People are prepared to pay money to block ads, and advertisers are prepared to pay money to keep ads being displayed. How about using some of that money to pay for maintenance of the websites that have blocked ads?
They have a mixture of a very large (2 million) number of probes to match DNA/RNA sequences of all known viruses which infect vertebrates. They use these to amplify viral sequences and then use normal high throughput DNA sequencing (Illumina, in this case) to see what they've got.
Yep, that seems a fair explanation. I liken it to trying to hit an ant with a minigun. It's probably not higher profile because probe capture has been done before (e.g. for ribosomal enrichment / exclusion); this is just taking it to the extreme. I wouldn't be surprised if someone follows this up later on with a 1 billion probe capture design for bacterial sequencing -- there'll always be more probes that can be added into the mix.
Why does this video spend 5 minutes saying fluff, when it could have been explained in a single word, "colocation". In fact, this was used in the first 20 seconds.
Yes. People have this idea in their mind that all intellectual property is the same, which causes confusion when litigation happens correctly. In this particular case, the debate will be whether or not Lexmark's patents are infringed by the process that the second-hand suppliers use, rather than the sale of the end product.
Richard Stallman has a good talk about the differences between the three main types of intellectual property, and says that anyone who tries to lump them together to be dealt with as a whole is doing it wrong.
Patents protect the use of processes or functions by a business
Trademarks protect the mindshare of a product or business
Copyrights protect the creative/artistic presentation of a product
Disclaimer: not a lawyer; please consult a lawyer who is familiar with the specific area of interest to work out what is wrong with what I've typed here.
From experience (i.e. failure) with switching people over, you get the best results if you introduce people to the free software first then change the operating system. Use Inkscape, Krita, GIMP, or Scribus on Windows, rather than switching two things at once.
Creative commons licenses don't fit their preferred use case, because it allows redistribution:
A single license that gives users access to the code but limits the ability to redistribute the code and distribute patches to the "core" is what we'd prefer.
More generally, creative commons licenses aren't an appropriate fit to software. They're designed with creative works in mind and protect the expression of a work, rather than the way in which that expression is created.
Keep the option to retrieve your account number by submitting your password, since even weak passwords are far harder to guess than 4-digit PIN numbers.
I don't think that's a reasonable assumption to make, particularly if you don't care about which account you get access to. Instead of guessing a lot of passwords for a single user, you can guess a small number of passwords for a lot of users. This also gets around any limits regarding access for a single account, as has been suggested as a solution. Getting multiple boxes to carry out this operation gets around limits regarding account access from a single IP address.
If you choose a sufficiently common weak password (and United's password system allows people to enter such passwords by default), then the chance of discovering a correct user/password combination is pretty high.
This is like a car manufacturer claiming that their car will have 20 horsepower, but much more if they look after it, and after several months/years the people who have preordered it finally get theirs and are careful about looking after it, and find out it has 1000 horsepower and the manufacturer says its a good thing because it encouraged them to be careful.
What I'm most impressed by with the videos is that it looks like the initial power for the jumping is coming from the front legs, rather than the back legs (which have more leverage).
It seems to be the case (at least on one standing start cheetah jump that I've seen, as well as a lion jump) that the front legs are moved back for balance and the back legs used for the power push for the jump.
Overall, I argue that the enterprise drives we have are treated as well as the consumer drives. And the enterprise drives are failing more.... Enterprise drives do have one advantage: longer warranties. That’s a benefit only if the higher price you pay for the longer warranty is less than what you expect to spend on replacing the drive. This leads to an obvious conclusion: If you’re OK with buying the replacements yourself after the warranty is up, then buy the cheaper consumer drives.
The idea was to plan an experiment together, with both of them agreeing on every single tiny detail. They would then go to a laboratory and set it up, again both keeping close eyes on one another. Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of different batches. Half the batches (randomly assigned) would be conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman. Because the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting, apparatus and procedure beforehand, “conducted by” pretty much just meant greeting the participants, giving the experimental instructions, and doing the staring.
The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.
Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus, having no contact with the subjects except to introduce themselves and flip a few switches – and whether one or the other was there that day completely altered the result. For a good time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.
Replace a room lit with incandescent lights with LEDs consuming a similar amount of power, and that's getting close to this level of light (5,000 lux vs 10,000 lux using today's technology). So it's not too much extra energy required to get to 10,000 lux.
For those who didn't pick up on the bit in the summary, this is not due to close work, it's most likely due to exposure to bright light:
But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less time with books, screens and close work.... Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to matter most was the eye's exposure to bright light.
If this is the case, then what we should do to reduce the myopia problem is to use brighter lights inside.
There are lots of studies on studies, and in general they are a good idea. Here's my take on that (from SoylentNews), slightly paraphrased to hopefully demonstrate why meta-studies can be good:
Keeping track of information is difficult, and journals generally don't like people to pepper their articles with too many citations. If the same information gets spread around, then the chance of citation drops for any particular article that contains that information. This is a problem, even with Watson-level recall, and even the very best papers will suffer from this issue.
Let's say there's a wonderful paper published in a journal that reviews a whole bunch of things. It survives for about 6 months with citations ramping up, but then someone discovers something new and interesting about one of those things. Then, people who would previously cite the big paper and therefore let others know about it, might decide that in their particular area, the new paper is a more appropriate citation.
About 6 months after that, the paper has hit its "peak citation rate", as the popularity of the paper is eroded in many different areas by the smaller, newer papers. Pick any one of those new papers, and you could easily say the earlier paper is better. However, pick any one of those many things, and you can probably find a better paper for the that particular area of study. Funding sources encourage this behaviour — being better than some previous paper, and fragmenting the research knowledge as much as possible.
People could read the single big paper and get a great overview, but over time they become more likely to know about the smaller papers which give excellent detail, but are very specific. Over time, the general knowledge of readers is reduced, and they lose track of related work outside their area of expertise.
For a change, this is something that appeared on SoylentNews before Slashdot. It has been interesting tracking this article through the social media sites that I frequent:
Reddit — Submitted Wed, Mar 11; 211 comments at the time of writing this comment
SoylentNews — Submitted Sunday, Mar 15; 16 comments at the time of writing this comment
Slashdot — Posted Monday, Mar 16; 30 comments at the time of writing this comment
Ah, thank you. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Now I have a research paper to explain my hypothesis about people heating themselves up to lose weight:
I've wondered if someone who wraps up in winter clothes every day is more likely to gain weight when calorie counting compared to someone who wears summer clothes every day. What I'd like to see is someone who does this and also monitors their body temperature, ambient temperature, and humidity throughout the day -- not a completely crazy idea given todays gadgets. If someone is cold, then their body will expend more energy to stay warm, and it will also expend a little energy to cool down when too hot.
To take this to the extreme, a person might live in a bomb calorimeter for the duration of testing, and make sure that all their excretions were calorified and included in the "calories used" column.
An alternative, related question, why are you saying things without references?
I don't have a good knowledge of the intricacies of screen locking and controlling input devices, so I have to refer to others who I consider to share my general view point, but who appear to be more knowledgeable in a particular area. This is a very common approach in research, and separates out the people who have their own theories based purely on anecdotal evidence from the people who build on the theories and evidence of other research.
My observation is that almost every program has bugs, and the number of bugs increase (in a non-linear fashion) with the size of a project. Bugs in software that deals with authentication are particularly serious, because a bug may be exploitable to give someone privileges that they would otherwise not have (see toolkit discussion).
If you disagree, please address why security is something that should be handled by screensavers, instead of the display manager.
I don't feel that I need to do this, because it has already been addressed in the toolkit discussion. You're giving off the impression that you haven't actually read the toolkit discussion. Please provide some other evidence why the arguments put forward by JWZ are incorrect (preferably something other than "he is a pretentious idiot, so he's wrong"). Anyway, because you're giving this impression, I feel it necessary to post more of that discussion here:
So, you want xscreensaver to invoke the "unlock dialog" program and wait for a response. The unlocker would use a GUI toolkit, and would be linked against the various security libraries. Perhaps the way it would work is that it would print either "yes" or "no" on stdout, depending on whether a password was correctly entered. Were it to crash, the daemon would take that that to mean "no"...
In fact, this approach would actually reduce the number of libraries (and thus, lines of code) in the daemon itself, since the daemon would not need to link against things like PAM and crypto. That's a good thing.
So that doesn't sound hard so far, except that the xscreensaver daemon has the keyboard grabbed. It's pretty important that it hold that grab, because otherwise keystrokes tend to go "through" the xscreensaver window and reach random desktop windows underneath.
This [raises] the question of, how do the keystrokes get to the unlock dialog at all? That's a difficult question. Understanding how to do that right requires a lot of knowledge about X (which I have) but also probably a lot of knowledge about foreign-language input methods and screen readers and other accessibility-ware (which I do not have.)...
In the current system, where the same process is the creator of both the screen-blanking window and the unlock dialog, this is not a problem: that process gets all the events it wants. But when they are in different processes, we need a way for the keyboard and mouse events to get to the process driving the unlock dialog. So you'd like to transfer the grabs from the xscreensaver daemon to the unlock dialog, and then transfer them back afterward. Unfortunately, there is no way to transfer grabs atomically in X....
Another possibility is for the xscreensaver daemon to keep its grabs, meaning that all keyboard and mouse events would go to it; but then for it to use XSendEvent() to generate synthetic events on the lock dialog window. That is, the xscreensaver daemon would read a KeyPress, and then would simulate an exact duplicate of that KeyPress on the lock dialog window.
[arguments against this: Applications can tell the difference between real and synthetic events, so might reject synthetic events as a security measure. Input methods need to be embedded in the dialog, rather than as a separate window]...
He's already basically responded to this in the toolkit discussion. Anyone else could write a secure screen locker, but to do that properly you need to understand the code of all the libraries being used:
That's why I implemented the unlock dialog using only Xlib: not because I think Xlib is a good way to write user interfaces, but because I think this was the safest way. The amount of code in Xlib is very small, and has been extensively security audited. It is very unlikely that there are crashing bugs lurking in Xlib itself. The same cannot be said for larger, more featureful libraries. So, by making minimal use of Xlib (the dialog box is drawn using only the lowest level text-printing and rectangle-drawing routines) we can keep the code path short and auditable.
I am as close to certain as I can be that there is no action a user can take on their input devices that will cause the current Xlib-based lock dialog in xscreensaver to unlock. That's because it's a small amount of code that I have stared at and tested for a very long time. It is a small enough piece of code that I (believe I) know every possible path through it.
Introduce N layers of widget library, general text field handling, compose processing, input methods, I18N... and all bets are off. Who knows what bugs wait lurking in there; who knows which particular combinations of which libraries are a security-bug timebomb.
Let me put that another way:
The GTK and GNOME libraries have never been security-audited to the extent that their maintainers would be willing to make the claim, "under no circumstances will this library ever crash."
One can, within a reasonable doubt, make that claim about libc, or even about Xlib, but not about anything the size of GTK. It's just too big to be sure. This is not a criticism of GTK or GNOME or their authors: it's simply a truth about any piece of software of that size.
Jamie Zawinski has another explanation why screensavers on KDE can't be secure:
Like GNOME, KDE also decided to invent their own screen saver framework from scratch instead of simply using xscreensaver.
And Unity:
Guess what, they did it again! Ubuntu Unity's screen-locking framework is yet another rewrite, and it is completely broken, bug-ridden and insecure. At this time I don't have any information on how to turn it off and use xscreensaver instead. If you do, let me know.
He also has a writeup on toolkits, discussing why locking and unlocking is a hard problem, especially when accessibility features are required.
I recall an article a month or so ago about a town that had already done this, using high-bandwidth internet to determine energy use across the town. Unfortunately I can't remember the town or the company....
Slashdot Mirror
People are prepared to pay money to block ads, and advertisers are prepared to pay money to keep ads being displayed. How about using some of that money to pay for maintenance of the websites that have blocked ads?
They have a mixture of a very large (2 million) number of probes to match DNA/RNA sequences of all known viruses which infect vertebrates. They use these to amplify viral sequences and then use normal high throughput DNA sequencing (Illumina, in this case) to see what they've got.
Yep, that seems a fair explanation. I liken it to trying to hit an ant with a minigun. It's probably not higher profile because probe capture has been done before (e.g. for ribosomal enrichment / exclusion); this is just taking it to the extreme. I wouldn't be surprised if someone follows this up later on with a 1 billion probe capture design for bacterial sequencing -- there'll always be more probes that can be added into the mix.
Why does this video spend 5 minutes saying fluff, when it could have been explained in a single word, "colocation". In fact, this was used in the first 20 seconds.
Yes. People have this idea in their mind that all intellectual property is the same, which causes confusion when litigation happens correctly. In this particular case, the debate will be whether or not Lexmark's patents are infringed by the process that the second-hand suppliers use, rather than the sale of the end product.
Richard Stallman has a good talk about the differences between the three main types of intellectual property, and says that anyone who tries to lump them together to be dealt with as a whole is doing it wrong.
Disclaimer: not a lawyer; please consult a lawyer who is familiar with the specific area of interest to work out what is wrong with what I've typed here.
For those who think a simple suspend is easy, go read one of Matthew Garrett's old posts about the mess. Here's an example:
http://www.advogato.org/articl...
Apparently it's much nicer now.
From experience (i.e. failure) with switching people over, you get the best results if you introduce people to the free software first then change the operating system. Use Inkscape, Krita, GIMP, or Scribus on Windows, rather than switching two things at once.
Creative commons licenses don't fit their preferred use case, because it allows redistribution:
A single license that gives users access to the code but limits the ability to redistribute the code and distribute patches to the "core" is what we'd prefer.
More generally, creative commons licenses aren't an appropriate fit to software. They're designed with creative works in mind and protect the expression of a work, rather than the way in which that expression is created.
Keep the option to retrieve your account number by submitting your password, since even weak passwords are far harder to guess than 4-digit PIN numbers.
I don't think that's a reasonable assumption to make, particularly if you don't care about which account you get access to. Instead of guessing a lot of passwords for a single user, you can guess a small number of passwords for a lot of users. This also gets around any limits regarding access for a single account, as has been suggested as a solution. Getting multiple boxes to carry out this operation gets around limits regarding account access from a single IP address.
If you choose a sufficiently common weak password (and United's password system allows people to enter such passwords by default), then the chance of discovering a correct user/password combination is pretty high.
This is like a car manufacturer claiming that their car will have 20 horsepower, but much more if they look after it, and after several months/years the people who have preordered it finally get theirs and are careful about looking after it, and find out it has 1000 horsepower and the manufacturer says its a good thing because it encouraged them to be careful.
What I'm most impressed by with the videos is that it looks like the initial power for the jumping is coming from the front legs, rather than the back legs (which have more leverage).
It seems to be the case (at least on one standing start cheetah jump that I've seen, as well as a lion jump) that the front legs are moved back for balance and the back legs used for the power push for the jump.
You may be right in case of other equipment, but enterprise grade drives are really better.
BackBlaze disagrees with you:
https://www.backblaze.com/blog...
Overall, I argue that the enterprise drives we have are treated as well as the consumer drives. And the enterprise drives are failing more.... Enterprise drives do have one advantage: longer warranties. That’s a benefit only if the higher price you pay for the longer warranty is less than what you expect to spend on replacing the drive. This leads to an obvious conclusion: If you’re OK with buying the replacements yourself after the warranty is up, then buy the cheaper consumer drives.
Even better is a study linked to by that page, point IV here:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014...
The idea was to plan an experiment together, with both of them agreeing on every single tiny detail. They would then go to a laboratory and set it up, again both keeping close eyes on one another. Finally, they would conduct the experiment in a series of different batches. Half the batches (randomly assigned) would be conducted by Dr. Schlitz, the other half by Dr. Wiseman. Because the two authors had very carefully standardized the setting, apparatus and procedure beforehand, “conducted by” pretty much just meant greeting the participants, giving the experimental instructions, and doing the staring.
The results? Schlitz’s trials found strong evidence of psychic powers, Wiseman’s trials found no evidence whatsoever.
Take a second to reflect on how this makes no sense. Two experimenters in the same laboratory, using the same apparatus, having no contact with the subjects except to introduce themselves and flip a few switches – and whether one or the other was there that day completely altered the result. For a good time, watch the gymnastics they have to do to in the paper to make this sound sufficiently sensical to even get published. This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.
Replace a room lit with incandescent lights with LEDs consuming a similar amount of power, and that's getting close to this level of light (5,000 lux vs 10,000 lux using today's technology). So it's not too much extra energy required to get to 10,000 lux.
For those who didn't pick up on the bit in the summary, this is not due to close work, it's most likely due to exposure to bright light:
But time engaged in indoor sports had no such protective association; and time outdoors did, whether children had played sports, attended picnics or simply read on the beach. And children who spent more time outside were not necessarily spending less time with books, screens and close work.... Close work might still have some effect, but what seemed to matter most was the eye's exposure to bright light.
If this is the case, then what we should do to reduce the myopia problem is to use brighter lights inside.
There are lots of studies on studies, and in general they are a good idea. Here's my take on that (from SoylentNews), slightly paraphrased to hopefully demonstrate why meta-studies can be good:
Keeping track of information is difficult, and journals generally don't like people to pepper their articles with too many citations. If the same information gets spread around, then the chance of citation drops for any particular article that contains that information. This is a problem, even with Watson-level recall, and even the very best papers will suffer from this issue.
Let's say there's a wonderful paper published in a journal that reviews a whole bunch of things. It survives for about 6 months with citations ramping up, but then someone discovers something new and interesting about one of those things. Then, people who would previously cite the big paper and therefore let others know about it, might decide that in their particular area, the new paper is a more appropriate citation.
About 6 months after that, the paper has hit its "peak citation rate", as the popularity of the paper is eroded in many different areas by the smaller, newer papers. Pick any one of those new papers, and you could easily say the earlier paper is better. However, pick any one of those many things, and you can probably find a better paper for the that particular area of study. Funding sources encourage this behaviour — being better than some previous paper, and fragmenting the research knowledge as much as possible.
People could read the single big paper and get a great overview, but over time they become more likely to know about the smaller papers which give excellent detail, but are very specific. Over time, the general knowledge of readers is reduced, and they lose track of related work outside their area of expertise.
For a change, this is something that appeared on SoylentNews before Slashdot. It has been interesting tracking this article through the social media sites that I frequent:
Reddit — Submitted Wed, Mar 11; 211 comments at the time of writing this comment
SoylentNews — Submitted Sunday, Mar 15; 16 comments at the time of writing this comment
Slashdot — Posted Monday, Mar 16; 30 comments at the time of writing this comment
As an alternative, Canadians are free to decorate them in such a way that the face looks like Barbara Streisand.
Can I suggest SoylentNews?
http://soylentnews.org/
Ah, thank you. Non-exercise activity thermogenesis. Now I have a research paper to explain my hypothesis about people heating themselves up to lose weight:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...
I've wondered if someone who wraps up in winter clothes every day is more likely to gain weight when calorie counting compared to someone who wears summer clothes every day. What I'd like to see is someone who does this and also monitors their body temperature, ambient temperature, and humidity throughout the day -- not a completely crazy idea given todays gadgets. If someone is cold, then their body will expend more energy to stay warm, and it will also expend a little energy to cool down when too hot.
To take this to the extreme, a person might live in a bomb calorimeter for the duration of testing, and make sure that all their excretions were calorified and included in the "calories used" column.
why are you letting jwz do your thinking for you?
An alternative, related question, why are you saying things without references?
I don't have a good knowledge of the intricacies of screen locking and controlling input devices, so I have to refer to others who I consider to share my general view point, but who appear to be more knowledgeable in a particular area. This is a very common approach in research, and separates out the people who have their own theories based purely on anecdotal evidence from the people who build on the theories and evidence of other research.
My observation is that almost every program has bugs, and the number of bugs increase (in a non-linear fashion) with the size of a project. Bugs in software that deals with authentication are particularly serious, because a bug may be exploitable to give someone privileges that they would otherwise not have (see toolkit discussion).
If you disagree, please address why security is something that should be handled by screensavers, instead of the display manager.
I don't feel that I need to do this, because it has already been addressed in the toolkit discussion. You're giving off the impression that you haven't actually read the toolkit discussion. Please provide some other evidence why the arguments put forward by JWZ are incorrect (preferably something other than "he is a pretentious idiot, so he's wrong"). Anyway, because you're giving this impression, I feel it necessary to post more of that discussion here:
So, you want xscreensaver to invoke the "unlock dialog" program and wait for a response. The unlocker would use a GUI toolkit, and would be linked against the various security libraries. Perhaps the way it would work is that it would print either "yes" or "no" on stdout, depending on whether a password was correctly entered. Were it to crash, the daemon would take that that to mean "no"...
In fact, this approach would actually reduce the number of libraries (and thus, lines of code) in the daemon itself, since the daemon would not need to link against things like PAM and crypto. That's a good thing.
So that doesn't sound hard so far, except that the xscreensaver daemon has the keyboard grabbed. It's pretty important that it hold that grab, because otherwise keystrokes tend to go "through" the xscreensaver window and reach random desktop windows underneath.
This [raises] the question of, how do the keystrokes get to the unlock dialog at all? That's a difficult question. Understanding how to do that right requires a lot of knowledge about X (which I have) but also probably a lot of knowledge about foreign-language input methods and screen readers and other accessibility-ware (which I do not have.) ...
In the current system, where the same process is the creator of both the screen-blanking window and the unlock dialog, this is not a problem: that process gets all the events it wants. But when they are in different processes, we need a way for the keyboard and mouse events to get to the process driving the unlock dialog. So you'd like to transfer the grabs from the xscreensaver daemon to the unlock dialog, and then transfer them back afterward. Unfortunately, there is no way to transfer grabs atomically in X. ...
Another possibility is for the xscreensaver daemon to keep its grabs, meaning that all keyboard and mouse events would go to it; but then for it to use XSendEvent() to generate synthetic events on the lock dialog window. That is, the xscreensaver daemon would read a KeyPress, and then would simulate an exact duplicate of that KeyPress on the lock dialog window.
[arguments against this: Applications can tell the difference between real and synthetic events, so might reject synthetic events as a security measure. Input methods need to be embedded in the dialog, rather than as a separate window] ...
In Summary
Making the xscreensaver
He's already basically responded to this in the toolkit discussion. Anyone else could write a secure screen locker, but to do that properly you need to understand the code of all the libraries being used:
That's why I implemented the unlock dialog using only Xlib: not because I think Xlib is a good way to write user interfaces, but because I think this was the safest way. The amount of code in Xlib is very small, and has been extensively security audited. It is very unlikely that there are crashing bugs lurking in Xlib itself. The same cannot be said for larger, more featureful libraries. So, by making minimal use of Xlib (the dialog box is drawn using only the lowest level text-printing and rectangle-drawing routines) we can keep the code path short and auditable.
I am as close to certain as I can be that there is no action a user can take on their input devices that will cause the current Xlib-based lock dialog in xscreensaver to unlock. That's because it's a small amount of code that I have stared at and tested for a very long time. It is a small enough piece of code that I (believe I) know every possible path through it.
Introduce N layers of widget library, general text field handling, compose processing, input methods, I18N... and all bets are off. Who knows what bugs wait lurking in there; who knows which particular combinations of which libraries are a security-bug timebomb.
Let me put that another way:
The GTK and GNOME libraries have never been security-audited to the extent that their maintainers would be willing to make the claim, "under no circumstances will this library ever crash."
One can, within a reasonable doubt, make that claim about libc, or even about Xlib, but not about anything the size of GTK. It's just too big to be sure. This is not a criticism of GTK or GNOME or their authors: it's simply a truth about any piece of software of that size.
Jamie Zawinski has another explanation why screensavers on KDE can't be secure:
Like GNOME, KDE also decided to invent their own screen saver framework from scratch instead of simply using xscreensaver.
And Unity:
Guess what, they did it again! Ubuntu Unity's screen-locking framework is yet another rewrite, and it is completely broken, bug-ridden and insecure. At this time I don't have any information on how to turn it off and use xscreensaver instead. If you do, let me know.
He also has a writeup on toolkits, discussing why locking and unlocking is a hard problem, especially when accessibility features are required.
I recall an article a month or so ago about a town that had already done this, using high-bandwidth internet to determine energy use across the town. Unfortunately I can't remember the town or the company....
3D printing with wood? Oh, a bit like Laywood then.
The other composites are something I'm less familiar with, but I know that shapeways already has alumide as a printable medium.