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Out in the Northeast Texas town of Ft. Worth, a company called CircuitCo started making something they called the BeagleBoard -- an open source hardware single-board computer for educators and experimenters. Now, with help and support from Intel, they're making and supporting the Atom-based MinnowBoard, which is also open source, and comes with Angstrom Linux to help experimenters get started with it. David Anders is the Senior Embedded Systems Engineer at CircuitCo. Slashdot's Timothy Lord met David at LinuxCon North America 2013 in New Orleans and made this video of him talking about the recently-released MinnowBoard and the more mature BeagleBoard.

theodp writes "If he'd had his druthers, Bill Gates told a Harvard audience, Ctrl+Alt+Del would never have seen the light of day. However, an IBM keyboard designer didn't want to give Microsoft a single button to start things up, and thus the iconic three-finger-salute was born."

An anonymous reader writes "One of my coworkers recently left the company, and I had to take over most of his responsibilities, including the maintenance and development of a homegrown CRM/ERP system. The system has evolved over more than a decade under the hands of at least four different developers and is based on Microsoft Access. Since I have been assigned this additional role, a day rarely passes without a user yelling for help because some part of the software is failing in strange and unpredictable ways, or some of the entered data has to be corrected manually in some obscure table in one of several database files. Without any exaggeration, some of the Visual Basic source code would be sufficient for several stories on The Daily WTF, and could make a grown man cry. Instead of spending further hours on optimizing this software i would rather like to start from scratch with some existing open-source CRM/ERP system that can be adapted to my companies needs. So far I have looked at and tested several CRM systems, including SugarCRM, vtiger, Feng Office (formerly known as opengoo), Zurmo and Fat Free CRM. Feng Office and Fat Free CRM look really nice and easy to use; the other ones could take a bit less bloat but are fine nevertheless. What software would you choose?"

An anonymous reader writes "One of my coworkers recently left the company, and I had to take over most of his responsibilities, including the maintenance and development of a homegrown CRM/ERP system. The system has evolved over more than a decade under the hands of at least four different developers and is based on Microsoft Access. Since I have been assigned this additional role, a day rarely passes without a user yelling for help because some part of the software is failing in strange and unpredictable ways, or some of the entered data has to be corrected manually in some obscure table in one of several database files. Without any exaggeration, some of the Visual Basic source code would be sufficient for several stories on The Daily WTF, and could make a grown man cry. Instead of spending further hours on optimizing this software i would rather like to start from scratch with some existing open-source CRM/ERP system that can be adapted to my companies needs. So far I have looked at and tested several CRM systems, including SugarCRM, vtiger, Feng Office (formerly known as opengoo), Zurmo and Fat Free CRM. Feng Office and Fat Free CRM look really nice and easy to use; the other ones could take a bit less bloat but are fine nevertheless. What software would you choose?"

An anonymous reader writes "One of my coworkers recently left the company, and I had to take over most of his responsibilities, including the maintenance and development of a homegrown CRM/ERP system. The system has evolved over more than a decade under the hands of at least four different developers and is based on Microsoft Access. Since I have been assigned this additional role, a day rarely passes without a user yelling for help because some part of the software is failing in strange and unpredictable ways, or some of the entered data has to be corrected manually in some obscure table in one of several database files. Without any exaggeration, some of the Visual Basic source code would be sufficient for several stories on The Daily WTF, and could make a grown man cry. Instead of spending further hours on optimizing this software i would rather like to start from scratch with some existing open-source CRM/ERP system that can be adapted to my companies needs. So far I have looked at and tested several CRM systems, including SugarCRM, vtiger, Feng Office (formerly known as opengoo), Zurmo and Fat Free CRM. Feng Office and Fat Free CRM look really nice and easy to use; the other ones could take a bit less bloat but are fine nevertheless. What software would you choose?"

New submitter casab1anca writes "In classic Amazon fashion, without much fanfare, a bunch of new tablets just popped up on their homepage today. The new range, dubbed HDX, is available in the usual 8.9" and 7" versions, with improved hardware and software, but perhaps equally interesting is the revamped 7" Fire HD from last year, which goes for just $139 now." Compared to the Kindle Fire HD, the new models feature a jump in display density (216 PPI to 323 PPI for the 7" and 254 to 339 PPI for the 9"), a switch from a dual-core TI OMAP Cortex-A9 (at 1.2/1.5GHz) to a quad-core 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon, and a bump from 1G to 2G of RAM. On the software side, Android has been upgraded from 4.0 to 4.2.2 and Amazon added a few new features to their applications. Businessweek has an interview with Jeff Bezos running today too (starting a bit down the first page).

Seemingly to inflict more suffering upon himself, Matthew Garrett (lord of getting things to boot using EFI) decided that booting directly into Zork would be cool. Quoting his weblog entry: "So, Frotz seemed like the natural choice when this happened. But despite having a set of functionality that makes it look much more like an OS than a boot environment, UEFI doesn't actually expose a standard C library. The EFI Application Development Kit solves this particular design decision. Porting Frotz ended up involving far more fixing up of Frotz bugs that tripped up -Werror than anything else. One note, though - make sure you include DevShell in the list of required packages at build time, otherwise file i/o will mysteriously fail." Grab the code, assuming you have a copy of Zork (or any other Z-machine game, as long as you name it ZORK1.DAT, I think).

Seemingly to inflict more suffering upon himself, Matthew Garrett (lord of getting things to boot using EFI) decided that booting directly into Zork would be cool. Quoting his weblog entry: "So, Frotz seemed like the natural choice when this happened. But despite having a set of functionality that makes it look much more like an OS than a boot environment, UEFI doesn't actually expose a standard C library. The EFI Application Development Kit solves this particular design decision. Porting Frotz ended up involving far more fixing up of Frotz bugs that tripped up -Werror than anything else. One note, though - make sure you include DevShell in the list of required packages at build time, otherwise file i/o will mysteriously fail." Grab the code, assuming you have a copy of Zork (or any other Z-machine game, as long as you name it ZORK1.DAT, I think).

necro81 writes "Hyperlinks are not forever. Link rot occurs when a source you've linked to no longer exists — or worse, exists in a different state than when the link was originally made. Even permalinks aren't necessarily permanent if a domain goes silent or switches ownership. According to new research from Harvard Law, some 49% of hyperlinks in Supreme Court documents no longer point to the correct original content. A second study on link rot from Yale stresses that for the Court footnotes, citations, parenthetical asides, and historical context mean as much as the text of an opinion itself, which makes link rot a threat to future scholarship."

Bennett Haselton writes: "While nothing can really 'prepare' you for your first time at Burning Man, there are a few simple steps that can eliminate a lot of the stress. Unfortunately it can be hard to get information out of the 10-year veterans about how to do things the easy way (some of them probably view the 'easy way' as 'ruining the whole point'). So here's some advice instead from someone who just got back from their first time, and who likes to take the path of least resistance." Keep reading for the rest of Bennett's Burning Man advice.

If you get nothing else out of this article:

• You can fly to Reno Airport and take the Burner Express shuttle to Burning Man, instead of driving.

• You can rent a bike from one of the other camps at Burning Man rather than bringing one yourself. (Bringing one might be the easier option if you're driving there, but not if you're flying.)

• You can pay dues to a camp that will provide food, water, camping space, a place to store your trash (if you didn't know, there are no communal trash dumpsters at Burning Man), sometimes electricity, and sometimes access to a shower, rather than trying to arrange for all of those things yourself.

• If you just need space for one person to sleep, you can buy and bring a single-occupancy tent. You don't need to build a home-made shade structure out of PVC and tarp.

• If you have lower-than-average heat tolerance, buy ice from the ice vendors to make your own ice water, and carry a water spray bottle.

These points should be taken in conjunction with a more comprehensive guide to preparing and packing; I'm not writing a full guide to getting ready for Burning Man. These just happen to be the points where I wasted the most time going down the wrong path during preparation, taking advice too literally from the BurningMan.com website and/or grizzled veterans who thought that you honor the event's heritage by doing things the hard way, before realizing there was a much easier option. (I would have liked it, for example, if the Burning Man website had told me you can just rent a bike once you get there, instead of pointing me to a long list of other options that are much more hassle.)

Generally speaking, for more details on how to prepare, you should talk to someone who has been before -- but it's has to be someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously and will give genuinely usable advice. We all know people who give you the kind of advice that you can actually use because it closely corresponds with what people actually do; and we also all know people who give you the kind of advice designed to "make a man out of you" (regardless of gender) by steering you through an ordeal that will make you appreciate how hard they had to work, but which may not actually be useful. Burning Man attracts a disproportionate number of people from the second category, but you need to find and talk to someone from the first group.

In particular, one lesson learned the hard way: Do not ask a male Burning Man veteran how to do something, in front of a girl that they might be trying to have sex with later. Because you'll get an answer designed to impress her, not to help you -- something along the lines of hunting your own deer with a crossbow and then using the bones to construct a tent frame across which you stretch the fresh deer skin for shelter.

All right, I'm exaggerating, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that the first three people I asked about what kind of tent and shade structure I needed to bring, all of them suggested following directions from the Internet about how to build your own from PVC pipe and tarp from Home Depot, or how to build something called a Hexayurt. (Seriously, the Hexayurt sounds like an honest-to-God brilliant idea, but is kind of overkill, and realistically eliminated as an option if you're flying to Burning Man.) Really, you can get buy with a storebought tent.

A few other meta-points about how I got this information:

• I'm sure some people think that making it "easy" for people to survive at Burning Man will ruin it for the veterans, but I think that the less time you have to worry about practical details (such as your week's food supply running low or your home-made tent blowing over in the wind), the more time you can spend actually participating. I'm writing this because I had a good time, and I'd like to make it easier for other people to go, and once they get there, to have more time to contribute using whatever special skill they happened to bring with them.

• I'm erring on the side of paying a little bit more money for a little bit less hassle.

• Notwithstanding the foregoing, I consider these fallback options which cost a little more money but are guaranteed to work -- for example, pre-paying to rent a bicycle at the event. If you know someone who can bring a bicycle for you in their truck, great; but you have to find someone who is driving there, who has room in their truck, who is willing to do you a favor or let you reimburse them, who is not going to flake out and sell their ticket at the last minute, etc. I've always found that when you are looking for cheaper alternatives, it's a lot less stressful if you have a more expensive option you can fall back on, that you know will definitely work if the cheaper options fall through.

So, back to my list:

You can fly to Reno Airport and take the Burner Express shuttle to Burning Man, instead of driving.

Now I did say that most of my "simplifying strategies" were hard to find through the official channels, but this is an exception to that general rule, in that this option actually is promoted prominently on the BurningMan.com website, not least because the Burner Express shuttle service is operated by the corporation that runs Burning Man. The Burner Express shuttle costs $60 each way and runs from the Reno Airport to Burning Man, allowing you to get from the airport to the event without having to rent a car or coordinate a ride. That might sound expensive if you were planning to rideshare from the airport for free, but you also get to bypass a five-hour line of cars waiting to get in to Burning Man through the entrance gate, and bypass another five-hour line again on the way out. That works out to paying about $12 an hour to avoid sitting in a line full of hot cars, which sounds worth it to me. (There is also a Burner Express shuttle that runs from San Francisco to Burning Man.)

The major constraint that this creates is that you have to fit everything you're bringing into two suitcases per person, which is the maximum allowed by Burner Express, unless you pay extra to bring a third suitcase. (That's still plenty of space, but it does rule out things like the hexayurt.) You can use the extra-large luggage allowance to pay to bring a bicycle on the Burner Express bus, but that means you have to somehow get your hands on a bicycle at the beginning of the bus ride. That's not easy, since you would either have to leave Reno Airport, rent a bike somewhere in the city, and bring it back to the airport before the bus leaves -- or else fly with your own bike on the plane to Reno Airport, which is expensive. Which leads to the next simplifying strategy:

You can rent a bike from one of the other camps at Burning Man rather than bringing one yourself.

I rented mine from Playa Bike Repair camp for $200. If I'd reserved it earlier it would have been $150. (I don't know how many camps there are that rent bicycles to burners, but Hammer and Cyclery is at least one other one.)

This was the one point on which I wished the BurningMan.com website had pointed me in the right direction and saved me a lot of aggravating time chasing dead ends, since their website has three separate pages about bikes at Burning Man -- what kind to bring, where to get them, how to transport them, how to return them -- without mentioning the option of renting them from other camps. (This seems like such a big omission, that it made me wonder if part of BurningMan.com shouldn't be organized as a wiki, so that users can submit edits if the organization doesn't have time to maintain it. A link to the bike rental camps, is exactly the kind of thing that probably would have been added to a page about "bicycles at Burning Man", if it had been wikified.)

The Burning Man website does link to places you can rent a bike in Reno -- some of which are much cheaper than the $200 to rent from Playa Bike Repair -- but they were all booked out by the time I started looking a few weeks before the event. Also, if you're flying in to Reno and renting a bike from a shop there, you'd have to figure out how, after you arrive at the airport, you're going to go and pick up the bike to bring it back to the airport before the Burner Express bus leaves. All more reasons why I figured a bike rental camp was much simpler.

You do have to pre-arrange and pre-pay for a rental from a bike rental camp. Playa Bike Repair had no walk-up rentals available at the event, and I doubt the other bike rental camps would either, since they have to know in advance how many bikes to bring with them, based on reservations.

And speaking of Playa Bike Repair camp --

You can pay dues to a camp that will provide food, water, camping space, a place to store your trash (if you didn't know, there are no communal trash dumpsters at Burning Man), and sometimes access to a shower, rather than trying to arrange for all of those things yourself.

"Camps" at Burning Man are groups of campers who often pool their resources so that, for example, one person can drive in with a truck carrying a week's worth of food for everyone, instead of everyone bringing in their own food. Some camps have consisted of the same group of friends for many years and have completely closed their membership, so that even close friends of the existing members can't join. Others outright sell camp memberships to the general public. (My camp was in the middle of the open-ness spectrum; it wasn't open to the public, but two of the campers were guys that I had met a few times, so I got in by paying $200 and doing a share of the camp chores.)

One Burning Man participant, who had done more research than I did on the types of camp memberships that were open to the public, said that they varied widely in the value they offered for the dollar -- some charged up to $300 for almost nothing, while others charged under $100 for everything including food, water, and showers. He said that in order to find a suitable camp, he wrote up a "Burner Resume" describing his skills, and contacted various camps while putting out a request on the Burning Man forums. You might find some sweet deals that way, expanding your options beyond those camps which straightforwardly sell memberships to the public through a shopping cart interface right on their website.

Playa Bike Repair is in fact one camp that sells public memberships and gives you a discount on your loaner bike if you camp with them. (But read the fine print; they also ask you to work four 4-hour shifts (16 hours total) for the camp during the week.)

I can't vouch for any specific camp that has open membership; I'm just saying that as a general strategy, it's probably easier to pay money into a camp that will take care of these details for you, rather than worrying about everything yourself.

If you just need space for one person to sleep, all you need is a single-occupancy tent.

Originally, after reading the Burning Man Survival Guide for 2013, I was under the impression that you needed to bring a shade structure to the desert in addition to your tent. Basically, they recommend a tent to protect you from the elements, and then a separate layer on top of that to cast a shadow over the tent, to prevent overheating. (Obviously, the opaque fabric of the tent already creates "shade" inside, but if the tent is directly in the sun, the air trapped inside the tent will heat up like an oven. So you need a second layer above the tent, to create shade while still allowing the air to circulate between the roof of the tent chamber, and whatever is above it casting the shadow.) And this is where I got a lot of Bear Grylls types telling me how to build my own shade structure out of PVC pipe and tarp.

It's probably simpler than that. Basically:

• If you're sleeping in a single-occupancy tent and you won't be sleeping in it during the day, a regular camping tent is fine.

• On the other hand, if you might be sleeping or resting in your tent during the day, you'll likely want a tent that has a built-in shade canopy, or a separate shade structure.

• In either case, you should anchor it to the ground using rebar, rather than the stakes that come with the tent or the shade structure.

• But, in neither case do you need to build anything yourself out of PVC and tarp, unless you really want to save money. You can get tents and shade structures at REI or Sports Authority, and I think it's worth it to have one more thing that is built by professionals and that much less likely to have something go wrong with it.

Now here's where I may have gotten away with an easy approach because of my particular circumstances. Originally I brought a 12-foot-square shade structure that I had planned to set up over my tent. But I either caught a cold on the plane to Reno, or was hit with dust allergies as soon as I got to Burning Man (I still don't know which), so I was taking heavy doses of Benadryl every evening. And that meant I was usually out cold by midnight, and that meant I was usually up by 8 am the next morning and well out of my tent before the sun started heating up the trapped air inside. So I didn't even need my shade structure and never set it up.

On the other hand, if you plan on sleeping or resting in your tent during in the day, then you probably need shade. You can buy tents which have an extra layer of fabric separate from the roof of the tent, to let the air circulate while still providing shade, or you can get a separate shade structure. Most experienced burners say that an EZ-UP shade structure is not suitable because it can be too flimsy and likely to blow away in high winds; a burner in your city can help you find a sturdier shade structure that you can buy.

Remember, a flimsy tent or shade structure might merely be crumpled by high winds, so it's up to you if you want to take that chance. A tent or shade structure that is improperly secured, however, creates a hazard to other people, so it's your obligation to other burners to make sure your tent or shade structure stays attached to the ground, whether it crumples or not. That's why you should use rebar instead of the standard stakes which come with the tent (which are too short to anchor securely in the desert sand), and then cover the cops of the rebar with bottlecaps or tennis balls so that people won't impale themselves if they trip and fall onto one of the stakes.

One final note on that: I didn't set up my shade structure, but I did bring an electric fan that I turned on full blast to circulate the air in and out of my tent the one morning that I did sleep in for a bit. If your camp provides electricity to plug in a fan, that may work just a well for you, and be a lot simpler than a separate shade structure.

If you have lower-than-average heat tolerance, buy ice from the ice vendors to make your own ice water, and carry a water spray bottle.

Bags of ice are one of the few things that are sold at Burning Man, by the event organizers. Most days I would go to the ice vendors and buy my own 10-lb bag of crushed ice, bike back to the camp with it in my backpack, and empty it into my plastic water jugs. This got me only about two hours' worth of ice-cold water, before the ice was all melted -- but during the two hottest hours in the middle of the day, I considered it to be well worth it. On my definite packing list for next year: a cooler (small enough to fit in a suitcase) which I can use to store my own private ice supply and make it last all day, and a thermos to carry around ice water and keep it cold for as long as possible. (Almost everyone I saw was drinking lukewarm water from a camelbak or simple water bottle instead of a thermos; I'd gladly spend the extra 10 seconds screwing and unscrewing the thermos, to get ice-cold water instead of room-temperature. Besides, for hydration purposes, cold water is better for you.)

A water spray bottle, besides being a good way to deal with the heat, can also function as an icebreaker -- I didn't bring my own spray bottle, but many times I walked past strangers who said Hi and gave me a nice misting with water, sometimes scented with a flavor like lavender. Surprisingly, given how refreshing the spray bottles are, most people seemed not to have one, so everyone was always happy to see the person who had the spray bottle. Everyone at Burning Man is expected to contribute one way or another, and if you don't know how to juggle flaming chainsaws and you don't have boobs that you can walk around exposing everywhere, carrying around a bottle to mist people with is quite sufficient.

Of course spray bottles are not the only resource you can share for the benefit of the community. Next to every row of porta-potties distributed throughout the city at Burning Man, there was a wooden stake in the ground with two with two hand sanitizer dispensers attached to it, but the dispensers were almost always empty when I tried to use them, so I started carrying around my own hand sanitizer bottle. On my last morning there, since my personal hand sanitizer bottle was still 80% full, and since I had just spent a week snarfing up every piece of free food that was offered to me, I figured the least I could do was to stand by the hand sanitizer post for a few minutes and offer free hand sanitizer to anyone who wanted it, after they discovered that the official dispensers were empty. Nice way to give back to the community and say Hi to a few people, although not a great way to pick up the ladies since you're meeting them in the context of helping them wipe off bacteria from their own shit. Have fun!

Bennett Haselton writes: "While nothing can really 'prepare' you for your first time at Burning Man, there are a few simple steps that can eliminate a lot of the stress. Unfortunately it can be hard to get information out of the 10-year veterans about how to do things the easy way (some of them probably view the 'easy way' as 'ruining the whole point'). So here's some advice instead from someone who just got back from their first time, and who likes to take the path of least resistance." Keep reading for the rest of Bennett's Burning Man advice.

If you get nothing else out of this article:

• You can fly to Reno Airport and take the Burner Express shuttle to Burning Man, instead of driving.

• You can rent a bike from one of the other camps at Burning Man rather than bringing one yourself. (Bringing one might be the easier option if you're driving there, but not if you're flying.)

• You can pay dues to a camp that will provide food, water, camping space, a place to store your trash (if you didn't know, there are no communal trash dumpsters at Burning Man), sometimes electricity, and sometimes access to a shower, rather than trying to arrange for all of those things yourself.

• If you just need space for one person to sleep, you can buy and bring a single-occupancy tent. You don't need to build a home-made shade structure out of PVC and tarp.

• If you have lower-than-average heat tolerance, buy ice from the ice vendors to make your own ice water, and carry a water spray bottle.

These points should be taken in conjunction with a more comprehensive guide to preparing and packing; I'm not writing a full guide to getting ready for Burning Man. These just happen to be the points where I wasted the most time going down the wrong path during preparation, taking advice too literally from the BurningMan.com website and/or grizzled veterans who thought that you honor the event's heritage by doing things the hard way, before realizing there was a much easier option. (I would have liked it, for example, if the Burning Man website had told me you can just rent a bike once you get there, instead of pointing me to a long list of other options that are much more hassle.)

Generally speaking, for more details on how to prepare, you should talk to someone who has been before -- but it's has to be someone who doesn't take themselves too seriously and will give genuinely usable advice. We all know people who give you the kind of advice that you can actually use because it closely corresponds with what people actually do; and we also all know people who give you the kind of advice designed to "make a man out of you" (regardless of gender) by steering you through an ordeal that will make you appreciate how hard they had to work, but which may not actually be useful. Burning Man attracts a disproportionate number of people from the second category, but you need to find and talk to someone from the first group.

In particular, one lesson learned the hard way: Do not ask a male Burning Man veteran how to do something, in front of a girl that they might be trying to have sex with later. Because you'll get an answer designed to impress her, not to help you -- something along the lines of hunting your own deer with a crossbow and then using the bones to construct a tent frame across which you stretch the fresh deer skin for shelter.

All right, I'm exaggerating, but I'm not exaggerating when I say that the first three people I asked about what kind of tent and shade structure I needed to bring, all of them suggested following directions from the Internet about how to build your own from PVC pipe and tarp from Home Depot, or how to build something called a Hexayurt. (Seriously, the Hexayurt sounds like an honest-to-God brilliant idea, but is kind of overkill, and realistically eliminated as an option if you're flying to Burning Man.) Really, you can get buy with a storebought tent.

A few other meta-points about how I got this information:

• I'm sure some people think that making it "easy" for people to survive at Burning Man will ruin it for the veterans, but I think that the less time you have to worry about practical details (such as your week's food supply running low or your home-made tent blowing over in the wind), the more time you can spend actually participating. I'm writing this because I had a good time, and I'd like to make it easier for other people to go, and once they get there, to have more time to contribute using whatever special skill they happened to bring with them.

• I'm erring on the side of paying a little bit more money for a little bit less hassle.

• Notwithstanding the foregoing, I consider these fallback options which cost a little more money but are guaranteed to work -- for example, pre-paying to rent a bicycle at the event. If you know someone who can bring a bicycle for you in their truck, great; but you have to find someone who is driving there, who has room in their truck, who is willing to do you a favor or let you reimburse them, who is not going to flake out and sell their ticket at the last minute, etc. I've always found that when you are looking for cheaper alternatives, it's a lot less stressful if you have a more expensive option you can fall back on, that you know will definitely work if the cheaper options fall through.

So, back to my list:

You can fly to Reno Airport and take the Burner Express shuttle to Burning Man, instead of driving.

Now I did say that most of my "simplifying strategies" were hard to find through the official channels, but this is an exception to that general rule, in that this option actually is promoted prominently on the BurningMan.com website, not least because the Burner Express shuttle service is operated by the corporation that runs Burning Man. The Burner Express shuttle costs $60 each way and runs from the Reno Airport to Burning Man, allowing you to get from the airport to the event without having to rent a car or coordinate a ride. That might sound expensive if you were planning to rideshare from the airport for free, but you also get to bypass a five-hour line of cars waiting to get in to Burning Man through the entrance gate, and bypass another five-hour line again on the way out. That works out to paying about $12 an hour to avoid sitting in a line full of hot cars, which sounds worth it to me. (There is also a Burner Express shuttle that runs from San Francisco to Burning Man.)

The major constraint that this creates is that you have to fit everything you're bringing into two suitcases per person, which is the maximum allowed by Burner Express, unless you pay extra to bring a third suitcase. (That's still plenty of space, but it does rule out things like the hexayurt.) You can use the extra-large luggage allowance to pay to bring a bicycle on the Burner Express bus, but that means you have to somehow get your hands on a bicycle at the beginning of the bus ride. That's not easy, since you would either have to leave Reno Airport, rent a bike somewhere in the city, and bring it back to the airport before the bus leaves -- or else fly with your own bike on the plane to Reno Airport, which is expensive. Which leads to the next simplifying strategy:

You can rent a bike from one of the other camps at Burning Man rather than bringing one yourself.

I rented mine from Playa Bike Repair camp for $200. If I'd reserved it earlier it would have been $150. (I don't know how many camps there are that rent bicycles to burners, but Hammer and Cyclery is at least one other one.)

This was the one point on which I wished the BurningMan.com website had pointed me in the right direction and saved me a lot of aggravating time chasing dead ends, since their website has three separate pages about bikes at Burning Man -- what kind to bring, where to get them, how to transport them, how to return them -- without mentioning the option of renting them from other camps. (This seems like such a big omission, that it made me wonder if part of BurningMan.com shouldn't be organized as a wiki, so that users can submit edits if the organization doesn't have time to maintain it. A link to the bike rental camps, is exactly the kind of thing that probably would have been added to a page about "bicycles at Burning Man", if it had been wikified.)

The Burning Man website does link to places you can rent a bike in Reno -- some of which are much cheaper than the $200 to rent from Playa Bike Repair -- but they were all booked out by the time I started looking a few weeks before the event. Also, if you're flying in to Reno and renting a bike from a shop there, you'd have to figure out how, after you arrive at the airport, you're going to go and pick up the bike to bring it back to the airport before the Burner Express bus leaves. All more reasons why I figured a bike rental camp was much simpler.

You do have to pre-arrange and pre-pay for a rental from a bike rental camp. Playa Bike Repair had no walk-up rentals available at the event, and I doubt the other bike rental camps would either, since they have to know in advance how many bikes to bring with them, based on reservations.

And speaking of Playa Bike Repair camp --

You can pay dues to a camp that will provide food, water, camping space, a place to store your trash (if you didn't know, there are no communal trash dumpsters at Burning Man), and sometimes access to a shower, rather than trying to arrange for all of those things yourself.

"Camps" at Burning Man are groups of campers who often pool their resources so that, for example, one person can drive in with a truck carrying a week's worth of food for everyone, instead of everyone bringing in their own food. Some camps have consisted of the same group of friends for many years and have completely closed their membership, so that even close friends of the existing members can't join. Others outright sell camp memberships to the general public. (My camp was in the middle of the open-ness spectrum; it wasn't open to the public, but two of the campers were guys that I had met a few times, so I got in by paying $200 and doing a share of the camp chores.)

One Burning Man participant, who had done more research than I did on the types of camp memberships that were open to the public, said that they varied widely in the value they offered for the dollar -- some charged up to $300 for almost nothing, while others charged under $100 for everything including food, water, and showers. He said that in order to find a suitable camp, he wrote up a "Burner Resume" describing his skills, and contacted various camps while putting out a request on the Burning Man forums. You might find some sweet deals that way, expanding your options beyond those camps which straightforwardly sell memberships to the public through a shopping cart interface right on their website.

Playa Bike Repair is in fact one camp that sells public memberships and gives you a discount on your loaner bike if you camp with them. (But read the fine print; they also ask you to work four 4-hour shifts (16 hours total) for the camp during the week.)

I can't vouch for any specific camp that has open membership; I'm just saying that as a general strategy, it's probably easier to pay money into a camp that will take care of these details for you, rather than worrying about everything yourself.

If you just need space for one person to sleep, all you need is a single-occupancy tent.

Originally, after reading the Burning Man Survival Guide for 2013, I was under the impression that you needed to bring a shade structure to the desert in addition to your tent. Basically, they recommend a tent to protect you from the elements, and then a separate layer on top of that to cast a shadow over the tent, to prevent overheating. (Obviously, the opaque fabric of the tent already creates "shade" inside, but if the tent is directly in the sun, the air trapped inside the tent will heat up like an oven. So you need a second layer above the tent, to create shade while still allowing the air to circulate between the roof of the tent chamber, and whatever is above it casting the shadow.) And this is where I got a lot of Bear Grylls types telling me how to build my own shade structure out of PVC pipe and tarp.

It's probably simpler than that. Basically:

• If you're sleeping in a single-occupancy tent and you won't be sleeping in it during the day, a regular camping tent is fine.

• On the other hand, if you might be sleeping or resting in your tent during the day, you'll likely want a tent that has a built-in shade canopy, or a separate shade structure.

• In either case, you should anchor it to the ground using rebar, rather than the stakes that come with the tent or the shade structure.

• But, in neither case do you need to build anything yourself out of PVC and tarp, unless you really want to save money. You can get tents and shade structures at REI or Sports Authority, and I think it's worth it to have one more thing that is built by professionals and that much less likely to have something go wrong with it.

Now here's where I may have gotten away with an easy approach because of my particular circumstances. Originally I brought a 12-foot-square shade structure that I had planned to set up over my tent. But I either caught a cold on the plane to Reno, or was hit with dust allergies as soon as I got to Burning Man (I still don't know which), so I was taking heavy doses of Benadryl every evening. And that meant I was usually out cold by midnight, and that meant I was usually up by 8 am the next morning and well out of my tent before the sun started heating up the trapped air inside. So I didn't even need my shade structure and never set it up.

On the other hand, if you plan on sleeping or resting in your tent during in the day, then you probably need shade. You can buy tents which have an extra layer of fabric separate from the roof of the tent, to let the air circulate while still providing shade, or you can get a separate shade structure. Most experienced burners say that an EZ-UP shade structure is not suitable because it can be too flimsy and likely to blow away in high winds; a burner in your city can help you find a sturdier shade structure that you can buy.

Remember, a flimsy tent or shade structure might merely be crumpled by high winds, so it's up to you if you want to take that chance. A tent or shade structure that is improperly secured, however, creates a hazard to other people, so it's your obligation to other burners to make sure your tent or shade structure stays attached to the ground, whether it crumples or not. That's why you should use rebar instead of the standard stakes which come with the tent (which are too short to anchor securely in the desert sand), and then cover the cops of the rebar with bottlecaps or tennis balls so that people won't impale themselves if they trip and fall onto one of the stakes.

One final note on that: I didn't set up my shade structure, but I did bring an electric fan that I turned on full blast to circulate the air in and out of my tent the one morning that I did sleep in for a bit. If your camp provides electricity to plug in a fan, that may work just a well for you, and be a lot simpler than a separate shade structure.

If you have lower-than-average heat tolerance, buy ice from the ice vendors to make your own ice water, and carry a water spray bottle.

Bags of ice are one of the few things that are sold at Burning Man, by the event organizers. Most days I would go to the ice vendors and buy my own 10-lb bag of crushed ice, bike back to the camp with it in my backpack, and empty it into my plastic water jugs. This got me only about two hours' worth of ice-cold water, before the ice was all melted -- but during the two hottest hours in the middle of the day, I considered it to be well worth it. On my definite packing list for next year: a cooler (small enough to fit in a suitcase) which I can use to store my own private ice supply and make it last all day, and a thermos to carry around ice water and keep it cold for as long as possible. (Almost everyone I saw was drinking lukewarm water from a camelbak or simple water bottle instead of a thermos; I'd gladly spend the extra 10 seconds screwing and unscrewing the thermos, to get ice-cold water instead of room-temperature. Besides, for hydration purposes, cold water is better for you.)

A water spray bottle, besides being a good way to deal with the heat, can also function as an icebreaker -- I didn't bring my own spray bottle, but many times I walked past strangers who said Hi and gave me a nice misting with water, sometimes scented with a flavor like lavender. Surprisingly, given how refreshing the spray bottles are, most people seemed not to have one, so everyone was always happy to see the person who had the spray bottle. Everyone at Burning Man is expected to contribute one way or another, and if you don't know how to juggle flaming chainsaws and you don't have boobs that you can walk around exposing everywhere, carrying around a bottle to mist people with is quite sufficient.

Of course spray bottles are not the only resource you can share for the benefit of the community. Next to every row of porta-potties distributed throughout the city at Burning Man, there was a wooden stake in the ground with two with two hand sanitizer dispensers attached to it, but the dispensers were almost always empty when I tried to use them, so I started carrying around my own hand sanitizer bottle. On my last morning there, since my personal hand sanitizer bottle was still 80% full, and since I had just spent a week snarfing up every piece of free food that was offered to me, I figured the least I could do was to stand by the hand sanitizer post for a few minutes and offer free hand sanitizer to anyone who wanted it, after they discovered that the official dispensers were empty. Nice way to give back to the community and say Hi to a few people, although not a great way to pick up the ladies since you're meeting them in the context of helping them wipe off bacteria from their own shit. Have fun!

KentuckyFC writes "Many types of small spider release threads into the air which then lift and carry them significant distances. Biologists have found them at altitudes of up to 4 km. The conventional thinking is that the threads catch thermal air currents which then carry them away but this does not explain how spiders perform their trick even when there is little or no wind. Now one physicist says the explanation is the atmosphere's natural electric field which has an average downward-pointing magnitude of 120 Volts per metre. He calculates that a strand of silk need only gain a negative charge of around 30 nanoCoulombs to lift a spider. That explains how the spiders take off on windless days, how they reach such great heights and how several strands can lift heavier spiders of up to 100 milligrams."

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Tom Simonite reports at MIT Technology News that a new research group within Facebook is working on an emerging and powerful approach to artificial intelligence known as deep learning, which uses simulated networks of brain cells to process data. Applying this method to data shared on Facebook could allow for novel features, and perhaps boost the company's ad targeting. Deep learning has shown already potential to enable software to do things such as work out the emotions or events described in text even if they aren't explicitly referenced, recognize objects in photos, and make sophisticated predictions about people's likely future behavior. Facebook's chief technology officer, Mike Schroepfer, says that one obvious place to use deep learning is to improve the news feed, the personalized list of recent updates he calls Facebook's 'killer app.' Facebook already uses conventional machine learning techniques to prune the 1,500 updates that average Facebook users could possibly see down to 30 to 60 that are judged to be most likely to be important to them. 'The data set is increasing in size, people are getting more friends, and with the advent of mobile, people are online more frequently,' says Schroepfer. 'It's not that I look at my news feed once at the end of the day; I constantly pull out my phone while I'm waiting for my friend, or I'm at the coffee shop. We have five minutes to really delight you.'"

An anonymous reader writes "British secret service GCHQ is willing to penetrate the networks of telecoms firms to subsequently use them for spying. German magazine DER SPIEGEL reports GCHQ hacked the machines of Belcacom staff to later use their GRX routers for targeted man-in-the-middle-attacks on people's phones. Belgacom is the biggest telecom in Belgium, and is partly state-owned. DER SPIEGEL publishes three original slides from a GCHQ presentation. They specifically mention targeting 'engineers/systems administrators.'"

MTorrice writes "The same wells that energy companies drill to extract natural gas from shale formations could become repositories to store large quantities of carbon dioxide. A new computer model suggests that wells in the Marcellus shale, a 600-sq-mile formation in the northeastern U.S. that is a hotbed for gas extraction, could store half the CO2 emitted by the country's power plants from now until 2030."

Twelve years ago, Slashdot interviewed Brad Kuhn in his then-role as VP of the Free Software Foundation. Kuhn is still involved with the FSF, but has gone on, after a stint as CTO for the Software Freedom Law Center, to concentrate his efforts as President, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The Conservancy offers organization and support to copylefted and permissively licensed software, and Brad explains in the video below what that entails, as well as where the Conservancy fits in the expanding landscape of organizations that help protect the rights of software developers. Brad makes no bones about wishing for a world where all software is Free software, but that's a big-picture goal. In the meantime, there's a lot of work to go around, just making sure that developers' chosen licenses are intelligently selected, and properly respected.

First time accepted submitter Guy From V writes "Charles Carreon, zany lawyer and poster-child for the Streisand Effect (sorry Babs) for his lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Mattew Innman last year in his original role as legal counsel for Funnyjunk, as reported by ArsTechnica, seems to have finally called it quits. In other news, the River Styx has reportedly dropped below 32 degrees Fahrenheit."

First time accepted submitter Guy From V writes "Charles Carreon, zany lawyer and poster-child for the Streisand Effect (sorry Babs) for his lawsuit against The Oatmeal creator Mattew Innman last year in his original role as legal counsel for Funnyjunk, as reported by ArsTechnica, seems to have finally called it quits. In other news, the River Styx has reportedly dropped below 32 degrees Fahrenheit."

An anonymous reader writes "The openSUSE Linux distribution looks like it may be the first major Linux distribution to ship the Btrfs file-system by default. The openSUSE 13.1 release is due out in November and is still using EXT4 by default, but after that the developers are looking at having openSUSE using Btrfs by default on new installations. The Btrfs features to be enabled would be the ones the developers feel are data-safe."

First time accepted submitter trickstyhobbit writes "Former Nintendo president and majority stockholder Hiroshi Yamauchi has died. He was president of the company for over 50 years and saw the development of the NES, SNES, Nintendo 64, and GameCube among other devices." His career at Nintendo is worth reading about.

Google has announced the formation of a new company called Calico, which aims to promote health and fight aging. Larry Page said, "That’s a lot different from what Google does today. And you’re right. But as we explained in our first letter to shareholders, there’s tremendous potential for technology more generally to improve people’s lives. So don’t be surprised if we invest in projects that seem strange or speculative compared with our existing Internet businesses." He expanded upon this in an interview with Time: "I'm not proposing that we spend all of our money on those kinds of speculative things. But we should be spending a commensurate amount with what normal types of companies spend on research and development, and spend it on things that are a little more long-term and a little more ambitious than people normally would. More like moon shots." The new company's CEO will be Arthur Levinson, who is currently the chairman of Apple and biotech company Genentech. Apple CEO Tim Cook said, "For too many of our friends and family, life has been cut short or the quality of their life is too often lacking. Art is one of the crazy ones who thinks it doesn't have to be this way."

Brad McCredie is an IBM VP, and head of IBM's Power Systems development. (He's also one of the mere few hundred IBM Fellows that have been named in the past 50 years.) He pointed out in his keynote at this year's LinuxCon gathering that IBM has been adopting and supporting Linux (and associated software, like Apache) in various ways for the past decade and a half. Famously, the company promised to support Linux to the tune of a billion dollars in 2001, and McCredie renewed the promise on Tuesday. I sat down to talk with him about just how they'll go about spending the next billion dollars on Linux development; when a company has more than $200 billion in market capitalization, there are lots of ways to spread it around. Spending on hardware is one way, and McCredie also talked about the recently announced OpenPower consortium, which ties directly into the ongoing Linux push.

Months after a successful test launch of the Antares rocket with a dummy payload, today Orbital Sciences Corp successfully launched their demo cargo mission to the ISS. Their Cygnus resupply craft detached from the second stage and at 11:33 a.m. deployed its solar array. From NASA: "Solar array deployment is complete for Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus spacecraft, now traveling 17,500 mph in Earth's orbit to rendezvous with the International Space Station on Sunday, Sept. 22, for a demonstration resupply mission. The spacecraft will deliver about 1,300 pounds (589 kilograms) of cargo, including food and clothing, to the space station's Expedition 37 crew, who will grapple and attach the capsule using the orbiting laboratory's robotic arm." There's an updates weblog, and some pictures.

Months after a successful test launch of the Antares rocket with a dummy payload, today Orbital Sciences Corp successfully launched their demo cargo mission to the ISS. Their Cygnus resupply craft detached from the second stage and at 11:33 a.m. deployed its solar array. From NASA: "Solar array deployment is complete for Orbital Sciences Corp.'s Cygnus spacecraft, now traveling 17,500 mph in Earth's orbit to rendezvous with the International Space Station on Sunday, Sept. 22, for a demonstration resupply mission. The spacecraft will deliver about 1,300 pounds (589 kilograms) of cargo, including food and clothing, to the space station's Expedition 37 crew, who will grapple and attach the capsule using the orbiting laboratory's robotic arm." There's an updates weblog, and some pictures.

iONiUM writes "Today the new Blackberry Z30 was announced today (release coming in the next 'few weeks'). It has a 4.97" 16:9 screen running at 720x1280. The CPU also got an upgrade, at 1.7Ghz. The news claims that the battery is a 2880maH with up to 25 hours of use. I'm not really convinced this is enough of a differentiation between the Z10 to save Blackberry, and as someone who owns a Z10 and Q10 (but uses an S3 instead), I don't see how this addresses any of the real issues Blackberry is facing, the biggest being a lack of apps."

RocketAcademy writes "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has launched a new program to develop a reusable first-stage launch vehicle. Experimental Spaceplane 1 (XS-1) would be capable of flying 10 times in 10 days, with a small ground crew, reaching speeds of Mach 10, and deploying a small upper stage to place a 3,000-pound satellite into orbit. The XS-1 program is complementary to the Air Force's Boeing X-37, which is a reusable upper stage. The X-37 is currently launched by an expendable Atlas rocket but could be launched by a vehicle derived from XS-1 in the future. Military planners have dreamed of a two-stage, fully reusable Military Spaceplane for several years, but funding has not materialized up to now."

KentuckyFC writes "The banking system is closely regulated and monitored by central banks and other government agencies. But it has become common practice for banks to get around this by doing business in ways that don't show up on conventional balance sheets. This so-called shadow banking system is thought to be huge, but nobody knows exactly how big. Now three econophysicists have discovered that the size distribution of the world's largest financial firms significantly differs from the size distribution of smaller ones or indeed non-financial firms. And they hypothesize that the difference is the result of the hidden transactions that make up the shadow banking system. By this new measure, the shadow banking system has grown dramatically since the financial crisis and was worth over $100 trillion in 2012, significantly more than had been thought and more even than the GDP of the entire planet. Nothing to worry about, then."

Beardydog writes "SkyOS, the commercial, alternative OS created almost entirely by Robert Szeleney, became free (as in beer) sometime last month. Alternative OS enthusiasts can be forgiven for missing it, as the website has been largely derelict, and the forums overrun with spam, since the project was halted in 2009. It's not clear from the announcement whether the ISO available is the traditional build, or the version rebuilt around Linux. The post announcing the free version provides a license name ('public') and registration code that must be entered during setup. While it isn't quite the open-sourcing that most followers hoped for, it's heartening to know SkyOS won't be completely lost in the mists of time." For a blast from the past, check out our old stories about SkyOS.

Slashdot's Timothy Lord is attending LinuxCon in New Orleans this week and writes in with the following. "Valve co-founder and managing director Gabe Newell says in no uncertain terms what the brain trust at Valve thinks: When it comes to actual users, 'Linux is currently insignificant by any metric' (by any metric that matters to game companies, at least, like number of players, minutes played, and — all important — revenue). On these fronts, Linux players are 'typically under 1 percent' of what game companies see. But that's not the upshot. The takeaway is just about the opposite, says Newell: 'The future of gaming is on Linux.' Newell expounded on the present and future of games on Linux in a keynote address at LinuxCon North America, which kicked off today in New Orleans. He described ways Valve is working to improve the landscape for games on Linux, and hinted at new hardware developments from the company in the near future." Keep reading for the rest of Tim's report. Since Valve's 1996 founding, the company has come out with a rash of well-known games including Half-life, Counterstrike, and Portal, for personal computers as well as the console market. In that time, though, Valve, like the rest of the computer world, has gone through structural changes driven by the falling costs of both computers and bandwidth. These, says Newell, have increased the relative value of design and game quality in general, but also marketing and — crucially — distribution paths. That has ramifications throughout the games industry, including the emergence and growth of online delivery for games and updates. (Valve’s own system, Steam, is up to 50 million users by itself; the console infrastructure is even bigger: Sony claimed that many users three years ago). The changes in relative costs have also spurred free to play models and large-scale e-sports. (Large scale is no joke: According to Newell, "At the last tournament we held, we had over a million people watching it simultaneously.")

Newell describes a trend toward end-users being involved, though, not just as spectators, but as content creators. He describes this in fairly sweeping terms: “Games will becomes nodes in a linked economy, where the majority of digital goods and services are user generated.” That sounds a bit grandiose, perhaps, but it’s grounded in numbers. “The Team Fortress community creates 10 times the amount of content [that developers do],” says Newell. While he says Valve has always been happy to compete with other game studios (“we’re a little bit cocky”), “the one entity we wouldn’t ever want to compete with is our own users; they’ve already outstripped us dramatically. It’s not by a little bit; it’s an order of magnitude already.” Broad-based distributed development like that is what open source has been whipping up in the world of software for decades.

Creating games or games content, though, isn’t for the faint of heart: centralized online app stores (Apple’s in particular) “put an enormous number of roadblocks in front of doing that,” including developer approval as well as vetting individual apps and updates to them. In that context, he says, few users have the stubbornness or wherewithal to get through that. A more streamlined system for taking advantage of eater player/developers is needed.

“Several years ago, we thought ‘OK, if our model is correct, we need to help making Linux a good gaming plaform for users and developers.” To that end, Valve makes for a case study in how Linux has been creeping in: the company shipped the first dedicated games server running Linux in 1999. Now, most games servers run Linux (now several hundred thousand — and “probably a million”).

Those game servers are dishing up prodigious loads of data: “Near as we can tell, we’re generating something like 2 to 3 percent of worldwide mobile and land-based IP traffic, and that tends to startle people who don’t realize what a large sea change is going on. Even ignoring game servers, we’ve delivered over an exabyte of data year to date.” (Internally, he says, there’s approximately 20TB of content in a Linux-based version control system. This, says Newell, is true for companies like Bungie, too.)

Impressive as those data-shoveling numbers are, they don’t exactly shout desktop (or living room) success. But steps that Valve (along with other companies) has taken make it easier to swallow the claim. “Several years ago, we thought ‘OK, if our model is correct, we need to help make Linux a good gaming plaform for users and developers.” The first major move, says Newell, was to get a game — a real, graphics-intensive game — going on Linux. The process, though, revealed a “sweater thread” of issues, revealing flaws in in all parts of the stack: faulty drivers, gaps between Linux distributions’ included software, pitfalls in the user experience, and flaws in the company’s Steam tools.

In the course of resolving problems in each of those layers, “The good thing is that if we get a game like Left for Dead running, we’ve probably worked through issues for lots of developers. We’ve definitely solved problems for the Call of Duty team, or Tour of Duty, or whatever. The games aren’t that different; the key thing is to get changes all the way through for users. In February, we shipped [the Linux] Steam client; today -- at least when I got on the plane -- Valve has 198 games running on Linux.“

The bug-fixing and code-developing isn’t just a sporadic effort; the company has “several guys on SDL,” started by current Valve employee Sam Lantinga, and is co-developing a new Linux debugger, in addition to the work they’ve done on the LLVM debugger.

Making Linux a better platform for games is necessary, but may not be sufficient in itself, though. Platforms tend to cluster not just by operating system, but by context: platform, mobile, and console games don’t always play nicely: “As a user, I shoudn’t have to buy new games, or have new friends, or whatever, just because I’m sitting on a couch.” With Linux certainly a more-than-viable software platform for games, but still in the chicken-and-egg world of low user and revenue numbers that discourage spending developer time on Linux end users, Newell says the next step is necessary work on the hardware side of the equation, to smooth the open-source path between the developer and back-end data handling side of the games business to actual end-users.

“One of the things we had to do, is we're staging out the different pieces we think are necessary for staging to make Linux the future of gaming,” said Newell. “Our next step, having done these other pieces, is on the hardware side. There are thermal issues and sound issues, but also a lot of input issues.” He closed with this tease: “Our next step on this is to release some stuff we’ve done on the hardware side. Next week we’re going to be rolling out more information about how we get there, and what are the hardware opportunities we see for getting Linux into the living room."

fermion writes "This weeks 'Who Made That' column in The New York Times concerns the built in pencil eraser. In 1858 Hymen Lipman put a rubber plug into the wood shaft of a pencil. An investor then paid about 2 million in today's dollars for the patent. This investor might have become very rich had the supreme court not ruled that all Lipmen had done was put together two known technologies, so the patent was not valid. The question is where has this need for patents to be innovative gone? After all there is the Amazon one-click patent which, after revision, has been upheld. Microsoft Activesync technology patent seems to simply patent copying information from one place to another. In this modern day do patents promote innovation, or simply protect firms from competition?"

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "John Gever reports at MedPage Today on a new study conducted by researchers from the University of Buffalo, which found that people with more cavities in their teeth are 32 percent less likely to suffer from head and neck cancers. 'To our knowledge, the present study suggests, for the first time, an independent association between dental caries and head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.' The researchers proposed a mechanism for the apparent protective effect: that cariogenic, lactic acid-producing bacteria prompt cell-mediated Th1 immune responses that suppress tumor formation. The team examined records of patients older than 21 seen in the university's dental and maxillofacial prosthetics department from 1999 to 2007, identifying 399 who were newly diagnosed with head and neck squamous cell carcinoma. Assuming that the association between caries and reduced cancer risk is real, the team suggests that one could regard the cariogenic bacteria as beneficial overall, with caries 'a form of collateral damage.' Therefore an appropriate strategy could be to target that effect specifically without aggressively targeting the bacteria. 'Antimicrobial treatment, vaccination, or gene therapy against cariogenic bacteria may lead to more harm than good in the long run.'"

mask.of.sanity writes "Cheap home alarms, door opening systems and wireless mains switches can be bypassed with low-cost and home-made devices that can replicate their infrared signals. Fixed-code radio frequency systems could be attacked using a $20 'toy', or using basic DIY componentry. Quoting: 'Criminals might be able to capture IR signals if they can get a line of sight to when the system is being armed or disarmed. If a criminal knows what type of alarm system you're using then they could do what we did here and reverse it for cloning a remote. A more likely scenario is just to buy a duplicate system and use that remote. Not all IR remotes can be switched from the same system. It depends on whether a code is being transmitted and how many variations of the code and remote exist. In the system described in this post, there is no code, just a carrier signal. If a code is being transmitted, then the Infrared toy can capture it and replay it. So that's your best bet for a criminal looking at a completely unknown remote.'"

First time accepted submitter someSnarkyBastard writes "It has already been widely reported that the NSA has subverted several major encryption standards but I have not seen any mention of how this affects the FIPS 140-2 standard. Can we still trust these cyphers? They have been cleared for use by the US Government for Top-Secret clearance documents; surely the government wouldn't backdoor itself right?...Right?"

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "There is an interesting read at the Atlantic where Laura Dimon writes that mass psychogenic illness, historically known as "mass hysteria"—is making a comeback and it appears that social media is a new vector for its spread. Mass hysteria such as the Salem Witch Trials of 1692-1693, the most widely recognized episode of mass hysteria in history, which ultimately saw the hanging deaths of 20 women, spreads through sight and sound, and historically, one person would have to be in the same room as somebody exhibiting symptoms to be at risk of 'catching' the illness. 'Not anymore,' says Robert Bartholomew, a sociologist who has studied over 600 cases of mass hysteria dating back to 1566, noting that social media — 'extensions of our eyes and ears' — speeds and extends the reach of mass hysteria. 'Epidemic hysterias that in earlier periods were self-limited in geography now have free and wide access to the globe in seconds,' says Bartholomew. 'It's a belief, that's the power here, and the technology just amplifies the belief, and helps it spread more readily.' In a recent case, nearly 20 students at a Western New York Junior-Senior High school began experiencing involuntary jerks and tics. Some believe that the Le Roy outbreak was a direct result of videos posted to YouTube by Lori Brownell, a girl with severe tics in Corinth, New York, 250 miles east of Le Roy. The story took off quickly, not just on the local and national news but on Facebook and autism blogs and sites devoted to mental health and environmental issues. Bartholomew warns that there is 'potential for a far greater or global episode, unless we quickly understand how social media is, for the first time, acting as the primary vector or agent of spread for conversion disorder.'"

First time accepted submitter noahfecks writes "After the Linux 3.11 kernel was codenamed 'Linux for Workgroups' in memory of Microsoft Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Linus Torvalds is using 'Suicidal Squirrel' as the Linux 3.12 kernel codename." Seems only fitting. (The list of kernel names should reflect this soon.)

cartechboy writes "Stephen King has sold more than 300 million books of horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy. The guy has written so many works, and words, that he actually needs a "continuity adviser" to fact check him when he picks old stories up as a new book. Enter Rocky Wood — who is the world-wide leading expert on Stephen King's work. So much so, that King hired Wood (who has authored a 6000+ page encyclopedia on CD-ROM on every single aspect of King's work — including 26,000 different King characters) to fact check himself when he writes."

An anonymous reader writes "The discovery that even the most distant galaxies have supermassive black holes at their cores is a puzzle for astrophysicists. These objects must have formed relatively soon after the Big Bang. But if a galaxy is only a billion years old and contains a black hole that is a billion times more massive than the Sun, how did it get so big, so quickly? Now one cosmologist says he has the answer: black holes feed off the quantum foam that makes up the fabric of spacetime. This foam is 'nourishing' because it contains quantum black holes that can contribute to the black hole's growth. This idea leads to a prediction: that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way must also be growing in this way and at a rate that we should be able to measure. Just watch out for the burps."

IamTheRealMike writes "In the wake of Bruce Schneier's statements that he no longer trusts the constants selected for elliptic curve cryptography, people have started trying to reproduce the process that led to those constants being selected ... and found it cannot be done. As background, the most basic standard elliptic curves used for digital signatures and other cryptography are called the SEC random curves (SEC is 'Standards for Efficient Cryptography'), a good example being secp256r1. The random numbers in these curve parameters were supposed to be selected via a "verifiably random" process (output of SHA1 on some seed), which is a reasonable way to obtain a nothing up my sleeve number if the input to the hash function is trustworthy, like a small counter or the digits of PI. Unfortunately it turns out the actual inputs used were opaque 256 bit numbers, chosen ad-hoc with no justifications provided. Worse, the curve parameters for SEC were generated by head of elliptic curve research at the NSA — opening the possibility that they were found via a brute force search for a publicly unknown class of weak curves. Although no attack against the selected values are currently known, it's common practice to never use unexplainable magic numbers in cryptography standards, especially when those numbers are being chosen by intelligence agencies. Now that the world received strong confirmation that the much more obscure and less widely used standard Dual_EC_DRBG was in fact an NSA undercover operation, NIST re-opened the confirmed-bad standards for public comment. Unless NIST/the NSA can explain why the random curve seed values are trustworthy, it might be time to re-evaluate all NIST based elliptic curve crypto in general."

IamTheRealMike writes "In the wake of Bruce Schneier's statements that he no longer trusts the constants selected for elliptic curve cryptography, people have started trying to reproduce the process that led to those constants being selected ... and found it cannot be done. As background, the most basic standard elliptic curves used for digital signatures and other cryptography are called the SEC random curves (SEC is 'Standards for Efficient Cryptography'), a good example being secp256r1. The random numbers in these curve parameters were supposed to be selected via a "verifiably random" process (output of SHA1 on some seed), which is a reasonable way to obtain a nothing up my sleeve number if the input to the hash function is trustworthy, like a small counter or the digits of PI. Unfortunately it turns out the actual inputs used were opaque 256 bit numbers, chosen ad-hoc with no justifications provided. Worse, the curve parameters for SEC were generated by head of elliptic curve research at the NSA — opening the possibility that they were found via a brute force search for a publicly unknown class of weak curves. Although no attack against the selected values are currently known, it's common practice to never use unexplainable magic numbers in cryptography standards, especially when those numbers are being chosen by intelligence agencies. Now that the world received strong confirmation that the much more obscure and less widely used standard Dual_EC_DRBG was in fact an NSA undercover operation, NIST re-opened the confirmed-bad standards for public comment. Unless NIST/the NSA can explain why the random curve seed values are trustworthy, it might be time to re-evaluate all NIST based elliptic curve crypto in general."

Dave Knott writes "Sony today announced the PS Vita TV box. Measuring 6.5cm by 10.5cm, it can play Vita games on your television, stream content via HDMI or wirelessly, and play all the existing PlayStation Network content available on the standard Vita platform. This is seen by some analysts as an attempt by Sony to compete with such devices as the Ouya and Apple TV. The PS Vita TV is so far announced for a Japan-only release in early 2014 at a price of approximately $100 US. In related news, Sony also announced a lighter, slimmer, more colorful iteration of the standard Vita handheld console." The $100 model does not come with a controller; a $150 model was also announced that will include a Dualshock 3 and an 8G memory card.

Bennett Haselton writes: "The ongoing case of New York Times reporter James Risen -- whom the U.S. Department of Justice wants to force to testify against one of his sources for leaking classified CIA information -- brings up a more general question about the Fifth Amendment: Why are criminal defendants allowed to remain silent, but not third-party witnesses like Risen?" You'll find the rest of Bennett's story below.

In my last article about the Fifth Amendment, I tentatively made the argument that I couldn't see a principled reason why defendants should be able to refuse to answer the question of whether they committed the crime or not. My argument was that you're perfectly entitled to keep information private that is none of anybody's business -- you ought to be able to say, "It's none of your beeswax where I was on the night of the murder" -- however the fact of whether you committed the murder or not, is everybody's business, and I didn't see why the state shouldn't be able to make you choose between saying "Yes, I committed the murder," or "No, I didn't." (If you think the state would then try to convict you of lying if they were determined to railroad you, then my answer would be: If the state is going to railroad you anyway, they can convict you of the murder regardless of whether or not you say you're innocent, so that's not an argument in favor of the right to remain silent. I addressed this and several other counter-arguments in the original article.)

However, the argument I'm making this time is different. I'm saying that regardless of how you feel about the Fifth Amendment granting criminal defendants the right to remain silent, there's no consistent argument that would support giving defendants the right to remain silent, that should not also apply to third-party witnesses.

Here's the basic paradox: Suppose Bob may have committed a crime, and Alice is known not to be an accomplice but appears to have been a witness. If the courts ask both Bob and Alice the same question -- "Did Bob do it?" -- and both of them refuse to answer, then Bob's right to remain silent is protected under the Fifth Amendment, but Alice can be sent to jail -- despite the fact that Bob may have been guilty, but Alice is innocent! To me, that sounds crazy. (As explained at Findlaw and elsewhere, generally third-party witnesses can be required to testify in a way that defendants cannot. Witnesses can only plead the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination if they believe that by answering they could incriminate themselves. If it's generally agreed that a person is a third-party witness who was not guilty of any wrongdoing themselves, they can be forced to answer.)

In my first article arguing that defendants should not have the right to refuse to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed a murder, I wasn't sure of the conclusion, and I invited readers to submit arguments as to why I was wrong (I called the article "Seeking Fifth Amendment Defenders", after all, not "Let's Abolish The Fifth Amendment"). I'm still weighing the arguments coming in, and haven't decided what I believe. However, I'm more sure about the point I'm making this time: that there's no principled, consistent reason to give defendants the right to remain silent but not third-party witnesses. This is after talking to multiple lawyers, law students, and law enforcement officers and asking for any argument to the contrary.

There are two counter-arguments that I've received multiple times, that deserve a response:

• "The defendant's rights as a presumed-innocent citizen have to be protected until they're actually convicted." This is absolutely an important principle in a free society, but generally those "rights" refer to rights that free people have as well, and that are preserved even if you've been arrested -- for example, the right to free speech and the right to be presumed innocent, are all rights that the general public enjoys as well. Insofar as the Fifth Amendment says you have the right to refuse to answer questions about the particular incident that got you arrested, that's a right that innocent third-party witnesses don't have. Even in the most progressive societies, generally speaking criminal defendants don't get more rights than the public. Why should they get that special right in this case? Maybe there's an argument why, but you'd have to at least make that argument.

  So all the talk about protecting the rights of a criminal defendant, is valid, but it misses the point: Why shouldn't we also give the same rights to a third-party witness who we know is innocent?

• "It would be very difficult to prosecute many cases without compelling testimony from third-party witnesses." This is true -- particularly in the cases of reporters like Risen, who refuse to divulge their sources' identities, so all you have is the option of compelling the reporter to testify, when you don't even know the defendant's identity yet.

  However, that's really an argument that if you had to choose between having the ability to force defendants to testify, and having the ability to force third-party witnesses to testify, you would choose the ability to question third-party witnesses, simply because there are often more of them and sometimes they're available even when the defendant isn't. But that's not an answer to my question, which is: Is there an argument from moral or legal principles as to why the defendant is allowed to remain silent but third-party witnesses are not? Obviously, we don't actually have to choose between requiring defendants to answer and requiring third-party witnesses to answer. If we place more importance on giving courts the power to gather information, we should empower them to question third-party witnesses -- but wouldn't that argument also apply to requiring answers from the defendant? On the other hand, if we place more importance on individual liberty, we could grant the right to remain silent to defendants who are presumed innocent -- but shouldn't we grant that same right to third-party witnesses that we know are innocent?

  The argument that "it would be too inconvenient to prosecute cases if we couldn't require answers from third-party witnesses", is a bit like saying that if we had to choose between the courts having the power to force Eskimos to testify, and having the power to force non-Eskimos to testify, we would choose having the power to force non-Eskimos to testify, just because there are more of them. But obviously that's not a principled argument as to why we should be able to require answers from non-Eskimos but not from Eskimos.

Of course, many people's sympathy for James Risen might stem not from the fact that he's a third-party witness (to the crime of leaking information), but from the fact that his supporters are sympathetic to the cause of the anonymous leaker, who was exposing what he believed was a corrupt government. (Risen's book is subtitled "The Explosive Book on the Abuse of Power of the Bush Administration", always a way to get fans.) If James Risen knew the identity of someone who had raped and killed a child, but had gone to jail for refusing to name the suspect, probably a lot fewer people would be hailing him as a hero. But that hypothetical just makes the argument from the opposite direction: If we instinctively feel that third-party witnesses to a murder can be forced to answer questions about what they saw, why can't we make a suspect (who is, after all, a special case of a "potential witness") answer questions about what they know as well?

Our courts' current stance on the "right to remain silent" -- that it can be claimed by criminal defendants, but not by innocent third-party witnesses -- seems so absurd to me that I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I think it's an example of groupthink, an assumption that we accept because we're immersed in it, but that few people would ever come up with on their own if they were working from first principles about balancing liberty vs. the rights of the state.

Here's what I mean by that: Suppose you had been raised in a world that was identical to our own, except that our rights under the Fifth Amendment were inverted, so that innocent third-party witnesses could refuse to answer questions, but criminal defendants could at least be required to answer "Yes" or "No" as to whether they committed the crime. My hunch is that that, instead, would seem natural and sensible. You wouldn't scratch your head and say, "Wait, that seems wrong -- it should be the defendants who should have the right to remain silent, not the innocent witnesses."

By contrast, suppose you had been raised in the world that was identical to ours, except that portions of the First Amendment were inverted -- so that we could write any political arguments that we wanted to, but the government demanded prior approval of any fictional stories that we wanted to publish. I would hope that to many people, this would seem like a nagging contradiction, and over time more and more people would point out this inherent hypocrisy and call for restrictions on political thought to be abolished. That's because I think the First Amendment guarantee of free speech is something that can be derived from first principles about individual liberty -- if you want to write something and someone else wants to read it, and neither of you is harming anyone else in the process, it should be nobody else's business, period, full stop. And I just don't see a compelling argument from first principles in support of our current interpretation of the Fifth Amendment -- that we can make third-party witnesses answer questions, but not require the same of a criminal defendant.

Regardless, a court has already ruled that James Risen can be made to testify, and barring a successful appeal, he may choose to go to jail rather than reveal his source. The judge writing the ruling against Risen made an interesting slip-up, though, when he wrote:

The reporter must appear and give testimony just as every other citizen must.

But of course "every other citizen" does not have to give testimony -- if the defendant is ever identified, they won't have to. And that's the inconsistency that I find hard to explain.

CNET's Steve Guttenberg ("The Audiophiliac") profiles prolific audio engineer and general music industry do-it-all Steve Albini; Albini (who's worked on literally thousands of albums with musicians across a wide range of genres) has interesting things to say about compression, the rise of home-recording ("The majority of recordings will be crappy, low-quality recordings, but there will always be work for engineers who can do a good job, because there will always be people who appreciate good sound."), and why he still prefers to record to analog tape. (Note: Albini is justly famous not just for his production work, but in particular for his essay "The Problem with Music.")

coolnumbr12 writes with this excerpt from IBTimes: "Japan's magnetic-levitation train is still more than decade away from completion, but the L-Zero recently proved that it really is the world's fastest train. On a 15-mile stretch of test track, the L-Zero reached speeds of 310 miles per hour. After the successful trials, Central Japan Railway Co. is going ahead with a 5.1 trillion yen ($52 billion) plan to build a 177-mile maglev line between Tokyo and Nagoya. CJR says the trip will take just 40 minutes on the L-Zero." There are other fast trains in the world, but the L-Zero edges out the others on this list.

New submitter anwyn writes "In a recent article posted on the cryptography mailing list, long time civil libertarian and free software entrepreneur John Gilmore has analyzed possible NSA obstruction of cryptography in IPSEC. He suggests that packet processing in the Linux kernel had been obstructed by one kernel developer. Gilmore suggests that the NSA has been plotting against strong cryptography on mobile phones."

theodp writes "Back in the day, leprosy patients were stigmatized and shunned, quarantined from society in Leper Colonies. Those days may be long gone, but are our mapping, GPS, and social media technologies in effect helping to create modern-day 'Leper Colonies'? The recently-shuttered GhettoTracker.com (born again as Good Part of Town) generated cries of racism by inviting users to rate neighborhoods based on 'which parts of town are safe and which ones are ghetto, or unsafe'. Calling enough already with the avoid-the-ghetto apps, The Atlantic Cities' Emily Badger writes, "this idea toes a touchy line between a utilitarian application of open data and a sly wink toward people who just want to steer clear of 'those kinds of neighborhoods.'" The USPTO has already awarded avoid-crime-ridden-neighborhoods-like-the-plague patents to tech giants Microsoft, IBM, and Google. So, when it comes to navigational apps, where's the line between utility and racism? 'As mobile devices get smarter and more ubiquitous,' writes Svati Kirsten Narula, 'it is tempting to let technology make more and more decisions for us. But doing so will require us to sacrifice one of our favorite assumptions: that these tools are inherently logical and neutral...the motivations driving the algorithms may not match the motivations of those algorithms' users.' Indeed, the Google patent for Storing and Providing Routes proposes to 'remove streets from recommended directions if uploaded route information indicates that travelers seem to avoid the street.' Even faster routes that 'traverse one or more high crime areas,' Google reasons, 'may be less appealing to most travelers'."

Eloquence writes "Three years ago, Musopen raised nearly $70,000 to create public domain recordings of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, Schubert, and others. Now they're running a new campaign with a simple but ambitious objective: 'To preserve indefinitely and without question everything Chopin created. To release his music for free, both in 1080p video and 24 bit 192kHz audio. This is roughly 245 pieces.'" Adds project organizer aarondunn: "His music will be made available via an API powered by Musopen so anyone can come up with ways to explore and present Chopin's life."

American manufacturing plants are no longer necessarily dank, dirty places where large men without shirts sweat until they drop. Rather, most plants today are full of computer-driven machinery that takes strong skills to install and maintain. And since many manufacturers, especially small ones, can't afford to have high level IT and repair people on staff, their maintenance work is often outsourced. Obviously, this doesn't mean outsourcing to a company in China or India (that's offshoring), but to one right here in the USA. Today's interviewee, Chris LeBeau, is director of information technologies for Advanced Technology Services, which is one of many companies that have sprung up to help factories operate efficiently in a highly computerized world. Most of their techs have wrench-turning skills, but more and more, they also have strong IT skills and walk around carrying tablet computers. So what you have here is a whole set of IT-related careers for people who enjoy working with computers but would rather stay physical and move around than spend all day in front of a monitor at a desk. Chris's comments about why IT-based factory maintenance is more usful here than in China are interesting, too -- and may offer a clue as to why some types of industry are bringing their manufacturing operations back to the U.S. from low-wage countries in order to increase efficiency.

American manufacturing plants are no longer necessarily dank, dirty places where large men without shirts sweat until they drop. Rather, most plants today are full of computer-driven machinery that takes strong skills to install and maintain. And since many manufacturers, especially small ones, can't afford to have high level IT and repair people on staff, their maintenance work is often outsourced. Obviously, this doesn't mean outsourcing to a company in China or India (that's offshoring), but to one right here in the USA. Today's interviewee, Chris LeBeau, is director of information technologies for Advanced Technology Services, which is one of many companies that have sprung up to help factories operate efficiently in a highly computerized world. Most of their techs have wrench-turning skills, but more and more, they also have strong IT skills and walk around carrying tablet computers. So what you have here is a whole set of IT-related careers for people who enjoy working with computers but would rather stay physical and move around than spend all day in front of a monitor at a desk. Chris's comments about why IT-based factory maintenance is more usful here than in China are interesting, too -- and may offer a clue as to why some types of industry are bringing their manufacturing operations back to the U.S. from low-wage countries in order to increase efficiency.

paroneayea writes "MediaGoblin 0.5.0 Goblin Force is released with a slew of new features: authentication plugins including OpenID and Mozilla Persona support, a new notification system, a new "reprocessing framework", and more! The project is also making progress towards its long-awaited federation goals via the Pump API, as used in pump.io. Rockin'!" (If the name doesn't ring a bell, Wikipedia helps: MediaGoblin is "a free, decentralized Web platform (server software) for hosting and sharing digital media.")

Toe, The writes "It has long been understood that completely different animals can end up with very similar traits (convergent evolution), and even that genes can converge. But a new study shows an unbelievable level of convergence among entire groups of genes. The study shows that animals as diverse as bats and dolphins, which independently developed echolocation, converge in nearly 200 different genomic regions concentrated in several 'hearing genes.' The implications are rather deep, if you think about it, delving into interesting limitations on diversity or insights into the potential of DNA. And perhaps more importantly, this finding goes a long way toward explaining why almost aliens in the universe look surprisingly identical to humans (though still doesn't explain why they all speak English)."