This is a great idea: “In the old days (before the web) you could not read the operating manual or instructions for an appliance, device, or tool until you got it home and unpacked it. [...] Those days are gone. You can find a PDF version of the manual for most products on the web [...] new rule: get the manual first, before you buy.”

Something like this might have already happened here in the US if our legislators were not for sale.

A neater solution than the subprocess module and what that replaced. Also see envoy.

“This update corrects the number a typographical error in Private Eye’s record number of copies sold.” Whatever that means, the article is quite interesting.

Last June I noted here that a citizen of the UK had been arrested for simply possessing some bomb and poison recipes, even though he had not actually made any bombs or poison. He has now been sentenced to over two years for this “offense.”

The DC government cares about you.

This thing is not a toy.

I thought they were already doing this.

An excellent gnuplot site demonstrating a handful of techniques and tricks for overcoming some of gnuplot’s quirks and producing truly appealing plots.

That’s the title of this website. If you are fascinated by innovative ways to visualize datasets, this provides a rewarding browsing opportunity. A little too much of the cute and pretty and not enough quantitative insight for my tastes, however.

Someone shot and killed a security guard at a Walgreens in Chicago today. Recently Walgreens fired an employee who had defended the people in the store against a gunman, because that kind of behavior is against their policies.

Why does a search for “Christopher Hitchens” return a sleazy “Yellow Pages” directory page in fifth place?

The family of an 88-year-old woman is suing Gary Null because, they claim, she died an excruciating death after consuming Null’s allegedly tainted “Ultimate Power Meal” over three months.

After the initial flurry of encomiums upon the untimely death of Christopher Hitchens, we now see something else.

A Canadian resident visiting Iran was arrested and will be killed for programming. He was tortured to make him confess to things that are physically impossible. The Iranian government’s excuse is that his open-source code happened to have been used by some porn site. The real reason seems to be that he’s an Iranian citizen and engineer who decided to live abroad. The Iranian government hates that. Via Hacker News.

Doctors who become experts at the ins and outs of PubMed searching will be in a better position to provide the best care for their patients.

Experts are concerned about India’s ability to safeguard its growing inventory of nuclear weapons material, largely because of the corruption that pervades that nation’s government.

I just installed this lovely plugin for vim that enhances its status line. Always see what git branch you're on, the filetype, whether the file is dirty, your mode, and more, in an attractive display. Tips: add these lines to your .vimrc file:
set nocompatible " Disable vi-compatibility
set laststatus=2 " Show the statusline even if there's only one buffer
let Powerline_symbols="unicode" " Get fancy symbols without using the patched fonts
You must say rm /tmp/Powerline.cache after every change in configuration to see the results.

Take a gander at the photographs of this beautiful snake, Atheris matildae, newly discovered in Tanzania.

Boing-boing links to what they mistakenly believe is the best NY Times correction ever. In fact, the best NY Times correction ever can be found here.