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BBC reports that according to Dmitri Dolgov, lead software engineer for Google's driverless car project, Google's self-driving cars are programmed to exceed speed limits by up to 10 mph when surrounding vehicles are breaking the speed limit, because going more slowly could actually present a danger. In many countries, including the United States, the speed limit is a rather nebulous thing. It's posted, but on many roads hardly anybody obeys it. Almost every driver speeds regularly, and anybody going at or below the limit on a clear road outside the right lane is typically an obstruction to traffic—they will find themselves being tailgated or passed at high speed on the left and right. A ticket for going 1 mph over the limit is an extremely rare thing and usually signals a cop with another agenda or a special day of zero-tolerance enforcement. In fact, many drivers feel safe from tickets up to about 9 mph over the limit. Tickets happen there, but the major penalties require going faster, and most police like to go after that one weaving, racing guy who thinks the limit does not apply to him. Commenting on Google self-drive cars' ability to exceed the speed limit, a Department for Transport spokesman said: "There are no plans to change speed limits, which will still apply to driverless cars".

Jessica Roy reports at NY Magazine that news aggregator Fark has became one of the first original link aggregators to ban misogyny from its community making moderators responsible for ensuring that misogyny doesn't make its way into headlines or comments. Banned headlines include rape jokes, calling women as a group "whores" or "sluts" or similar demeaning terminology, and jokes suggesting that a woman who suffered a crime was somehow asking for it. "There are lots of examples of highly misogynistic language in pop culture, and Fark has used those plenty over the years. From SNL's "Jane, you ignorant slut" to Blazing Saddles' multiple casual references to rape, there are a lot of instances where views are made extreme to parody them. On Fark, we have a tendency to use pop culture references as a type of referential shorthand with one another," says Drew Curtis, founder of Fark. "On SNL and in a comedy movie, though, the context is clear. On the Internet, it's impossible to know the difference between a person with hateful views and a person lampooning hateful views to make a point." According to Roy, Fark's new guidelines are a "refreshing departure from the misguided free speech arguments that sites like Reddit that bend over backwards to defend the handful of misogynist communities that are among its ranks, not to mention the free-floating slut-shaming that snakes its way into regular comment threads."

Jon Evans writes at TechCrunch that some extremely successful companies, notably Facebook and Google, are famously engineer-centric, and many, many engineers go on to become successful CEOs. But at many companies engineers are treated as less-than-equal because they are often viewed as idiot savants. "We may speak the magic language of machines, the thinking goes, but we aren’t business people, so we aren’t qualified to make the most important decisions. That’s for the analysts, the product people, the MBAs. They might throw money our way, but they don’t take our opinions seriously, at least not the ones they understand."

Michael O. Church, describes the different experiences of the same candidate applying for a position of “Senior Software Engineer” vs. “VP of Data Science,” a managerial position. "As an engineering candidate, he faced five gruelling technical interviews and was arbitrarily vetoed by the last interviewer. As a managerial candidate, he essentially chatted his way through behavioral questions–and was offered a lucrative position with a generous relocation package. Church argues that this difference is because engineers have low social status, whereas even managerial candidates, one they’ve proven they can talk the talk, are viewed as equals."

Evans says it’s an inevitable side effect of companies who boast completely non-technical managers. "People who have never written code or soldered diodes, who don’t really understand what and how engineers do what we do, have no alternative but to have blind faith in us. Which, paradoxically, leads to less respect, because it’s the root cause of idiot-savant syndrome," writes Evans. "f you’re an engineer who’s treated as automatically lesser than an business graduate or MBA, or worst of all, treated as a cloistered savant, that’s a warning sign. Consider your future carefully if so."

Oliver Roeder writes at 538 that for living-room players, Scrabble is a test of vocabularies but for world-class players, it’s about cold memorization and mathematical probabilities which is why top player are often computer programmers or mathematicians, not poets or novelists. Think of the dictionary as a giant rulebook of valid text strings not as a compendium of the beauty and complexity of the English language. A good competitive player will have memorized a sizeable chunk of the 83,667 words that are two letters to eight letters long. Great players will know a lot of the 29,150 nine-letter words as well.

To the uninitiated, a scrabble game played by top players looks like they had played in Martian. Here’s a taste: In a single game in last year’s Nationals, Nigel Richards, the champion of the 2010 National Scrabble Championship, played the following words: zarf (a metal holder for a coffee cup), waddy (to strike with a thick club), hulloed (to hallo, to shout), sajous (a capuchin, a monkey), qi (the vital force in Chinese thought), flyboats (a small, fast boat), trigo (wheat) and threaper (one that threaps, disputes). Richards has a photographic memory and is known for his uncanny gift for constructing impossible words by stringing his letters through tiles already on the board. "He is probably the best Scrabble player in the world at this point," says John D. Williams, Jr.. "He's got the entire dictionary memorized. He's pretty much a Scrabble machine, if such a thing exists." So, really, how does he do it? As Richards said in an interview posted on YouTube, “I’m not sure there is a secret. It’s just a matter of learning the words.” All 178,691 of them.

For the last few years, Microsoft has tried to separate the modern version of Internet Explorer from its legacy: a relatively slow, insecure browser saddled with proprietary features. Now Mark Hachman reports at PC World that as recently as a few weeks ago, members of the Internet Explorer development team debated renaming the browser, presumably in an effort to eliminate any distaste from the software's earliest days. According to one member of the Explorer Develop Group during an AMA on Reddit: "It's been suggested internally; I remember a particularly long email thread where numerous people were passionately debating it. Plenty of ideas get kicked around about how we can separate ourselves from negative perceptions that no longer reflect our product today," wrote Jonathon Sampson. "The discussion I recall seeing was a very recent one (just a few weeks ago). Who knows what the future holds :)"

Olga Khazan writes in The Atlantic that police in Ferguson, Missouri, arrested two reporters Wednesday night as protests over the police shooting of an unarmed teenager continued for the fifth day. The journalists, the Washington Post's Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post's Ryan Reilly, were only detained for about 15 minutes before being released, but the incident provoked widespread outrage over the Ferguson police's increasingly brutal tactics.

Lowery wrote that armed officers stormed a McDonald's in which he and Reilly were working and demanded to see ID. They then told Lowery to stop video recording them, and finally they ordered the reporters to leave and claimed they weren't leaving fast enough. According to other reports, the Ferguson police also demanded that an MSNBC camera man and a local Fox News crew take down their cameras. Police hit the crew of Al Jazeera America with tear gas and dismantled their gear.

"The arrest and intimidation of journalists for documenting the events in Ferguson is particularly disturbing because it interferes with the ability of the press to hold the government accountable. But actually, anyone - journalist or otherwise - can take a photo of a police officer," writes Khazan. "Citizens have the right to take pictures of anything in plain view in a public space, including police officers and federal buildings. Police can not confiscate, demand to view, or delete digital photos."

The NYT reports that in 1990, New York City had 147,000 reported auto thefts, one for every 50 residents but last year, there were just 7,400, or one per 1,100 for a 96 percent drop in the rate of car theft. There's been a big shift in the economics of auto theft: Stealing cars is harder than it used to be, less lucrative and more likely to land you in jail. As such, people have found other things to do. The most important factor is a technological advance: engine immobilizer systems, adopted by manufacturers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These make it essentially impossible to start a car without the ignition key, which contains a microchip uniquely programmed by the dealer to match the car. "It's very difficult; not just your average perpetrator on the street is going to be able to steal those cars," says Capt. John Boller, who leads the New York Police Department's auto crime division. Instead, criminals have stuck to stealing older cars.

Now a startup in Chile is working on an unstealable bike by making a lock out of the frame. The only way to steal it is to break the lock, which implies breaking the bike. Or you could try painting your bicycle pink.

Nick Farrell reports that Canadian businessman Yank Barry has sued four Wikipedia editors for defamation over changes they made to his page in a case filed in Ventura County's Superior Court that says Richard Fife, Nate Gertler, Ethan Urbanik, and John Nagle conspired to tarnish his name. The case focuses on VitaPro foods which Barry founded in the late 1980s to create textured vegetable protein aimed at cutting down on worldwide meat consumption. All was going well until the mid-1990s, when Barry was convicted of a kickback scheme involving VitaPro and Texas prisons. At the time Associated Press said that Barry was convicted of bribery, money laundering and conspiracy. However Barry was acquitted in 2005.

One editor "Ganbarreh" states that Fife "made a clear statement about his agenda to maintain defamatory material on the subject's page in order to cause financial harm and threaten the subjects' livelihood". Fife admits that it wasn't his "finest wikipedia moment" and that his edit was intended to "prepare for large amounts of edits biased towards the positive to the article". Barry, a philanthropist and member of the legendary band The Kingsmen of "Louie, Louie" fame, says that he tried to resolve many of the issues with his page diplomatically but was ultimately forced to take legal action. The lawsuit says that the Wikipedia editors removed "truthful and verifiable content from the Wikipedia pages pertaining to plaintiffs with the intent and purpose to downplay, minimize, attack or criticize favorable content about the plaintiffs." "My page was so ridiculously false and made be sound like a terrible person and people believed it causing deals to fall through," says Barry. "I finally had enough."

Lucian Constantin writes at PC World that with the increasing number of 64-bit systems, experts say the incentive is growing for attackers to invest in methods of bypassing defenses like the PatchGuard kernel patching protection and the digital signature enforcement for drivers. "These protections have certainly increased the cost to build and deploy rootkits on 64-bit platforms," say McAfee researchers but roadblocks set in place by 64-bit systems now appear to be "mere speed bumps for well-organized attackers", who have already found ways to gain entry at the kernel level."

The Secure Boot feature of the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) - the BIOS replacement in newer computers-was designed specifically to prevent the installation of bootkits. It works by checking that the boot code inside the MBR is on a pre-approved whitelist and is digitally signed before executing it. However, over the past year security researchers have found several vulnerabilities in UEFI implementations used by many computer manufacturers that can be exploited from inside the OS to disable Secure Boot. Mitre security researcher Corey Kallenberg estimates that Secure Boot can be bypassed on about half of the computers that have the feature enabled. Over the past year OEMs have started to pay a lot more attention to BIOS security research and have started to react, Kallenberg says. "I think we're finally at a place where you'll see OEMs take this more seriously."

Olga Khazan writes at The Atlantic that hangover research is a bit of a neglected field, but there's a lot hangovers can tell us about our brains, our guts, and the epidemiology of alcoholism. According to researcher Richard Stephens from a health standpoint everyone tends to think that hangovers are a good thing because it stops you from drinking too much, like the natural brake on drinking. And yet, a number of studies have actually shown the opposite. "If hangover is a natural brake on drinking, then alcoholics should get the least hangovers of anyone - that the reason they are alcoholic is that they don't have that natural brake on drinking," says Stevens who has been studying hangovers for ten years. "But actually a number of studies in the US have actually shown the opposite, that alcoholics get the most severe hangovers, even when you control for the amount of alcohol consumed. And so it seems like it's a more complex relationship between being at risk of alcoholism and hangovers"

Stevens also says that there's is a biological basis for "the hair of the dog". When you drink alcohol, there's an enzyme in the body that breaks down the ethanol in alcohol into metabolites - after you've had a drink of alcohol and felt drunk, once you start to feel sober again, that's because your body has metabolized the ethanol. But once the ethanol has been metabolized, there are usually other alcohols in smaller quantities in alcoholic beverages. One such compound is methanol, and when the body metabolizes methanol, it metabolizes it into toxins - formaldehyde and formic acid. And those make you feel ill, sort of poison you a little bit. What's interesting though is that the enzymes in your body that break down alcohols would prefer to break down ethanol first and methanol second. "It means that when you're in a hangover phase, if you drink more alcohol you'll actually stop your body from breaking down methanol and the things that are making you feel ill, and instead go back to working on the ethanol and leave the methanol intact."

Finally, a number of studies show that the severity of hangovers declines with age, a finding that cannot be explained by the usual amount of alcohol consumption, frequency of binge drinking, or the proportion of alcohol consumed with meals. "Hangovers predominantly affect younger, less experienced drinkers," says Stephens. "Younger drinkers in their late teens and 20s are several times more likely to get a hangover than older, more experienced drinkers. In light of links between hangover and risk of alcoholism, younger drinkers should beware."