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News: The Cosmic Connection

The recent report of the ubiquity of extrasolar planets coupled with the fact that it bodes well for searches for life friendly Earth twins, brought me back to my reading of Carl Sagan's 1966 Intelligent Life In The Universe and later article in Sky & Telescope where he came up with a remarkable number in favor of such.

How To: Send SMS Messages with Python

In this article, I'll show you how to send SMS messages with Python. You'll need Python 2.7 or later, urllib and urllib2. The code basically uses an online text messaging service to "POST" html data, as if a person was entering the data themselves. The uses for something like this are unlimited. For example, I modified the basic code so I would receive a text message letting me know every time someone rang my doorbell. The program could interface with Arduino through a serial port, and send d...

Goodnight Byte: HackThisSite, Realistic 1 - Real Hacking Simulations

Last Friday's mission was to accomplish solving HackThisSite, realistic 1. This is the first in a series of realistic simulation missions designed to be exactly like situations you may encounter in the real world. This first mission, we are asked to help a friend manipulate the website voting system for a Battle of the Bands vote count in his favor.

Scrabble Bingo of the Day: CAGANER

Scrabble Bingo of the Day: * CAGANER [n] A caganer is a small figurine of a person defecating in place, pants humorously around the character's ankles. It's a traditional Christmas decoration in Catalonia, Spain and in neighboring areas, where it's placed within the nativity scene.

News: Tips on Car Windscreen Maintenance

Most of the car owners pay attention to the maintenance of the vehicle but among them, many forget to include windscreen maintenance in their periodic checkups. Car windscreen maintenance is quite simple and can be done on your own. In order to maintain car,the drivers should treat this with utmost care as they do for tyres because neglecting small issues in windscreen can land you in deep trouble and on safety prospects as well,it is unsafe.

News: Kaplan University's Visionary Voices–A Collection of Ideas on Continuing Educa

Kaplan University presents Visionary Voices, a series of interviews that chronicle our goals in regards to adult education and continuing education throughout your life. Kaplan University offers online degree programs designed to expand the way you think and help you develop both personally and professionally. Students turn to us to develop their critical thinking skills, to challenge and prepare them for successful careers.*

News: Google Chrome Web Store Gets New Look

This morning, the Official Google Blog and Chrome Blog revealed the new tab page, which lets you flip between your installed apps and your most visited web sites. To take a look at how it works, check out the video below. The Chrome Web Store also received a facelift. It's now a lot bigger and brighter, with infinite scrolling instead of pagination. Adding new apps and extensions is a snap; all you have to do is select your app or extension, read more about it, and then click on the +Add to C...

How To: Make an Unbreakable Linux Password Using a SHA-2 Hash Algorithm

In Linux, all password hashes are normally stored using the MD5 hashing algorithm in the /etc/shadow file, but MD5 is algorithmically weak due to collision vulnerabilities. The new recommended standard are the higher level SHA-2 hashing algorithms, SHA256 or SHA512. As a friend pointed out to me, Ubuntu is currently the only distro implementing SHA-2 as the default. With SHA-2, your passwords take an unreasonably larger amount of time to calculate. This will greatly decrease how many password...

News: Google+ to Support Pseudonyms, Google Apps & More

Since its inception, Google+ users have been a loud, vocal bunch, and they've made their displeasure known about many issues, especially on the lack of support for pseudonyms, Google Apps, and brand pages. It's been especially galling for many Google loyalists, who found their Google+ profiles suspended, when they ended up violating the Google+ "common name" policy.

News: Mobile Game Developer Fined $50,000 by FTC for Soliciting Emails from Minors

Children under the age of 13 possess insight that can blow the minds of their elders, but not the wherewithal to make important life choices for themselves. This is exactly why there are strict rules against marketing cigarettes to them. In 2000, a law went into effect called the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act that institutes similar consumer protections for our youth's online identities, prohibiting companies from soliciting personal information from children under 13 years of age ...

Games That Act Like Films: Are They Really 'Bastard Half-Children'?

Many gamers see the film industry as the premier model that video games should follow, and it's no surprise. Movies are seen as the most legitimate and profitable of all artistic visual mediums, which is certainly qualities practitioners of any new medium would desire. Big budget games like Heavy Rain and L.A. Noire strive for the same level as film by aping its techniques, focusing on storytelling in a cinematic fashion, rather than creating compelling gameplay experiences.

How To: How Do You Handle Payroll?

There is a difference between what is possible, what should be done and what an owner manager may want to do. Decide how you want to handle payroll then determine if your desires and best practices are in agreement. Before I point out the decisions that need to be made, let me make two points. First, all personnel for your business do not have to be employees. Some entities can be run with all non-employee personnel or a combination of both. This is one of the reasons why doing a business pla...

How To: Silence Phone Calls from Annoying Friends and Spammy Callers

Everybody has them. You can say you don't, but it's probably a lie. There's at least one person on your mobile phone that you never, ever want to pick up the phone for. When they call, you cringe and immediately hit the silent button. They're annoying. Overbearing. You hate them, but yet you love them enough to not delete them entirely from your contact list. Maybe if they called just once a week, but once a day is just too much for you to handle. What do you do?

The Google+ Project: Google's Social Network Takes On Facebook

Google recently unveiled the start of their new social network Google+, which is set to compete with Facebook and fix the awkward, broken aspects on online sharing they claim exist. It's currently only open to a limited number of Googlers during its "field trial," and if you weren't one of the lucky ones given an invitation, you can still sign up to be notified when Google+ is available in your area. You can also stay up to date on its Twitter page, GooglePlus.

News: Supreme Court Deems Violent Video Games Protected Under Freedom of Speech

Video games are the newest major expressive media. As such, their role in society is still being defined continuously. A monumentally important example of this took place yesterday at the US Supreme Court. After a long deliberation, the highest court in the land handed down a decision invalidating a California law banning the sale of violent video games to minors on the grounds that video games are protected speech under the First Amendment, like movies and books.

Super Marrow Brothers: The Story of the Greatest Pun Ever

Playing Super Mario Brothers for the NES is the first thing I can ever remember doing, at age 3 sitting on the carpet at my grandparents' house. It was a special game for an entire generation, including British youths Andrej and Adam Zamoyski. It inspired them to eventually become video game testers and designers themselves; Andrej at Lionhead Studios and Adam at Headstrong Games, and then Zynga Mobile UK (until recently called Wonderland Software, developers of Godfinger for the iPhone).

Child of Eden: First Impressions

A woman from space that who has been dead hundreds of years has been resurrected on the internet and you're the IT assigned to fight the viruses attacking her. Child of Eden is a mesmerizing musical game, with fluid animations, great game play, and lots of replay ability.

Minecraft: Musical Wonderland

Have you ever wanted to ride a rollercoaster while listening to Lady Gaga? Or have the Star Wars theme auto-play when you enter your house? You can with Minecraft. Search Youtube for a popular song + Minecraft, and chances are there will be a video for it!