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This is a good question. I'd also want to know if the location - public toilets, private workplaces, hospitals and so forth - impacts the germ level. So many things to control for, such little time.

When I was doing a biology class at high school (about 1990) we had to take swabs from any surface to see what would grow. I chose my teeth, and got the sample back a week later.

The teenage genius next to me asked "Don't you brush your teeth? Hurr hurr! Dirty teeth! Dirty teeth!"

This guy went on to work for the (not-United States) government...

Ooh, I'd use that. I hate touching toilet doors because of the number of people who walk off after having a crap who don't wash their hands.

This has been know about for decades. Hell when I was in college in the early 90's one of my intro microbiology labs involved taking samples from the bathrooms, including sampling the air from the hand dryers. It's the reason I skip hand dryers to this day.

Couple of points:

• If you log in to your home account on work hardware or network, you get what you deserve. It's work's hardware/equipment. If they aren't cool, don't trust 'em.
• I can't think of anything that google provides that it doesn't provide over https or similar. Work isn't gonna know what appears on your monitor unless someone is watching over your shoulder. See point 1. Blow your caches and browse incognito if you're worried about someone scanning your cache, etc.

If you only log in to your Google account at home, and you're the only one who sees your computer monitor, then sure, they're just letting companies target you based on what people statistically like you have bought. For some, that may mean lots of ads for clothes, other lots of ads for adult services.

What if you log in to your Google account at work and at home. Your at-home purchases should not lead to targeted ads at work. Lots of people buy not-safe-for-work items; most wouldn't appreciate related ads being shown at work.

This is only "privacy-safe" if all the computers you use are 100% private, and even then, being lumped together with others based on how you use your computer is still a basic privacy breach. Unfortunately, in this day and age it's not only expected, but accepted.

Somehow claiming they have an exclusive hold on a tune from 1893 is appalling.

Makes me want to sing Happy Birthday outside Warner/Chappell's offices on the date of the original copyright. That wouldn't hit a nerve, would it? :D

I already received an email from my VPS provider reassuring us that they, unlike their competitors, will not be pulling and reallocating IPv4 addresses, nor jacking up the price; at least for the foreseeable future. I wonder if that is really happening at other colos, and if they'll charge a premium to customers who, for whatever reason want to keep their specific addresses (does anyone even care)

There is atad of science behind using papertowel efficiently:

TED talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FMBSblpcrc

but it showed that several minutes after drying your hands left you with the same levels, regardless of which method you used.

I wonder what the root of that is - the fact that soaps are meant to break free and rinse-off dirt and germs, versus actually killing the germs? Or that people who use jet dryers just suck at washing their hands, in general?

That is a great idea; Of course it would go without saying that Australians would probably have pub-science down pat :) When I can, I use my used paper towels to grab the door handle, and hope they put a trashcan close by.

Perhaps not as scientific, but more fun to watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pFww_EaLiY

In a recent trip to Sydney the pub around the corner from the hotel had an instep on the toilet door to allow for opening the door with a foot. Surprisingly, people actually used it.

There are a number of studies showing that hand sanitizer is less effective than soap and water, too.

I'm fairly sure I saw this particular study, about hand dryers, back in the mid- to late-1990s, but it showed that several minutes after drying your hands left you with the same levels, regardless of which method you used.

Ultimately, this is only useful for modelling the spread of disease, as most people will not change their hand washing methods anyway.

Waterless hand sanitizer have been around for some time, but leave a weird unclean after-feeling imho; plus i'd imagine there are some people would refuse to use it, leaving the door handle dirtier than the toilet seat :)

Although not an alternative, an improvement could be to use UV light to sanitize the air. I know they are used in some air duct systems, but i'm not sure how efficient or quick they are, particularly for such a high volume of air.

The community is friendly, the posts are well written, the interface is BEAUTIFUL (unlike Soylent which looks like it got thrown up on), there's no corporate tomfoolery, the image preview system is pretty tight, RSS that works reasonably well, and the community isn't weirdly antisemitic (looking at you Soylent). Slashdot is like New York, Soylent is like Detroit, Pipedot is like some pleasant southern town where you're always welcome, and things move slow.

Are there better alternatives?

Besides, perhaps, single use hand towels.

Doesn't mention the new forced air Dyson dryers

Yes it does:

"both jet and warm air hand dryers"

The Dyson is just one model of the modern jet/turbo type hand dryers. The first (LONG before Dyson) was the Mitsubishi Jet Towel. Others include the Excel XLERATOR, American Dryer Extreme Air, World Dryer SLIMdri/SMARTdry/Airforce, BluStorm, Saniflow, ASI turbo, and more.

Personally, I HATE them all... The noise level is ridiculously ear-shattering, and even in low-traffic restrooms they leave wet trails across the wall and a puddle on the floor underneath them. Even at 3X the operating cost, I'd gladly go with warm air units.

Doesn't mention the new forced air Dyson dryers

Time to stop using a gmail account for online services

Actually, a link next to would be nice. Especially for copy/pasting directly to a comment.

Well the issue is not that France wants Google to remove the entries for all countries, what they want, is that Google remove it on all domains inside France.

Currently if you go to google.fr and search one of the remove entries, it will display those results. But if you change the domain to google.com, it will show them.

Considering most people don't use google.fr, google.ie, etc, but use google.com instead, Google's "implementation" is pathetic.

Now we can argue wether it should be implemented at all, but saying that you implemented the request when you actually haven't is simply being in contempt.

Actually, Google would have to pull out of the entire EU, not just France.

You should probably save your comments for when these stories get pushed to the front page. Here in the pipe, hardly anyone will see them. This is really for editing the story before publication... corrections, more/better links, etc.

Not sure when these will go live... I figured waiting for maybe 3 up-votes would be no big deal, but they've been sitting at +1 for days and days.

Has this sort of thing happened before?

Global companies are used to having to censor for certain countries, but it's quite different here with France telling Google to enforce this right-to-be-forgotten thing globally or else stop doing business in France.

So is it better to wipe your hands on your clothes than use a hand-dryer?

Also, I'm pretty sure it had been established years ago (nowhere near as recently as Nov. 2014, the date on the article) that hand-dryers incubate bacteria.

You realize this machine is a modified Lenovo too, right? In fact all the RYF laptops are. Even though they've been doing some bad stuff recently, everyone else is still worse. Sad as that is.

You can still connect a higher res screen using HDMI. This one is using DSI port and keeps the HDMI port free for other uses.

Not a great read... Over and over they speculate about this theory or that, then walk it back with "but that's assuming" xyz...

See them keep repeat that pattern reminded me of something:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXOebOaBFV4

In 1945 the Germans fled westwards. In 2015 the Ukrainians flee eastwards. Is that too subtle for dullards?

It's an old Soviet-era propaganda move, to cause suffering, then offer to help those affected.

Back when they blockaded West Berlin, and saw the airlift starting to succeed, the Soviets offered supplies to any hungry West Berliners who went over and turned-in their ration cards.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berlin_Blockade#Initial_responses

Apparently the Ukrainans are less cautious, less skeptical of the aid the Russian government is offering, than the Germans were.

Do we really need to compare the ample human rights in the UK against the murders of journalists in Russia?

Nobody cares about the BBC noose, the hostility is from the ground up because they lie so much.

Russians are perfectly able to read and watch whatever they like, they're the largest user base of I2P and the pathetic official attempts at blocking websites is only the Russian version of Feinstein with all the US faux moral labels, ratings, and warnings.

In 1945 the Germans fled westwards. In 2015 the Ukrainians flee eastwards. Is that too subtle for dullards?

Oh good.

You can always trust the reassuring words of the NSA relayed by an AC.

http://io9.com/could-life-have-emerged-on-earths-near-twin-1719964421

Yes, super-Earth.... or mini-Neptune. Above link gives a few more details.

Back in the day, the Russians were using Molniya orbits for their communications, so I just assumed Russian dishes could move.

Of course, picking up their broadcasts in the states required moving dishes because we're on the low-altitude fast-moving side of the orbit.

Important? Try essential. If you have to take regular 3hr bus trips it just makes the time fly. Imagine streaming content on a bus trip. I would blow my mobile data plan in no time flat.

It's okay. Intel has never spied on their customers. Ever. Those stories about backdoors and phoning home are completely false. There is no "second operating system" in the hardware hidden from users, capable of being hacked into, capable of taking control of the primary OS. Complete and utter lies. Trust us. - NSA

Lenovo? Really? Would never trust Lenovo again. Ever. Not even their hardware.

You can easily almost double the vertical resolution.

Turn it 90°.

Stallman uses a Lemote Yeelong,

From your link: "Saturday January 23, 2010."

I would think it safe to assume he has upgraded to something more modern in the intervening 5.7 years span...

Yup, he sure has... Upgraded at least to a Thinkpad X60 from these guys since then.

He now uses a Lenovo ThinkPad X60 on which the FSF installed libreboot and Trisquel.

I think the overriding factor is that its all currently closed source, with chunks being supplied by 3rd party developers

A server BMC is really just an low-resource embedded ARM based computer, mounted on the motherboard. Obviously that's something pretty easy for a Linux image to do. In fact I distinctly remember reading about some group working on writing just such an open source BMC firmware, but I can't motivate myself to go try and look it up again.

You can't just replace any BMC firmware with your own image, as they are cryptographically signed like the rest of the server firmware, but if you're working with the OEM, there's no reason you couldn't have an open source BMC image, and maybe work around the need for signing by only allowing updates via a boot-time BIOS prompt, a physical jumper, or similar physical access requirement that wouldn't work as well with (remote) servers.

I think the overriding factor is that its all currently closed source, with chunks being supplied by 3rd party developers. If the laptop does well, maybe it will help nudge these companies to developing an open-source equivalent to protect their market share; better yet, the community creates a solution themselves

How about just linking to the story like #M0VY (with all the comments), instead of directly to a single comment like #MBJ5 ?

Notifications include links to both for easy click-through.

Is there any way to change this behaviour?

Pipedot isn't exactly bursting with comments. I have no need to filter any out.

I was expecting to see some exotic hardware, but no. Intel CPU, Intel graphics, the usual suspects produce the other components.

Stallman uses a Lemote Yeelong, which is a very obscure MIPS-powered netbook which supports 100% FOSS all the way down.

Removing/disabling existing out-of-band management strikes me as a distinct step BACKWARDS. OoBM is extremely useful and convenient (and uncommon in consumer hardware). It's unfortunate that manufacturers don't put a high priority on the security of their OoBM firmware, so I understand the reason for the removal... but I'd still call it on-par with protecting your computer by completely disconnecting it from all networks. It'll be secure that way, but...

I agree the cost sounds really high, but really, for a rasberry pi, I think the resolution and size is ok.

There are more IPv4 addresses to be had, right now, but the point of the article is that they will run out pretty soon, too, and transition to IPv6 takes some time. Any big entities that haven't at least begun, are late, behind most others, and may run out of time.

Pipecode has always worked that way with direct links. You have to link the last/bottom comment to see the whole chain. It's the polar opposite of /code but it works.

With all the smartphone screens these days, you would think they would be able to nab a much higher resolution screen (and likely cheaper) part from a phone maker's spare parts bin. With some new phones getting 4K screens today, something with only 480 vertical lines sounds a bit dated.

The Internet will continue to operate, but all organizations must now accelerate their efforts to deploy IPv6.

Well, no. They can still buy IPv4 addresses, just not from ARIN, no? ARIN running out might increase the price per address, at worst.