I don't know where to start with this one...

Airport Security ftw!
Originally uploaded by sirbrett84

I mean, really, the man behind the curtain is clearly visible, and apparently it's Bonzo the Clown. Geez.

And I thought car theft was a big problem.

According to the Australian Federal Police comissioner:

Our environmental scanning tells us that even with some of the cloning of human beings - not necessarily in Australia but in those countries that are going to allow it - you could have potentially a cloned part-person, part-robot.

And that's something we have to be careful of, crime-wise.

Something's gone wrong here, and it isn't the packs of cloned cyborgs soon to roaming the streets of sunny (upper) Aranda in the near future. No, what's gone wrong is that there are people in positions of authority like this who aren't even aware that they are totally unequipped to handle certain aspects of their jobs. I'm sure Comissioner Keelty is a fine police officer, but he clearly needs an advisor who actually understands these issues.

How secrecy fails.

09 F9 11 02
9D 74 E3 5B
D8 41 56 C5
63 56 88 C0

Let's pause to consider how the security model for HD-DVD failed. It failed because (as per Kerchoff's Principle), it was only as secure as the key embedded in every HD-DVD player. That key (which might coincidentally resemble the hexidecimal number I have randomly typed above), once discovered, was distributed ... widely. The structure of secrecy on the modern internet is such that if real demand exists for a secret, and it's as trvially easy to copy as this, then there simply isn't a secret any more. The fact that the demand was created in this case as part of a global, distributed effort to give the AACS-LA the finger after they acted like nimrods only makes it more interesting.

Rotted out

Rotted out
Originally uploaded by Sbocaj

Decaying tree makes the annular growth patterns obvious as layers of bricklike cells give way.

"No-one will ever pay $100/pound for coffee!"

On May 29, at around 6:30 pm Eastern time, the program that runs the Best of Panama auction website stopped functioning unexpectedly. The bid price for this year’s top Panamanian coffee was stuck on $99.99 per pound. The program had not been designed to progress beyond that mark... when the auction finally got up and running again after a three hour delay, the price went all the way to $130 a pound.

Computer-land is replete with instances of unexpectedly large numbers causing problems, usually years after the original systems were designed. "640KB is enough for anyone", the Y2K bug, and many, many stack overflow and buffer underrun errors, all essentially caused by people making incorrect asusumptions about how long a system would be in service.

[read the article: it's good]

Coke Machine

Somewhere there's an engineer who can look at this and name the sensor that's broken.

(flikr: metak)

Fruitflies, humans ... cocaine doesn't care.

As recently BoingBoinged, the navigational instincts of fruitflies and humans flake out in similar ways when hammered by cocaine. Does this mean that the motor-skill mapping humans make for driving a car is isomorphic in some way to the way fruitflies fly?