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Hennepin County is practicing what's called a results-only work environment, or ROWE, which gives everyone in a company the freedom to do their job when and where they want, as long as the work gets done. The state of Minnesota signed a contract for the program last year as part of a campaign to reduce rush hour traffic on 35W in Minneapolis. Nationwide, 3 percent of businesses now say they have a ROWE, though as far as participants here in Hennepin County know, theirs is the first public agency to adopt it. Many are ecstatic at the way it's working so far.

So again we see another instance of an interesting concept: the more open and free something is, the higher the maturity level required of the people using it. You can't have democracy in a country of idiots. And similarly, you can't have ROWE in a company of mouthbreathers.

The idea is that you’ve got hundreds of machines out there,” Rinard says. “We’re saying, ‘Okay, fine, you can take out six or 10 of my 200 machines.’” But, he adds, “by observing what happens with the executions of those six or 10 machines, we’ll be able to deploy patches out to protect the rest of the machines.” The entire process of recognizing an attack, testing a number of countermeasures and deploying the most effective ones can take a matter of seconds.

Very interesting research. I'm curious as to how it'd work with only one or a handful of computers, though. There you wouldn't get the benefit of being able to learn from a few systems falling.

Richard DeVaul's Linkedin status changed last month from Founder & President at AWare Technologies to Senior Prototype Engineer at Apple, Inc.  This is a significant hire for Apple and one that shows the company is looking far ahead into the future of mobile computing.

DeVaul has a background in wearable technologies as you can see from his personal homepage, as well as a PhD. in Media Arts & Sciences from MIT.  At MIT, he worked on new human-computer interaction techniques for wearable, mobile, and portable applications.

His dissertation was on

Forget the iPad. The wearable stuff is where it's at. This is major news; it means Apple is looking at the "real" future of computing.

If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats.

The text above is a snippet of an email sent by the president of the Detroit school board. Not a student in the system. Not even a bad student. No--the president of the school board. This is a problem.

Google's been talking about it for months now, and this week the rumblings grew louder that the Internet search giant plans to cease censorship of results for users of Google.cn in China.

Those plans may have been put into action earlier than anticipated, as news agencies are reporting that certain previously censored results are now freely displayed on Google's China site.

Specifically, results relating to the Tiananmen Square democracy protests, Tibet and regional independence movements are now displayed for Google.cn users in China, reports MSNBC. These topics are currently under strict control by the Chinese government.

Let's see how long China and Google's relationship lasts now...

GeoIPgen – Country-to-IPs generator. Geographic IP generator for IPv4 networks.

Download http://geoipgen.googlecode.com/files/geoipgen-0.4.tar.gz
Latest Version 0.4, 7th March 2009
License BSD
Author Andrew Horton aka urbanadventurer, MorningStar Security

Introduction

GeoIPgen is a country-to-IPs generator. It’s a geographic IP generator for IPv4 networks that uses the MaxMind GeoLite Country database.

Geoipgen is the first published software that uses a geographic ip database in reverse to translate from country-to-IPs instead of the usual use of IP-to-country to produce the complete set of IP addresses for a country. Previously software has generated IP address ranges so that entire countries can be blocked by a firewall and the technique used by geoipgen has been discussed before by the GNUcitizen researchers.

I love any tool that makes use of MaxMind's geolocation database. This one is no exception.

Paul Browning, a professor of Middle Eastern history at Columbia University, examines one of the ancient parchment scrolls whose content is being taken literally by a surprising number of people.

"I was at my wits' end over what to do about my failing marriage," Reuss said. "Marjorie and I thought about counseling, therapy, even divorce. In the end, though, I got the help I needed from a book of stories inscribed by an itinerant Middle Eastern shepherd many millennia ago."

One of their best.

Researchers postulate that each individual has a "set point" for happiness, which is largely determined by birth and genes. Deviations from that point tend to be short-lived.

How does money affect happiness? Once people are free from deprivation, the tie between money and happiness begins to fray. There's generally positive correlation but money yields diminishing returns.

Middle-class and affluent people are often stuck on a "hedonic treadmill" as they sacrifice personal relationships for diminishing returns.

They why do people pursue wealth? Psychologists argue that they are seeking "positional advantage." Most people are happy with less money on one condition - "everyone else is also making less."

An interesting piece of reading...

We've recently seen the largest explosion ever recorded: a supergiant star two hundred times bigger than the sun utterly obliterated by runaway thermonuclear reactions triggered by gamma ray-driven antimatter production.  The resulting blast was visible for months because it unleashed a  cloud of radioactive material over fifty times the size of our own star, giving off a nuclear fission glow visible from galaxies away.

The antimatter annihilates with its opposite, as antimatter is wont to do, but the problem is that the speed of antimatter explosion - which is pretty damn fast - is still a critical delay in the gamma-pressure holding up the star. The outer layers sag in, compressing the core more, raising the temperature, making more energetic gamma rays even more likely to make antimatter and suddenly the whole star is a runaway nuclear reactor beyond the scale of the imagination.  The entire thermonuclear core detonates at once, an atomic warhead that's not just bigger than the Sun - it's bigger than the Sun plus the mass of another ten close by stars. 

The entire star explodes.  No neutron star, no black hole, nothing left behind but an expanding cloud of newly radioactive material and empty space where once was the most massive item you can actually have without ripping space.  The explosion alone triggers alchemy on a suprasolar scale, converting stars' worth of matter into new radioactive elements.

And we saw this.  This really happened.  

Brutally awesome.

A couple weeks ago, Biz explained how Twitter users were being victimized by phishing scams spread primarily through links in Direct Messages. Basically, people click the link and bad things happen. My team can only detect these scams after malicious links have already been sent out.

Today, we’re launching a new service to protect users that strikes a major blow against phishing and other deceitful attacks. By routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service, we can detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links across all of Twitter. Even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we'll be able keep that user safe.

A much needed step.