Monogamouse Prairie voles have many vasopressin receptors in the reward centres of their brains. It seems as though these are wired up in a way that causes the animal to take pleasure from monogamy. (previously
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posted by kliuless
on Jan 9, 2010 -
20 comments
In 1984 computer pioneer Ken Thompson wrote one of the seminal works of computer security,
Reflections on Trusting Trust [PDF]. In it he postulated putting a trojan horse inside a compiler as a means of infecting software compiled by it. 25 years later somebody has finally done just that. Researchers at anti-virus house Sophos have
discovered a virus that places a backdoor into applications compiled with the Delphi language. They've identified at least 3000 separate Delphi applications that have had this backdoor compiled into them so far, including banking programs and programs used for cellphone programming.
posted by scalefree
on Aug 20, 2009 -
52 comments
Has some strange man been having orgasms inside your wife or daughter? Sure, you may think not, but can you be sure?? You can now, thanks to the revolutionary new
CheckMate (get it) Semen Detection Kit that is not, in fact, a joke despite how absolutely creepy it seems.
posted by jonson
on Jun 12, 2007 -
66 comments
E-voting systems hacker sees ‘particularly bad’ security issues ...On Tuesday, Dec. 13, we conducted a hack of the Diebold AccuVote optical scan device. I wrote a five-line script in Visual Basic that would allow you to go into the central tabulator and change any vote total you wanted, leaving no logs.... More from the
Washington Post here, where
... Four times over the past year Sancho told computer specialists to break in to his voting system. And on all four occasions they did, changing results with what the specialists described as relatively unsophisticated hacking techniques. ..."Can the votes of this Diebold system be hacked using the memory card?" Two people marked yes on their ballots, and six no. The optical scan machine read the ballots, and the data were transmitted to a final tabulator. The result? Seven yes, one no. ... Verified Voting and
Black Box Voting have much much more on all of this.
posted by amberglow
on Jan 23, 2006 -
58 comments
Trusting The Redcoats: How many independent-minded Americans actually rely on the BBC (specially the
World Service) for accurate coverage of American politics? Not to mention
The Guardian. Is it a strictly an elitist, liberal/left-wing phenomenon? What does it mean? What does it say about better-informed liberal newspapers and media of the U.S.? If so, why aren't like-minded Europeans just as cosmopolitan and, say, pay the same attention to news sources like The New York Times, NPR and others, rather than stolidly sticking to their own national staples?
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Jan 14, 2004 -
71 comments
Impeach "the crazies" now! "Can there be any greater violation of the public trust than to bear false witness to the people's representatives in pursuit of short-term political gain? Can there be injuries more immediate to society than to send American citizens to their death on a fraudulent pretext? With each shooting of a U.S. soldier in Iraq, the case for impeachment grows stronger."
posted by acrobat
on Oct 10, 2003 -
28 comments
