I thought their choices were pretty good, but they completely screwed up with the reasoning behind the selections. Here's my take on it:

1. Software engineer
Congratulations, no one really knows what you do. As a software engineer you have carte blanche to fuck off. Don't like what you're working on? Tell your employer it'll take two years and 10 people to accomplish. No one will know the difference. Just remember, 10 minutes of inspiration gets more accomplished than a strong work ethic.

Slashdot | Software Engineers Ranked Best Job in America

We have flash drives. Three days after the Los Angeles Times broke the story of the US military secrets for sale at an Afghan bazaar, a reporter for the paper bought ($40) another computer drive sold openly outside the U.S. air base in Bagram, Afghanistan. The 1-gigabyte flash drive holds "what appears to be a trove of potentially sensitive American intelligence data, including the names, photographs and telephone numbers of Afghan spies informing on the Taliban and Al Qaeda, personal snapshots, Special Forces training manuals, records of direct action training missions in South America, along with numerous computer slide presentations and documents marked secret." Most documents are neither locked nor encrypted. But the good news is, some of them can't be opened without a password, and the Army is investigating anyway.

Item in great condition - Would do business again! AAA | MetaFilter

Q: I love TiVo, but why can't I change the name of my saved shows? In the days of the video, I could tape what I want, change the name to "Broncos Highlights -- 1994" and rest assured my wife would never look at it. Now, if I TiVo something she might not like, "Naughty Nurses" is right on the saved list. Has there ever been a better product with such an obvious oversight?
--Brendan Lane, Darnestown, Md.

SG: You're a genius. They should add a special feature called "TiVo Camouflage" for an extra $9.95 a month. Every time you record a movie like "Naughty Nurses," TiVo Camouflage automatically changes the title of the show to something concurrently running on the NFL Network. That can't miss.

ESPN.com: Page 2 : Welcome back, mailbag

Silicon Valley based Zixxo has launched a great service that I asked for last year (#4 on this list) - local coupons via RSS. This is a very big market. Last year, 323 billion coupons were distributed in the U.S., and of those 4.5 billion were actually used

Needs work, but very interesting.

TechCrunch � Local Coupons at Zixxo

"Why Phishing Works" is a recent study (PDF) that examines phishing website techniques. The most visually deceptive website spoof in the study was able to fool 90% of the study's participants. That 90% figure includes the most technically advanced users among the participants. It was the look, not the spoofing of security features that did the job - something that our resident phishing expert found quite interesting.

Crossing disciplines and summing up this article published last summer in the journal Neuron - If you don't see something often, you won't often see it. Perhaps you could also say - If you don't see fakes often, you won't often see fakes. Therefore, many phishers while designing visually deceptive phishing sites count less on technical subterfuge than on the failings of the human brain's power of perception. If it looks like what the brain is expecting, then the brain often won't see that it isn't.

I like their proposal: let the user design a custom login interface. If you personalized it enough, then a spoofer would have much less chance. It would be much more complicated, and leave far more footprints.

Imagine if you log into your credit card online site by supplying a username. The next page has a picture of you, and that's when you enter your password. The only way to spoof this effectively would be some form of man-in-the-middle attack. But now the spoofer has much less control of when and where they apply their fraud (as opposed to passively collecting data through a third-party site... the third-party site is now "hot" and potentially monitored).

F-Secure : News from the Lab

Business Plan Hyperbole

This will be the greatest blog post ever. Its unique content and message has no equal, and we have not heard of any potential competitors The idea behind this post is so important, I'm somwhat afraid of your reading it without signing our ironclad NDA. However, I've been told that most Venture Capitalists won't sign such things, so I'll trust you to keep it quiet. In any case any potential competitor will be deterred by our soon to be filed provisional patent application, with its broad claims.

This post should revolutionize the way in which business plan information is delivered. Rather than just overstating the facts and underestimating any problems, we'll completely ignore both.

WayTooEarly: Business Plan Hyperbole

As the real-estate market continues to cool, a growing number of brokers are doing what was until recently unthinkable. They are giving most of their commissions to buyers.

I may have a similar arrangement, but it has more to do with giving a friend experience than as an enticement. Although read enough of the Big Picture, and it definitely feels like it is worth waiting a couple of months. (Or longer...)

RealEstateJournal | Real-Estate Brokers Step Up Rebates to Home Buyers

Cedric's definition of mainstream includes being appealing to Visual Basic and PHP programmers. That seems to be the backdrop of his first two points, that Ruby and Rails are too hard for these folks. I can see some of these points - folks in our reading group have been somewhat mind bent by some of the Ruby concepts, and they are Java/C# folks, which would put them higher on the food chain than VB and PHP programmers. I think that some of this is just unfamiliarity as opposed to difficulty, but there's not doubt that there is a learning curve there.

Ted Leung on the air : What does it mean for Ruby on Rails to become mainstream?

SQL Server Everywhere is an "embeddded" database, used to store data on small devices, such as mobile phones, rather than require users to connect to a server to access information. Flessner said Microsoft had already developed the embedded database for internal use but will now release it as a commercial product.

Other companies, such as Oracle, IBM and Sybase, already offer embedded databases. In addition, there are several open-source options such as Sleepycat, which was recently purchased by Oracle.

Microsoft readies embedded database | CNET News.com

Cybernet Technology News offers a quick fix that can help with Firefox's annoying memory leakage. This fix will bump memory usage down to under 10MB every time you minimize Firefox (Windows OS, only). When minimized, it writes Firefox to the hard drive and fetches it from there when you maximize.

Simple Fix for Plugging Firefox Memory Leaks :: Street Tech :: hardware beyond the hype