Dropsafe

I am a Principal Engineer (PE) at Sun Microsystems; that statement probably doesn’t mean much to most people reading this, so to put it into context: the PEs at Sun are a diverse community comprised mostly of senior technical field staff – mostly long-termers – who by virtue of being “customer-facing” are not exactly engineers

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[news.bbc.co.uk] “Would I look less dodgy without my rucksack?” I asked. “Dodgy,” he replied. “What about if I wore a suit?” “You’d look like a dodgy bloke in a suit,” he said. “How about if I shaved my beard?” “Dodgy. Just face it – you look dodgy,” came the disconcerting reply. Over the seven weeks

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[worldwearydetective.blogspot.com] The scene: An anonymous provincial town in middle England somewhere. Four plotters gather together in a darkened room. The year is 2008. Plotter 1: Right everyone. Today is the day. Is everyone ready? All: YES! Plotter 1: Is everyone a ‘clean skin’ that has avoided the attention of the greatest security agencies in the

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So I loaded my normal list of cartoons and news for this morning – “Open in Tabs” is such a marvellous feature – and about halfway through my Safari browser flashed-up an error alert – which stops everything – to say: www.errorsafe.com NOTICE: If your computer has errors in the registry database of file system

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Bill Gates drives a Porsche 959 and had to help change the law so that he could. Ingvar Kamprad drives a 1993 Volvo 240 GL. My oh my. [www.forbesautos.com]

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[news.independent.co.uk] In gently rolling countryside, not far from a tranquil lake, Chew Magna is the quintessential Somerset village. It has a well-kept cricket pitch, tidy gardens, three churches, two pubs and a row of quaint shops. A picturesque stream meanders by ancient houses – some of them mentioned in The Domesday Book – and a

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[news.independent.co.uk] Organisations opposed to animal experiments take the opposite view. They say that not only do alternatives to animals exist, but they are better. They also claim that relying on the results of animal research is dangerous. “Reliance on animal experimentation amounts to gambling with our children’s’ health,” says the antivivisection group Europeans for Medical

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[news.bbc.co.uk] Content from the BBC’s Natural History Unit has been made available free of charge over the internet. The Open Earth Archive will include previously unseen clips from new wildlife series Planet Earth. Footage can be viewed, downloaded and edited into personal projects as part of the Creative Archive Licence. The scheme, which released the

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[tinyurl.com]

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Check out todays (march 3rd) APOD: Shining brightly in the east at dawn, Venus dominates the sky in this view over a suburban landscape from Bursa, Turkey. An otherwise familiar scene for astronomer Tunc Tezel, his composite picture of the morning sky recorded on March 2nd also includes a surprise visitor to the inner solar

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As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: “And that’s the way it is.” To me, that encapsulates the newsman’s highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue. Sadly, that

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[news.bbc.co.uk] Online amateurs crack Nazi codes Three German ciphers unsolved since World War II are finally being cracked, helped by thousands of home computers. The codes resisted the best efforts of the celebrated Allied cryptographers based at Bletchley Park during the war. Now one has been solved by running code-breaking software on a “grid” of

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