First known hacker-caused power outage signals troubling escalation →
"It's the major scenario we've all been concerned about for so long."
Why the Economic Fates of America's Cities Diverged →
Inequality, an issue politicians talked about hesitantly, if at all, a decade ago, is now a central focus of candidates in both parties. The terms of the debate, however, are about individuals and classes: the elite versus the middle, the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. That's fair enough. But the language currently used to describe inequality doesn't capture the way it is manifesting geographically. Growing inequality between and among regions and metro areas is obvious. But it is almost completely absent from the current political conversation.
Why New York Subway Lines Are Missing Countdown Clocks →
The story of how it could take 28 years to install clocks that tell you when the damn trains are coming turns out not to be about some dinosaur fixed-block signaling system and the gleaming new technology here to replace it. It's simpler than that: it's the story of a large organization's first encounter with a large software project.
Why parenting may not matter and why most social science research is probably wrong →
The standard way of doing business in the social sciences ignores genetic influences, and has for years. Be careful which findings you cling to. Most social science research can only reveal associations; which is important, no doubt, but I presume you want to know something about causality also. To even begin approximating causality (assuming you cannot do an experiment, which you can't with most social science research), you must account for all confounding factors — genes included.
The secret history of the Out of Office message →
Turns out OOF is a quirk of Microsoft culture, dating back to the company's pre-Exchange Xenix email system of the late '80s. "Oof" was the name of Xenix's auto-reply feature and a command to call it up. Decades after Xenix transitioned into Exchange Server in 1993, people still say "oof," which, like all good slang, has a malleable usefulness. It's both a noun and adjective.
I always wondered where that came from...
Study confirms that ending your texts with a period is terrible →
When that reply was followed by a period, [college undergraduates] rated the response as less sincere than when no punctuation was used. The effect wasn't present in handwritten notes.
I'll continue using periods as well as commas, hyphens, and semicolons, social ramifications be damned. Get off my lawn, you grammar-less kids.
Meet the woman in charge of the FBI's most controversial high-tech tools →
Privacy advocates also worry that to carry out its hacks, the FBI is using "zero-day" exploits that take advantage of software flaws that have not been disclosed to the software maker. That practice makes consumers who use the software vulnerable, they argue.
Hess acknowledged that the bureau uses zero-days — the first time an official has done so.
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Huxley vs Orwell →
A clever comic on the accuracy of George Orwell's predictions about future society over those of Aldous Huxley. It's informative and scary at the same time. "In short, Orwell feared that what we hate would ruin us. Huxley that what we love will ruin us." It's unfortunate that Huxley got it right because the latter is much less obvious.
The National Security Letter Has Been Uncloaked →
Among other things, the FBI was demanding a target's complete Web browsing history, IP addresses of everyone a person has corresponded with, and records of all online purchases, according to a court document unveiled Monday. All that's required is an agent's signature denoting that the information is relevant to an investigation.
