"The reason we put UAC into the (Vista) platform was to annoy users--I'm serious," said Cross, speaking at the RSA Conference here Thursday. "Most users had administrator privileges on previous Windows systems and most applications needed administrator privileges to install or run."

Cross claimed that annoying users had been part of a Microsoft strategy to force independent software vendors (ISVs) to make their code more secure, as insecure code would trigger a prompt, discouraging users from executing the code.

Microsoft: Vista feature designed to 'annoy users' | Tech News on ZDNet

The world has seen the first international conference on manufacturing meat. This is the process, tested so far only at laboratory scale, of growing pork, chicken, or beef through cell culture in vats instead of raising and slaughtering animals.

But when will I be able to buy Wendy Meat(tm) at Safeway?

Can People Have Meat and a Planet, Too? - Dot Earth - Climate Change and Sustainability - New York Times Blog

So Mr. Levine stood on a chair, and shouted out, “Is anyone here an ActionScript programmer? We’d like to hire you!”

“I got some nasty looks from the baristas,” Mr. Levine recalled, “but that didn’t stop three or four people from coming up to our table and inquiring.”

Cafe Capitalism, San Francisco Style - New York Times

Another theory: She recognizes that she probably will not win the nomination. But a couple of possibilities are at play here. One is that lightning will strike, and she will become the nominee. Or, perhaps more plausibly though counter-intuitively, she is actually helping the party by staying in.

That’s because her message about disenfranchisement seems to have taken hold. As Ms. Williams noted, there are still 10 contests to go, with perhaps 43 millions votes to be counted. To short-circuit the process would anger her many of her supporters, especially those who have not yet voted. Thousands of people are coming to her rallies now, and her campaign has organized events in post-Pennsylvania states where people are thrilled to be part of a process from which they are normally excluded.

Katharine Q. Seelye - On Line - The New York Times - Politics - Election 2008 - New York Times

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More - New York Times

Scientists from three universities recently hacked into an implantable biomedical device through a wireless connection, stole information about a hypothetical patient's health and personal history and changed the cardiac defibrillator's settings.

Discovery News : Discovery Channel

Decius wrote:

Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URL's. The replacement?

Search boxes!1 With recommended search terms!

It makes sense, right? All the good domain names are gone. Getting people to a specific page in a big site is difficult (who's going to write down anything after the first slash?). And, most tellingly, I see increasingly more users already inadvertently put complete domain names like "gmail" and "netflix" into the Search box of their browsers out of habit — and it doesn't even register that Google pops up and they have to click to get to their destination.

I told you so :P

RE: cabel.name: Japan: URL's Are Totally Out

All this got me to thinking about the relationship between time and gadgets, because there is a relationship between the two, and it's not just about the 18-month tech cycle or the decomposition-proof materials that will allow my swaggy new Casio Module 3070 wristwatch to be around when the sun goes supernova. Any gadget we use invariably morphs our perception of time's passing.

Dork Talk: Douglas Coupland | Technology | The Guardian

Homeland security officials on Friday hinted at a possible face-saving deal to end their standoff with a handful of states over new driver's license rules — a dispute that, left unresolved, could cause big air travel headaches.

The Associated Press: Chertoff: ID Must Comply to Fly

Verizon Communications Inc and AT&T were big winners in the U.S. government's auction of wireless licenses that raised a record $19.59 billion, the Federal Communication Commission said on Thursday.

Verizon and AT&T win big at airwave auction | Markets | Markets News | Reuters