Chris PeBenito

(Photo: Aaron Friedman)

Genius investor Warren Buffett (right) is worth $62.7 billion. But his children will see only a small fraction of it when he dies. He's leaving them some money, but only what he describes as "enough money so that they would feel they could do anything, but not so much that they could do nothing."

He's one of many self-made millionaries and billionaries who is intentionally leaving only small portions of their fortunes to their children. They're not doing it out of spite, but out of love. The famous and wealthy chef Nigella Lawson put it like this:

I am determined that my children should have no financial security. It ruins people not having to earn money.

Roxanne Roberts investigated this trend for the Washington Post. She describes how one multi-millionaire arranged his estate:

‘We probably struggled over this more than any other issue,” says a local self-made multimillionaire. The businessman and his wife, worth hundreds of millions, grew up modestly in middle-class families and wanted to create a financial plan that would take care of their children — but not spoil them — if the couple died suddenly.

“We were horrified by what might happen if they had control of a large amount of money at a young age,” he says. “The more we stared at that, the more we became uncomfortable.”

Inspired by Buffett’s example, they created trusts for each of their now college-age children. Each kid has $2.5 million controlled by trustees, who can release money only for education, health care, a home purchase or a business start-up. Any unspent money in the trust will continue to be invested and grow.

Those restrictions remain in place until each child reaches age 40; after that, the money is all theirs to do as they please. In their 20s and 30s, the funds are there to get them launched; by 40, their parents assume they will be mature enough to use the money wisely or save it as a safety net.

-via Marginal Revolution

General Dynamics C4 Systems and NICTA are pleased to announce the open sourcing of seL4, the world's first operating-system kernel with an end-to-end proof of implementation correctness and security enforcement. It is still the world's most highly-assured OS. And here's the code.

An art installation from the Koln International School of Design aims to give us a feel for the ethereal radio waves we take for granted every day. Binairy Talk, created by Niklas Isselburg and Jakob Killian, uses a sound generator and pulsing device...

• Read more about EU says right to be forgotten is Google’s mess

Srikanth Rajagopalan, PM Director and Workplace aficionado

Recently at Google I/O, we announced a comprehensive set of new features that will allow IT organizations to easily deploy and manage Android devices in enterprise environments. These features will be built into the upcoming Android L release.

Samsung, with its KNOX technology, has been a thought leader in the enterprise mobility space. In order to accelerate Android adoption in the enterprise, we have partnered with Samsung to bring key KNOX functionality into Android, for the benefit of the entire Android ecosystem. We thank Samsung for their contributions. These new capabilities will make it easy for IT organizations to allow employees to bring their own Android devices to work (BYOD) and use them on the corporate network or to simply issue new Android devices to their employees. IT administrators will be able to manage a wide range of Android devices from many manufacturers, using third-party Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) solutions that are built on top of the new enterprise APIs launching with Android L release.

Google and Samsung together designed the new enterprise APIs around three major concepts:

• Device and data security
• Support for IT policies and restrictions
• Mobile application management

Device and data security

At the core of the expanded enterprise capabilities being introduced in Android ‘L’ lies a set of technologies that are designed to keep personal and corporate data both separate and safe. We achieve the data separation by building on the existing multi-user support in Android: personal and corporate applications will run as two separate Android users. Data is kept safe by using block-level disk encryption as well as verified boot technology. For those of you familiar with KNOX, this is analogous to KNOX Workspace. EMMs will be able to take advantage of new Android SDK APIs to enable the creation of a managed profile, which is where all corporate applications and data will reside.

Support for IT restrictions and policies

EMMs can use new Android SDK APIs , which have evolved from KNOX APIs, to allow IT admins to enforce a wide set of policies, ranging from system settings and certificate provisioning to application-specific (e.g. Chrome) configurations and restrictions.

Mobile application management

EMMs will be able to use new backend APIs, adapted from KNOX APIs and built around strong security principles for on-device app deployment, to allow IT admins to curate the corporate application catalog and to remotely deploy applications to the managed profile on the employees’ devices.

We encourage developers interested in the new Enterprise APIs to download and test the Android L Developer Preview. For developers who have already built applications using Samsung KNOX APIs, Samsung will be providing a KNOX Compatibility Library that will let such applications run on all Android L devices.

You can read more about this collaboration on the Samsung KNOX blog. Stay tuned for additional details.

 You’re sitting in your living room. All you want to do is watch some Game Of Thrones on your day off… but your Chromecast refuses to respond. All it will do is play Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. It might be this little box’s fault. Read More

In this infuriating video, Colin Nederkoorn records his computer streaming Netflix's test video over his Verizon FiOS connection. Then, via a VPN on the same home network, he receives a nearly ten-times faster stream.

Read the rest

There are uncountable multitudes of weather apps in the Play Store, which makes Earth Networks' latest move all the more perplexing. The company has removed its popular WeatherBug Elite app from the Play Store, much to the chagrin of paying users. We reached out to Earth Networks looking for specifics about the removal, and have learned that there will only be a single WeatherBug app going forward, and it will offer an ad-free experience in the form of an annual subscription.

Earth Networks (WeatherBug) Quietly Kills Premium Version Of App, Plans Subscriptions For Ad-Free Experience [Update] was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Maybe it's just because I'm an editor, but I think that Weird Al Yankovic's latest song, "Word Crimes"—a parody of Robin Thicke's kinda-creepy song "Blurred Lines"—is a masterpiece. Flossers obviously know the difference between its/it's and there/their/they're, but you'll still probably get a kick out of the lyric video, which you can watch below.

"Word Crimes" comes just a day after Yankovic released "Tacky," a parody of Pharell Williams' "Happy," which is also pretty great. You can get your copy of his new album, Mandatory Fun, here.

The original Nintendo Game Boy recently turned 25 years old, and even though mobile gaming has come a long way from the days of tiny green pixels, and screens so small you can hardly tell what's going on in the game, there’s still a whole lotta charm packed into that iconic Game Boy package:

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The Game Boy might look a little dated to the younger generation, but to those of us who were kids when the Game Boy was the new gaming hotness that little green screened Boy will always hold a special place in our hearts.

The Fine Bros present Kids React To Game Boy, and those Bros continue to do a fine job of showing us what's wrong with youngsters these days- they're way too hard to please!

-Via Geekologie

(Photo: Dayton Daily News)

Kevin Whitney is a farmer in Chickasa, Oklahoma. One day last October, he leaned over a grain elevator while inspecting its interior. His cell phone fell out of his shirt pocket and into a silo containing 280,000 bushels of grain.

(Image: KFOR)

Whitney assumed that it was lost. But it wasn't. The phone was going on a long journey down the Arkansas and then Mississippi Rivers until it arrived at a depot in Convent, Louisiana. Then it was loaded onto a ship that passed through the Panama Canal until it arrived in northern Japan.

There, another man found the phone and tried to locate its owner. KFOR News reports:

“The man on the other end said, ‘is this Kevin Whitney?’ I said yeah this is Kevin. He said, ‘did you lose a cell phone?’ I said yeah I lost a cell phone last fall.”

A worker at a grain mill in Japan mailed the phone back to Louisiana and from there it was sent to Kevin in Chickasha.

“It’s crazy I can’t believe it. What really shocked me about it all was what a small world it is. There a lot of a lot of meaningful pictures on it so we are real glad to get the phone back,” said Whitney.

-via Rocket News 24

Personally, in all my years of application development, I have had zero use of ternary operators.

You might argue that ternary operators are useful in that they reduce the code footprint of an application of those unnecessarily lengthy if-then-else statements. But really...who are we kidding here? The only practical application of ternary operator is to either intentionally obfuscate your code or use it as a soapbox to brag about how "l33t" you are.

Case in point, the single line of code that Hrvoje P. sent in.

FailSafe==0?'No technical alarms':((FailSafe&1)!=0&&(FailSafe&2)!=0&&(FailSafe&4)!=0&&(FailSafe&8)!=0?'Detection zones staying in a given state; Bad visibility;
Initialization; Bad configuration':((FailSafe&1)!=0&&(FailSafe&2)!=0&&(FailSafe&4)!=0?'Detection zones staying in a given state; Bad visibility; Initialization':
((FailSafe&1)!=0&&(FailSafe&2)!=0&&(FailSafe&8)!=0?'Detection zones staying in a given state; Bad visibility; Bad configuration':((FailSafe&1)!=0&&(FailSafe&4)!=0&&
(FailSafe&8)!=0?'Detection zones staying in a given state; Initialization; Bad configuration':((FailSafe&2)!=0&&(FailSafe&4)!=0&&(FailSafe&8)!=0?'Bad visibility;
Initialization; Bad configuration':((FailSafe&1)!=0&&(FailSafe&2)!=0?'Detection zones staying in a given state; Bad visibility':((FailSafe&1)!=0&&(FailSafe&4)!=0?'Detection 
zones staying in a given state; Initialization':((FailSafe&1)!=0&&(FailSafe&8)!=0?'Detection zones staying in a given state; Bad configuration':((FailSafe&2)!=0&&
(FailSafe&4)!=0?'Bad visibility; Initialization':((FailSafe&2)!=0&&(FailSafe&8)!=0?'Bad visibility; Bad configuration':((FailSafe&4)!=0&&(FailSafe&8)!=0?'Initialization; Bad 
configuration':((FailSafe&1)!=0?'Detection zones staying in a given state':((FailSafe&2)!=0?'Bad visibility':((FailSafe&4)!=0?'Initialization':((FailSafe&8)!=0?'Bad 
configuration':'Unknown')))))))))))))))

(via Bruce Sterling)

Tim Murray, a self-identified "human," is contesting the Republican Congressional nomination in Oklahoma City's third district, on the grounds that his opponent, the incumbent Rep. Frank Lucas, was secretly replaced with a body-double after being executed by the World Court in Ukraine "on or about jan. 11, 2011." Read the rest

The ACLU reports [PDF] that when it made Freedom of Information requests for Massachusetts SWAT team records, the SWATs claimed that because they were organized as "law enforcement councils" (jointly owned by many police departments, with additional federal funding) that they were not government agencies at all, but rather private corporations, and not subject to open records laws.

SWATs are the white-hot center of the increasingly brutal and militarized response of US police forces, which have outfitted themselves with ex-Afghanistan/Iraq military materiel and have deployed it in an escalating violent series of attacks, largely as part of the war on drugs. As Radley Balko writes in the Washington Post, the SWATs' claim to be private companies doesn't pass the giggle test: they are funded by the government, pay government employees, and do the government's business.

The argument boils down to this: we are not the police, we are private mercenaries armed with automatic weapons and military-grade vehicles and equipment, and when we attack and kill in the streets of American cities, we do so as private soldiers who happen to be funded by the police departments' budgets.

The ACLU is suing the North Eastern Massachusetts Law Enforcement Council to challenge this ruse, but even if they win, this should be setting off alarm bells for anyone who believes in good government and responsible policing. The cornerstone of democratic legitimacy is a duty to the public, with all the transparency and respect that implies. When police forces up and down the state structure themselves to create and exploit a loophole that lets them obscure the details of their most violent, most spectacular screw-ups -- which generally result in gruesome injuries and deaths to innocent members of the public -- there is no way they can claim to be acting in the public interest.

The fact that the city governments that oversee these departments and the federal agencies that fund the LECs have been complicit in this suggests that this isn't a matter of police overreach, but rather is a policy that goes literally all the way to the top of the policing regulatory structure in America. Read the rest

You know the scenario: friends come over, want to use your Wi-Fi, and expect you to just hand over the password. I don't know about you guys, but I'm pretty weird about just giving my password to everyone who walks through the door, regardless of how well I know them. Most of time I opt to type my password in for them, but there is an easier way: store your Wi-Fi info on an NFC tag.

Android "L" Feature Spotlight: Write Wi-Fi Passwords To NFC Tags Directly From Android was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

New submitter thermowax sends a report on how Massachusetts SWAT teams are dodging open records requests by claiming to be corporations. From the article: As it turns out, a number of SWAT teams in the Bay State are operated by what are called law enforcement councils, or LECs. These LECs are funded by several police agencies in a given geographic area and overseen by an executive board, which is usually made up of police chiefs from member police departments. ... Some of these LECs have also apparently incorporated as 501(c)(3) organizations. And it's here that we run into problems. According to the ACLU, the LECs are claiming that the 501(c)(3) status means that they're private corporations, not government agencies. And therefore, they say they're immune from open records requests. Let's be clear. These agencies oversee police activities. They employ cops who carry guns, wear badges, collect paychecks provided by taxpayers and have the power to detain, arrest, injure and kill. They operate SWAT teams, which conduct raids on private residences. And yet they say that because they've incorporated, they're immune to Massachusetts open records laws. The state's residents aren't permitted to know how often the SWAT teams are used, what they're used for, what sort of training they get or who they're primarily used against.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Rejoice, speeding drivers! The new 2015 Hyundai Genesis, which goes on sale around the world this year, will soon have the ability to automatically brake for speed cameras. The car will have a built-in map of speed cameras and average speed cameras, and then use a combination of GPS and its fancy Automatic Emergency Braking technology to brake if you're still going over the speed limit when you reach the camera. While this feature is probably legal, it does appear to go against the spirit of speed cameras; after all, if you can just keep your foot down, and rely on the car to automatically brake for speed cameras, that's hardly very safe, right?

The video of Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore's address to the Pastors-for-Life in Mississippi conference last January has gained recent notoriety, thanks to the judge's amazing assertion that only Christianity is entitled to First Amendment protection under US law. The top jurist bases his assertion on some rather dubious history and theology, which Kyle Whitmore carefully debunks. But it seems unlikely that a Chief Justice wouldn't know about this stuff. A fairer assumption is that he simply chooses not to notice it. Read the rest

In this video, shot in April by "Ex-Cop Law Student," Gray County Sheriff's Deputy Stokes tries every conceivable tactic to illegally intimidate a citizen who is peacefully recording him without interfering. Deputy Stokes invents imaginary laws, tries repeatedly to seize the camera, illegally orders the citizen to stop recording, demands identity papers without justification. When all else fairs, the Deputy declares that if the citizen journalist doesn't comply, that he can just "make stuff up" to make him stop. Read the rest

Greenhouse is a browser plugin created by Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer. It seeks out the names of elected US officials on any web-page you load in your browser and adds a pop-up link to their names listing the major donors to their campaigns. It uses 2012 election-cycle data drawn from Opensecrets's repository.

I've long suggested something like this as a way of improving political coverage. Indeed, you could imagine it going both ways -- any time the name of a company or individual who had made some big campaign contributions shows up in a webpage, you get a list of their political beneficiaries. Ideally, this would be an open framework to which data from any political race could be added. Read the rest

Sometimes corresponding events that might otherwise be considered mere coincidence are so amazing that they're attributed to serendipity or universal irony. This... isn't one of those times. But it might just make you go, "huh." Google's recent acquisition Nest Labs has launched the Nest Developers Program, which will allow developers to easily create connections between the smart thermostat and smoke detector hardware and other integrated devices. You can check out various tools and documentation at developer.nest.com.

Nest Labs Launches A Developer Program On The Same Day Its Hardware Gets Rooted was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

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In a high school basketball game last year, Izzy Wagner of Mount Miguel High School (Spring Valley, CA) had a clear, unopposed dunk. But he missed. He saw this while still in the air. So, hanging from the rim, he grabbed the rebounding ball and secured a dunk.

Alas, it was for naught. Sports on the Side, a news site for sports in the San Diego area, informs us that the rules of basketball do not permit dunking while hanging from the rim.

-via 22 Words

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Don't stand too close to the blood worm. It'll shoot its mouth out at you and grab you with its teeth. And the blood worm (Glycera dibranchiata) is venomous, thanks to a venom gland that contains a neurotoxin.

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Remember what the 1976 documentary Squirm taught us: blood worms crave your flesh.

-via Nerdcore

You've probably seen this image making the rounds on social media. It shows a method of doing basic subtraction that's intended to appear wildly nonsensical and much harder to follow than the "Old Fashion" [sic] way of just putting the 12 under the 32 and coming up with an answer. This method of teaching is often attributed to Common Core, a set of educational standards recently rolled out in the US.

But, explains math teacher and skeptic blogger Hemant Mehta, this image actually makes a lot more sense than it may seem to on first glance. In fact, for one thing, this method of teaching math isn't really new (our producer Jason Weisberger remembers learning it in high school). It's also not much different from the math you learned back when you were learning how to count change. It's meant to help kids be able to do math in their heads, without borrowing or scratch-paper notations or counting on fingers. What's more, he says, it has absolutely nothing to do with Common Core, which doesn't specify how subjects have to be taught.

I admit it’s totally confusing but here’s what it’s saying:

If you want to subtract 12 from 32, there’s a better way to think about it. Forget the algorithm. Instead, count up from 12 to an “easier” number like 15. (You’ve gone up 3.) Then, go up to 20. (You’ve gone up another 5.) Then jump to 30. (Another 10). Then, finally, to 32. (Another 2.)

I know. That’s still ridiculous. Well, consider this: Suppose you buy coffee and it costs $4.30 but all you have is a $20 bill. How much change should the barista give you back? (Assume for a second the register is broken.)

You sure as hell aren’t going to get out a sheet of paper ...