet the project's minimum funding requirements, the project goes ahead (and if the fundraising goal is not met, everyone who pledged gets their money back). Kickstarter doesn't pick "winners"; if you meet your funding requirement, you "win," and there's no limit on how many projects can be successfully funded in a given week. So I wasn't surprised to see that Kickstarter has funded over 39,000 projects successfully compared to Quirky's 326. (Yes, that's apples and oranges, since many Kickstarter projects are easier to complete than putting a Quirky invention into production — but still, given the buzz that both companies are receiving these days, would you have guessed that one of them has funded over 100 times more projects successfully than the other one?)

So those are my suggestions to Quirky: Use random-sample voting to get an initial reading for the merits of an idea (very easy), and then use Kickstarter-style pre-orders to secure funding for any marketable invention, not just a limited number of weekly "winners" (a much bigger overhaul, but a good long-term goal). If they appropriate my suggestions, I promise not to organize any protest demonstrations outside their headquarters demanding credit. In fact, given how unfair their current system is to the inventors ponying up $10 each to play their lottery, we should probably stage a protest outside their office if they don't take these ideas.

theodp writes "During the night, The Tech broke news that gunshots were reported at MIT near 32 Vassar Street (the Ray and Maria Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences), and one officer was shot and taken to Mass General Hospital. MIT's Emergency Information page also reports that injuries have been reported. Sadly, CNN is now reporting that the university police officer has died. Look for updates on Twitter." The two suspects identified earlier as being behind the Boston Marathon bombings are believed to be responsible for this. They were found by police. One suspect, 26-year-old Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed in a shootout. The other suspect, 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is still being pursued. The Associated Press reports that the two are believed to be from the Russian region near Chechnya. During the firefight, the suspects threw explosive devices at police. Public transit in Boston has been shut down, and hundreds of thousands of people have been asked to not leave their homes. Here are live feed for local TV news and emergency services audio. Police have been warned that the remaining suspect may have a suicide vest.

Reader Okian Warrior points out a related story worthy of notice: "The 4chan crowd, poring over images of the Boston marathon, identified two dark-skinned and bag-carrying suspects (among others). This was then picked up by The New York Post, who ran the image on Thursday's front page with the headline 'Feds seek these two pictured at Boston Marathon.' And now, a completely innocent teen now finds himself scared to leave his home."

astroengine writes "About 1,200 light-years from Earth, five planets are circling around sun-like star Kepler-62, two of which are fortuitously positioned for water, if any exists, to remain liquid on their surfaces — a condition believed to be necessary for life. The discovery, made by scientists using NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, is the strongest evidence yet for more than one Earth-sized planet existing in a star's so-called 'habitable' zone. 'We're particularly delighted to find that there are two planets in the habitable zone,' lead Kepler scientist William Borucki, with NASA's Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News. 'It sort of doubles our chances of finding that Earth we'd all like to find. When you think about Earth and Mars, if Mars had been a bit larger, if Jupiter hadn't been so close, we'd again have two planets in the habitable zone and maybe we'd have a place to go,' he said." There's also a third planet believed to be a good candidate for hosting water.

A massive explosion took place around 8:50pm ET at a fertilizer plant in a small town in Texas. The cause of the explosion is not precisely known, but the plant was on fire beforehand. The casualty reports are tentative and expected to rise, but two people are dead and over 150 are injured. Firefighters responding to the initial fire are unaccounted for. Over a thousand residents have been evacuated from their homes. Officials are worried about the volatility of another tank at the plant, but also about the potential damage from exposure to anhydrous ammonia. The blast was heard in Dallas, 75 miles away. "There are lots of houses that are leveled within a two-block radius. A lot of other homes are damaged as well outside that radius." A brief YouTube video shows the explosion of the plant.

A massive explosion took place around 8:50pm ET at a fertilizer plant in a small town in Texas. The cause of the explosion is not precisely known, but the plant was on fire beforehand. The casualty reports are tentative and expected to rise, but two people are dead and over 150 are injured. Firefighters responding to the initial fire are unaccounted for. Over a thousand residents have been evacuated from their homes. Officials are worried about the volatility of another tank at the plant, but also about the potential damage from exposure to anhydrous ammonia. The blast was heard in Dallas, 75 miles away. "There are lots of houses that are leveled within a two-block radius. A lot of other homes are damaged as well outside that radius." A brief YouTube video shows the explosion of the plant.

An anonymous reader writes "A letter addressed to Senator Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi) was tested and found to contain ricin, a highly toxic, inexpensive, and easily produced substance derived from castor beans. The letter was intercepted at the U.S. Capitol's off-site mail facility and nobody has been injured. The letter was postmarked Memphis, Tennessee, but listed no return address. Sen. Claire McCaskill told reporters that a suspect has been identified." And, this morning, a letter addressed to the President was discovered containing a suspicious substance. Update: 04/17 16:25 GMT by U L : And the substance is ricin. Apparently, air filters at another facility have also tested positive for ricin.

Nerval's Lobster writes "These days, when something in the world goes very wrong, it seems as if everybody learns about it first on Twitter and Facebook. In the minutes after homemade bombs turned the finish line of the Boston Marathon into a crime scene, terms such as #BostonMarathon shot to the top of Twitter's Trends list; across the country, office workers first learned of the attack when someone posted a message on a Facebook page. Social networks have become this generation's radio, the default conduit for the freshest information. As first responders treated the wounded and the minutes ticked past, news organizations began vacuuming up Twitter and Facebook posts from around Boston and posting it on their Websites, along with 'regular' text updates. A Vine video-snippet of a bomb going off near the finish line, knocking a runner off his feet, ended up embedded into dozens of blog postings. When a disaster strikes, and many of those same news Websites post 'live updates' that incorporate tons of social-networking posts, they face accusations of exploiting the tragedy in the name of pageviews and revenue. That's not surprising—long before 'yellow journalism' became a term, people have charged news organizations with playing up humanity's worst for their own gain. In the immediate aftermath of the Boston bombings, online pundits lashed out against Mashable, The Verge, Wired, and other publications that had posted live updates, accusing them of stepping outside their usual coverage areas for cynical gain. In the following piece, a number of tech editors-in-chief, including The Verge's Joshua Topolsky and Mashable's Lance Ulanoff, talk about their approaches to covering the tragedy."

Reports are coming in that the headquarters at the Boston Marathon have been locked down after two explosions were reported near the finish line. According to reports "dozens of people have been seriously injured." CNN has live coverage. Google has a Person Finder up for Boston.
Update: The Boston Police Dept. says 2 people have died and 23 are injured. News conference scheduled for 4:30 ET.

An anonymous reader writes with this snippet from CNN: "North Korea has raised at least one missile into its upright firing position, feeding concerns that a launch is imminent, a U.S. official told CNN Thursday. This comes as the world continued to keep watch for a possible missile launch by the secretive government, and a day before U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is expected to arrive in the region. In the latest daily tough talk from the North, a government agency is quoted by the state-run media as saying that 'war can break out any moment.'"

SchrodingerZ writes "The Blue Angels squadron, known for their intricate and death-defying aerial demonstrations, has canceled all scheduled air shows for the rest of the year. The United States Navy, which controls the Blue Angels, has reported that the grounding comes from the massive rollbacks in spending, due to the 85 billion dollar sequestration given by the federal government. In a statement from the office of the Commander Naval Air Forces in San Diego, the Navy said, 'Recognizing budget realities, current Defense policy states that outreach events can only be supported with local assets at no cost to the governmen.' Currently, the cost of an air show is above $100,000. This story came just a week after the announcement by the Air Force that their Thunderbird shows will also be canceled."

mallyn writes "This is an article about a search engine that is designed to look for devices on the net that are not really intended to be viewed and used by the general public. Devices include pool filters, skating rink cooling system, and other goodies. 'Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and services each month. It's stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights, security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot. Shodan searchers have found control systems for a water park, a gas station, a hotel wine cooler and a crematorium. Cybersecurity researchers have even located command and control systems for nuclear power plants and a particle-accelerating cyclotron by using Shodan. ... A quick search for "default password" reveals countless printers, servers and system control devices that use "admin" as their user name and "1234" as their password. Many more connected systems require no credentials at all — all you need is a Web browser to connect to them.'"

An anonymous reader writes "On October 25, 2012, as residents of the U.S. east coast made frantic preparations for the arrival of Hurricane Sandy, the captain of the HMS Bounty (a replica tall ship constructed fifty years earlier for the Marlon Brando film Mutiny on the Bounty) made a foolish decision, with the assent of his crew, to proceed with a scheduled voyage from New London, CT for St. Petersburg FL. CNN's Thom Patterson has written a long story with the benefit of survivor testimony to the NTSB and U.S. Coast Guard. Captain Robin Walbridge thought he could outrun the hurricane, and besides, he'd 'sailed into hurricanes before.' The crew (officially there were no passengers, a fact that allowed the ship to evade certain safety regulations) consisted of tall ship enthusiasts with widely varying amounts of nautical experience, perhaps taken by the vast historical literature on the great age of sailing. A day and a half into the voyage, Captain Walbridge altered his plan of sailing east of the storm, to sailing south and west of it. A day later, the Bounty was less than 200 miles from the eye of the storm; the engine room started to flood, and the pumps were jammed with debris being torn off by the storm's 70 mph winds. The end came early next day, the Bounty was knocked down by a huge wave, tossing the captain and several crew members overboard. The Coast Guard rescued fourteen of the crew members, but Claudene Christian (an adventure-loving novice who had enlisted as crew a few months before) was dead, and Captain Walbridge's body has not been found."

hackingbear writes "The suspected cyberattack that struck South Korean banks and media companies this week didn't originate from a Chinese IP address, South Korean officials said Friday, contradicting their previous claim. The Korea Communications Commission said that after 'detailed analysis,' the IP address used in the attack is the bank's internal IP address — which is, coincidentally identical to a Chinese ISP's address, among the 2^32 address space available."

Bennett Haselton writes "Recently I wrote an article about what I considered to be the sorry state of cooking instructions on the web (and how-to instructions in general), using as a jumping-off point a passage from Evgeny Morozov's new book To Save Everything, Click Here. My point was that most "newbie" instructions never seemed to get judged by the basic criteria by which all instructions should be judged: If you give these instructions to a group of beginners, and have them attempt to follow the instructions without any additional help from the author, what kind of results do they get? The original title of my article was "Better Cooking Through Algorithms," but due to some confusion in the submission process the title got changed to "Book Review: To Save Everything, Click Here" even though, as multiple commenters pointed out, it didn't make much sense as a "book review" since it only mentioned a short passage from the actual book. This article, on the other hand, really is intended as a review of The 4-Hour Chef, even though the article only covers a similarly tiny fraction of the book's 671-page length. That's because even before buying the book, I was determined to review it according to a simple process: Try three recipes from the book. Follow the directions step by step. (If any direction is ambiguous, then follow what could be a plausible interpretation of the directions.) My estimation of the quality of the book, as an instructional cooking guide for beginners, is then determined by the quality of the food produced by my attempt to follow the directions. (I've done this so many times for so many "beginner cookbooks," that I've probably lost my true "beginner" cook status in the process — which means that the results obtained by a real beginner using The 4-Hour Chef, would probably be a little worse than what I achieved.)" Read on for the rest of Bennett's Thoughts

I bought the book with tempered high hopes. Watching Tim Ferriss in his TV interviews and reading the enthusiasm that leaps off of every page (each recipe even comes with a "song pairing," music to jam out to while making the dish), it's hard not to take a quick liking to him. He comes across as a man who who really does want to share his passion and not just sell books. He's goofily handsome in that way that women and some men often confuse with "confidence", although he does seem to possess a lot of actual confidence. But enthusiasm is the enemy of objectivity, and I was determined to review the book according to the criterion of how well the directions actually work, not based on how much fun it would be to hang out with Tim. Even though it would probably be fun.

In his interview on Jimmy Fallon, for example, they looked like they were having a great time, but Jimmy told Tim that he read the book and tried following the directions for making bacon-infused bourbon, then proceeded to show some "action shots" of the result that he achieved: a jar of what looked like solid bacon fat, which Jimmy said he did not drink. OK, I thought, that means that whatever comes next, in that case the directions failed. Tim proceeded to explain that you have to be careful not to overblend it, and to leave it in the freezer long enough to be able to scrape more of the fat off, so that if you get a result that looks like Fallon's jar of goo, then that's probably what you did wrong. Great advice, but, not in the book. "Bacon-infused bourbon" sounds like precisely the kind of recipe that will sell a lot of books (not surprisingly, it's listed on the back cover of the book jacket), but which is hard to write good directions for.

In the same interview, Ferriss showed how he cooked sea bass sous vide in a hotel kitchen sink and then finished it by searing it with the hotel's travel iron, which he cheerfully admitted the hotel was not too happy about. I'm all for re-purposing common household items to find a new way to achieve something, but only if it's an improvement over the more mundane way of doing things; otherwise, it's just doing things inefficiently for the sake of being weird as an end in itself. (When I posted a photo of my bookshelf with a hollow-core wooden plank C-clamped to it at one end, with the other end used as an anchor for my XOOM tablet so I could watch movies while lying flat in bed, it was because that was the easiest way I could find to do that.) To be fair, Tim's suggestion of searing fish with a travel iron was probably intended to get the reader into the adventurous spirit, not as literal advice -- but then, my mission remains to evaluate the actual cooking advice, according to the results it produces.

The short answer: Of the three recipes I tried, one came out barely edible, and the other two were palatable mostly to the degree that the raw ingredients themselves were tasty, so I might as well have just snacked on the ingredients separately instead of combining them. All recipes definitely showed signs that they could have been greatly improved by being worked over by the process I described in my last article — i.e., show the recipes to a group of genuine newbies, listen to their feedback about all the points where they get stuck, then keep revising according to that feedback until you reach the point where the latest round of newbie testers is able to get through the directions with no problem. (You may notice that this sounds like a very obvious idea, but most how-to directions show very little sign of having been put through this kind of scrutiny.)

The first recipe in the book was for "Osso Buko", Ferriss's "knock-off" version of ossobuco, using lamb shanks instead of veal shanks. With $60 for a new porcelain Dutch oven, $20 for the lamb shanks, and other miscellaneous expenses, it cost me about $100 just to try the recipe to see if it worked (although Fred Meyer let me return the Dutch oven after I realized I was never going to try this again, and yes, I know you can find cheaper ones). A few times in the recipe, the directions used an unfamiliar term that I would have expected to be defined in a text for true beginners (for example, I didn't know what a "dry wine" was, and even the Wikipedia article wasn't much help, but the grocery store stockboy helped me out). The bigger problem was that at multiple points in the recipe, the instructions were too ambiguous to know if I was following them correctly, or I was unable to follow them exactly and didn't know how big of an adjustment I needed to make (e.g. what to do if the smallest shanks I could find were bigger than the recommended size). I still have no idea if the mediocre results were caused by one big screwup at one particular step, or the accumulation of many small deviations from what a real chef would have done.

Specifically: (1) The recipe calls for a Dutch oven. Ferriss has a brand he recommends, but can I use one from the local Fred Meyer? How big? The recipe doesn't say. I picked a five-quart since it was big enough to hold the lamb shanks. (2) The recipe calls for "lamb shanks." Fore shanks or hind shanks? Does it matter? My grocery store only has "lamb foreshanks" anyway. (3) The recipe says each shank should be 12 oz, but the smallest ones I could find were all 16 oz. What adjustments do I make? I have no idea. (4) The recipe called for "1/3 of a bottle" of wine, but later said to pour in enough "to cover 1/2-3/4 of the meat," and I couldn't do that without pouring in the whole bottle. I assumed the "cover 1/2 of the meat" direction took precedence over the "use 1/3 of the bottle" direction, but at that point I was sure that I'd deviated so far from the intent of the directions that the dish wasn't going to work. I put the whole thing into the oven at 350 degrees for two hours, which is about the only part of the recipe that I was sure that I followed correctly.

The results came out barely edible (I said "barely" — I still ate them, but I would never serve them or bring them to a party). Mostly it was a lot of work to cut through the tendons and small bones to get to the meat; if the Dutch oven was supposed to soften the meat so that everything fell off the bone, it didn't work.

The second recipe I tried was for crab cakes with harissa sauce. Right away I ran into a problem, since even in my fairly cosmopolitan city with multiple ethnic and specialty grocery stores, none of the ones I visited had ever heard of "harissa sauce." Now for directions that have been thoroughly beta-tested, this is where they would typically say, "Harissa sauce can be difficult to find, so here's where to look; otherwise, you can use this as a substitute." I found some forums saying you could use hot sauce, so I went with that. The crab cakes came out fine, but probably mostly due to the expensive crab ingredient, and I didn't like them enough to make them again.

The third recipe that I tried was for coconut cauliflower curry mash. The directions called for "crushed cashews," and said "If they're uncrushed, you can then crush them in your hands directly into the bowl. This is how Chuck Norris does it." By this time I was getting a little tired of the book being cute at the expense of being helpful — roasted cashews are physically impossible for most people to crush in their hands — but I flattened some under a rolling pin and followed the rest of the recipe. The result tasted OK, but probably only about as good as if I'd just mixed up the nuts and cauliflower and other ingredients and cooked them in a pot.

And that was the end of the ride for me. Three recipes and three results that I never thought about making again (one that was barely edible, and two that tasted only slightly better than the component ingredients mixed together, neither one all that good). Based on those sample results, my estimation is that for a true beginner going through the recipes in the book, the "success rate" would not be high enough to justify the time and money that they'd spend.

Full disclosure compels me to report that I did successfully prepare and "serve" one recipe in the book: bacon roses, which turned out about as well in my own kitchen as the ones he showed off on Jimmy Fallon. Most artificial roses have removable heads, and if you bake a couple of rolled-up slices of raw bacon, they come out resembling roses that can be threaded on the artificial-rose stems. But even then, the instructions in the book were overkill, requiring the reader to take a cupcake baking pan and drill holes in the bottom of each cupcake holder, so that you can cook the bacon in the cupcake holders while draining the fat out (but which also ruins the cupcake pan for the purpose of making actual cupcakes). For one thing, you can use silicone cupcake molds and just poke a hole in the bottom rather than drilling through aluminum; these can also be stacked when you're done, so that they take up much less storage space than a 12-muffin baking pan. But in any case I found that you could get perfectly good results just by rolling up the pieces of bacon and baking them sideways on a broiler rack; they hold their shape just as well as if you had baked them in the cupcake holders, since the rolled-up bacon hardly expands anyway. (This is the kind of thing that you also find if you have people beta-testing your recipes.)

To be fair, I'm only narrowly reviewing the book as an instructional guide to cooking. The book claims that the principles taught in its pages can be used to transform your life in a wide range of ways, including becoming world-class in "any skill" in about six months, which Ferriss says he has used to learn kickboxing, Spanish, shooting basketball 3-pointers, and Japanese horseback archery. Next on his list: writing cooking directions!

But now I'm being a smartass, and the truth is that there is potential for the recipes in these book to be transformed into something that could produce fantastic results in the hands of a beginner. Normally when I try out a "beginner's cookbook" — usually by using Amazon's "Look Inside" feature to sample a few recipes from the cookbook and print them out for free — if the first three recipes produce inedible results, I throw them out and never give the cookbook a second thought. But I'm more optimistic about re-working Ferriss's recipes in accordance with the beta-testing process above, for two reasons. First, he really does seem to have a passion for helping people and not just selling books (that's important, because it's hardly going to drive book sales to take recipes from the book and beta-test them and improve them as a free web-based project). Second, he has legions of fans who would probably volunteer as beta testers. I myself would be happy to volunteer, since the commitment of a beta tester is minimal, by design, because you're supposed to simulate the experience of a real user without overthinking it: go through the instructions one time, and record the quality of the result you get at the end. (Optionally, make a note of any ambiguous directions you encountered along the way, which might affect the quality of the end result.)

As they're written now, I don't think the recipes in the book would pass the definitional test of good directions: Give them to beginners, have them try to follow the steps, and record the results. I had essentially the same thought about the business-launching advice in Tim Ferriss's first book, The 4-Hour Workweek, which I only bought as a companion to the new book. Now I think The 4-Hour Workweek does contain a lot of useful self-help advice — for example, to get over your fear of the worst-case outcome by visualizing it entirely and realizing that it's not that bad. (Although I cracked up at the part about "outsourcing your work," thinking of a certain Verizon employee who took the advice too literally.) But for a book whose key premise is that you can liberate yourself from a 40-hour workweek, the advice about how to start a successful business to do this, occupies a surprisingly small portion of the book (pp. 150-200, if you leave out the subsequent chapter about how to automate your business once it's successful). Well, I've been a part of various entrepreneur communities since before I graduated college, and over the years I've seen many people follow some variation of the steps in those chapters, and the reality is that even if the founder does everything right, most new businesses still fizzle out just like my mediocre "osso buko."

The key difference, I think, is that any formula on how to start your own wildly successful business and shrink your workweek down to 4 hours, cannot work without a lot of luck — if it could, angel investors would just start hiring "entrepreneurs" to follow the formula exactly, if every one of those entrepreneurs (or even 25% of them) hit it out of the park with their new business venture, the investors would make out like gangbusters. Most methodical research suggests that actually only about 5% of VC-backed businesses hit their projected break-even on cash flow -- suggesting that even the best VCs can't find any combination of personal attributes, or action steps, that leads to entrepreneurial success without a big dose of luck. (Ferriss himself says that The 4-Hour Workweek was turned down by 28 out of 29 publishers, which sounds like a testament to the importance of persistence; but most authors whose work is turned down by the first 28 publishers, will usually get turned down by the 29th one too, and there was obviously a certain amount of luck in the fact that that didn't happen to him.)

On the other hand, following a recipe and producing a delicious dish, ought to be possible without luck. What you need, though, are precise directions that have been picked apart by beginner beta testers to remove any ambiguities, until you reach the point where the latest wave of beta testers was able to get through the directions with no confusion, and produce great results in nearly every case. The recipes in The 4-Hour Chef aren't at that point, but Tim Ferriss has the fan-based manpower at his disposal to test and transform those recipes into truly idiot-proof directions for delicious food, if he wants to.

An anonymous reader writes "Fueling your car with the wrong type of fuel happens even to POTUS. This happens when you put gasoline instead of diesel in the tank. ...." And Yes, the presidential limo really is a diesel. What about clean, renewable solar?

An anonymous reader writes "Bruce Schneier has written a blunt article in CNN about the state of privacy on the internet. Quoting: 'The Internet is a surveillance state. Whether we admit it to ourselves or not, and whether we like it or not, we're being tracked all the time. Google tracks us, both on its pages and on other pages it has access to. Facebook does the same; it even tracks non-Facebook users. Apple tracks us on our iPhones and iPads. One reporter used a tool called Collusion to track who was tracking him; 105 companies tracked his Internet use during one 36-hour period. ... This is ubiquitous surveillance: All of us being watched, all the time, and that data being stored forever. This is what a surveillance state looks like, and it's efficient beyond the wildest dreams of George Orwell. Sure, we can take measures to prevent this. We can limit what we search on Google from our iPhones, and instead use computer web browsers that allow us to delete cookies. We can use an alias on Facebook. We can turn our cell phones off and spend cash. But increasingly, none of it matters. There are simply too many ways to be tracked."

Hugh Pickens writes "While getting power cords, replacement keyboards, and other sundry computer accessories to employees who need them sounds easy enough, at many companies the process requires filling out order forms that can take IT departments days to fulfill. That's why Facebook CIO Tim Campos decided to take a more user-friendly approach to this common problem, installing custom-made vending machines around the Facebook campus that dispense computer accessories instead of snacks and sodas. When Facebook engineers spill coffee on their keyboard (a common mishap), they head to a nearby vending machine instead of hitting up their IT guy or just grabbing a replacement from a nearby cabinet. They swipe their badge, key in their selection and voila — a brand new keyboard drops down for them to take. According to Campos, they've reduced the cost of managing replacement accessories by about 35%. While products found in the vending machines are free, items are clearly marked with price tags so employees can see the retail value of each accessory they take. The new vending machines also require all employees to swipe their badge before making a selection. That means each and every power cord, keyboard and screen wipe they take can be traced back to their name, ensuring that the system won't be abused. 'I like the assumption that employees will do the right thing,' writes Alexis Madrigal. 'The swipe means that everyone's requests are tracked and I'm sure some algorithm somewhere is constantly sorting the data to see if anyone has pulled 10 sets of headphones out of the system.'"

eldavojohn writes "Last week, North Korea promised a "preemptive nuclear strike" prior to a UN vote on new sanctions. Despite the threat, the sanctions were unanimously approved. North Korea has responded by killing a Red Cross hotline with Seoul and claims that it has canceled the 1953 Armistice although the UN notes this cannot be done unilaterally (North Korea attempted the same thing in 2003 and 2009). While everyone thought that Kim Jong Un would ride out the sanctions on slush funds, the United States claims to have found his funds in Shanghai and other parts of China totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. Beijing has reportedly refused to confiscate these funds despite voting for the very UN resolutions sanctioning North Korea that read: 'More specifically, States are directed to prevent the provision of financial services or the transfer of any financial or other assets or resources, including 'bulk cash,' which might be used to evade the sanctions.'"

Hugh Pickens writes writes "Discover Magazine reports that Hugo Chavez will apparently get an embalming job designed to keep him looking alive for decades similar to that of Russia's Vladimir Lenin, whose body still lies in a mausoleum in Moscow's Red Square, nearly 90 years after his death. So how do you preserve a human body for decades without it turning into a pile of melted tissue? First, get to work quickly. Upon death, the human body starts decomposing immediately. The way to stop it is with formaldehyde, a preservative used for the past century, which inhibits the enzyme decomposition as well as killing bacteria. 'You pump the chemical in, and as the formaldehyde hits the cells of the body, it firms up the protein of the cell, or fixates it,' says Vernie Fountain, head of the Fountain National Academy of Professional Embalming Skills in Springfield, Mo. 'That's what makes them stiff.' With a body that will have to be on display for years, it's likely to require a top-shelf, super-strong solution. 'If I were doing Hugo Chavez, I would strengthen the solution and use more preservative product,' says Fountain. Next, get a good moisturizer. Formaldehyde preserves, but it also dries out the body. Vaseline or other moisturizers can preserve the look of skin, according to Melissa Johnson Williams, executive director of the American Society of Embalmers. Finally keep cool. Heat decomposes a body so for long term preservation, the body has to be kept at the temperature of a standard kitchen refrigerator, somewhere in the mid-40s. Lastly, if Venezuelans really want to keep Hugo Chavez around forever, like many other world figures, there's only one solution that works, according to Fountain. 'The best form of preservation is mummification.'"

Dupple writes with a story about the latest in the Google-Microsoft feud. "The tired spat between Google and Microsoft just got a lot more interesting after reports that the search giant tipped off European authorities to antitrust concerns, a tip that will now cost the Windows-maker nearly a billion dollars. When news of the fine levied by the European Union's competition watchdog broke on Wednesday, nobody was too surprised that the European Commission was punishing Microsoft for bullying consumers. But with a recent headline-stealing dispute between the Redmond, Washington company and Google, it's competitor down in Mountain View, California, bloggers got curious. Early Wednesday evening, The Wall Street Journal's Tom Gara wondered, 'Did Google Snitch?' According to a Financial Times report published a few minutes later, the answer is yes."

New submitter FoolishBluntman sends this quote from CNN: "An unmanned drone came within 200 feet of a commercial jet over New York, triggering an FBI appeal to the public for any information about the unusual and potentially dangerous incident. The crew of Alitalia Flight 608 approaching John F. Kennedy airport on Monday reported the sighting. 'We saw a drone, a drone aircraft,' the pilot can be heard telling air traffic controllers on radio calls captured by the website LiveATC.net. ... The unmanned aircraft, described by the FBI as black and no more than three feet wide with four propellers, came within 200 feet of the Boeing jetliner. The FBI said it was looking to identify and locate the aircraft and its operator. A source with knowledge of the incident says investigators interviewed the pilot and others on the Alitalia plane."

An anonymous reader writes "Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks stopping extinction-level meteor hits: '...Here in America, we're really good at blowing stuff up and less good at knowing where the pieces land, you know...So, people who have studied the problem generally – and I'm in this camp – see a deflection scenario is more sound and more controllable. So if this is the asteroid and it's sort of headed toward us, one way is you send up a space ship and they'll both feel each other. And the space ship hovers. And they'll both feel each other's gravity. And they want to sort of drift toward one another. But you don't let that happen. You set off little retro rockets that prevent it. And the act of doing so slowly tugs the asteroid into a new orbit.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Dozens of fans attending a NASCAR race at Daytona Speedway were injured when a crash during the last lap triggered a chain reaction, culminating in the front section of Kyle Larson's car ricocheting into the fence in front of the stands (Larson escaped injury). While the footage accompanying the article is dramatic enough, an even more riveting clip showing the chaotic scene in the stands from up close was posted on YouTube, but was taken down after NASCAR claimed it violated their copyright . YouTube has since restored the fan's video. A NASCAR spokesman has issued a clarification, saying that the takedown request was done out of respect for those injured. The race was an opening act for the main event, the Daytona 500, which officials say will proceed as scheduled. 'With the fence being prepared tonight to our safety protocols, we expect to go racing tomorrow with no changes,' Speedway President Joie Chitwood told CNN."

Hugh Pickens writes "The rules for papal elections are steeped in tradition. John Paul II last codified them in 1996, and Benedict XVI left the rules largely untouched. The 'Universi Dominici Gregis on the Vacancy of the Apostolic See and the Election of the Roman Pontiff' is surprisingly detailed. Now as the College of Cardinals prepares to elect a new pope, security people like Bruce Schneier wonder about the process. How does it work, and just how hard would it be to hack the vote? First, the system is entirely manual, making it immune to the sorts of technological attacks that make modern voting systems so risky. Second, the small group of voters — all of whom know each other — makes it impossible for an outsider to affect the voting in any way. The chapel is cleared and locked before voting. No one is going to dress up as a cardinal and sneak into the Sistine Chapel. In short, the voter verification process is about as good as you're ever going to find. A cardinal can't stuff ballots when he votes. Then the complicated paten-and-chalice ritual ensures that each cardinal votes once — his ballot is visible — and also keeps his hand out of the chalice holding the other votes. Ballots from previous votes are burned, which makes it harder to use one to stuff the ballot box. What are the lessons here? First, open systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder. Every step of the election process is observed by everyone, and everyone knows everyone, which makes it harder for someone to get away with anything. Second, small and simple elections are easier to secure. This kind of process works to elect a pope or a club president, but quickly becomes unwieldy for a large-scale election. And third: When an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple of thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good."

Hugh Pickens writes "William D. Hartung, director of the Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy, writes that although we have been bombarded with tales of woe about the potentially devastating impacts of cutting the Pentagon budget 8% under the sequester, examples of egregious waste and misplaced spending priorities at the Pentagon abound. One need look no further than the department's largest weapons program, the F-35 combat aircraft, which has just been grounded again after a routine inspection revealed a crack on a turbine blade in the jet engine of an F-35 test aircraft in California. Even before it has moved into full-scale production, the plane has already increased in price by 75%, and it has so far failed to meet basic performance standards. By the Pentagon's own admission, building and operating three versions of the F-35 — one for the Air Force, one for the Navy and one for the Marines — will cost more than $1.4 trillion over its lifetime, making it the most expensive weapons program ever undertaken. And in an era in which aerial combat is of diminishing importance and upgraded versions of current generation U.S. aircraft can more than do the job, it is not at all clear that we need to purchase more than 2,400 of these planes. Cutting the two most expensive versions of the F-35 will save over $60 billion in the next decade."