Photo: El Celler De Can Roca

Elite Traveller has a list of  top 100 Restaurants in the World. Below are top 5:

Alinea

 

1723 N Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60614
(312) 867-0110

 

Chef: Grant Achatz

 

El Celler de Can Roca

 

Calle Can Sunyer, 48, 17007 Girona +34 972 22 21 57

 

Chef: Joan Roca

 

Azurmendi

 

Larrabetzu, Spain

 

Chef: Eneko Atxa

 

Eleven Madison Park

 

New York, USA

 

Chef: Daniel Humm

 

The Fat Duck

 

Bray, UK

 

Chef: Heston Blumenthal

The only way to escape tracking at this point is not to use Internet. It doesn't come as a surprise that Facebook tracks all visitors to a third party websites. 

If you do not want to appear on CCTV camera, do not get out of the house.

The researchers now claim that Facebook tracks computers of users without their consent, whether they are logged in to Facebook or not, and even if they are not registered users of the site or explicitly opt out in Europe. Facebook tracks users in order to target advertising.

The issue revolves around Facebook’s use of its social plugins such as the “Like” button, which has been placed on more than 13m sites including health and government sites.

Facebook places tracking cookies on users’ computers if they visit any page on the facebook.com domain, including fan pages or other pages that do not require a Facebook account to visit.

When a user visits a third-party site that carries one of Facebook’s social plug-ins, it detects and sends the tracking cookies back to Facebook - even if the user does not interact with the Like button, Facebook Login or other extension of the social media site.

EU privacy law states that prior consent must be given before issuing a cookie or performing tracking, unless it is necessary for either the networking required to connect to the service (“criterion A”) or to deliver a service specifically requested by the user (“criterion B”).

Nike's "Just Do It" slogan was based on the last words of a convict before he was executed by firing squad:

The murderer was Gary Gilmore, who had grown up in Portland, Oregan – the city that is home to both Nike and Wieden+Kennedy. In 1976 Gilmore robbed and murdered two men in Utah and was executed by firing squad the following year (by some accounts Gilmore actually said "Let's do this" just before he was shot).

Read One More Drink at esquire.

Drinking a fourth drink dictates that a certain kind of evening is about to unfold: namely, one in which you will be drunk. Because nobody stops at four drinks. Four is to inebriation what the St. Louis arch is to the West: It's the gateway drink, the point of no return. A fourth empty glass or bottle or mason jar set on the bar or table or broken in the hobo fire in front of you is your announcement to the rest of the world that, at some point in the next twelve to twenty-four hours, you will be left trying very hard to remember or even harder to forget.

But a brave new world has opened up for you, a great blinding universe of magic and possibility. You're a man who might start confusing nouns with verbs. You're a man who might fall off of his barstool. You're a man who might sleep on the floor in his clothes.

In Alaska, people search for the cost of a gallon of milk. In New Jersey, people search for the cost of a funeral. In other states, vasectomies, facelifts, and prostitues are popular searches. Here are some of the autocomplete predictions of search queries for goods and services elsewhere.

Left: Reliquary arm of St. Valentine 14th century Swiss Right: 2 Chainz

Left: Detail of "The Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence," oil on wood, by Masters of the Acts of Mercy (Austrian, Salzburg, c. 1465) Right: ASAP Ferg

This Tumblr compares art from before the 16th century and contemporary images of hip hop. These are some of my favorites.

The NY Times Magazine got Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle, to "drive across America and write about it without talking to a single American":

I'd seen poverty before, of course, even incomprehensible poverty, as in the slums outside Maputo, in Mozambique. But I'd never seen anything like this. If what I had seen tonight - house after house after house abandoned, deserted, decaying as if there had been disaster - if this was poverty, then it must be a new kind poverty, maybe in the same way that the wealth that had amassed here in the 20th century had been a new kind of wealth. I had never really understood how a nation that so celebrated the individual could obliterate all differences the way this country did. In a system of mass production, the individual workers are replaceable and the products are identical. The identical cars are followed by identical gas stations, identical restaurants, identical motels and, as an extension of these, by identical TV screens, which hang everywhere in this country, broadcasting identical entertainment and identical dreams. Not even the Soviet Union at the height of its power had succeeded in creating such a unified, collective identity as the one Americans lived their lives within. When times got rough, a person could abandon one town in favor of another, and that new town would still represent the same thing.

Was that what home was here? Not the place, not the local, but the culture, the general?

George Lois created a number of iconic ad campaigns as well as dozens of fantastic Esquire covers.

Jen Christiansen tracked down for Scientific American the iconic image on the cover of Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures. Designer Peter Saville found the image, a stacked graph of successive radio signals from pulsar CP 1919, in a 1977 astronomy encyclopedia but it actually originated in a 1970 Ph.D. thesis.

By now I had also combed through early discovery articles in scientific journals and every book anthology on pulsars I could get my hands on to learn more about early pulsar visualizations. The more I learned, the more this descriptor in the 1971 Ostriker caption began to feel significant; "computer-generated illustration." The charts from Bell at Mullard were output in real time, using analogue plotting tools. A transition in technology from analogue to digital seemed to have been taking place between the discovery of pulsars in 1967 to the work being conducting at Arecibo in 1968 through the early 1970's. A cohort of doctoral students from Cornell University seemed to be embracing that shift, working on the cutting edge of digital analysis and pulsar data output. One PhD thesis title from that group in particular caught my attention, "Radio Observations of the Pulse Profiles and Dispersion Measures of Twelve Pulsars," by Harold D. Craft, Jr. (September 1970).

Sadly, last year I couldn't find my favorite graffitis in Amsterdam. The construction wall where they were painted was removed.

NY Times former rock critic Mike Jahn reflects on the lifes of dead stars he used to know:

The number of dead rockers -- some of them good and talented people -- of my acquaintance stands at 44. A few are important music insiders. This year there are three additions who died in 2014. This year I’ve added expanded commentary and another yarn.

It's tempting to think that drugs were behind most of these abrupt departures. However, in many cases death came via largely unrelated medical problems -- heart attacks, strokes, or cancer, mainly. A number did die of overdoses of either drugs or alcohol, sometimes both. Others succumbed to crashes by aircraft, cars, and one by skiing into a tree. There was one fatal infection (I expected more). There also were murders and one suicide, possibly to avoid death by any of the aforementioned. 

If you're adding up and tracking deaths per band, we’re talking about three-fifths each of Canned Heat and MC5, half each of the Doors and Who, one-third of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and Peter, Paul & Mary, and a quarter of the Beatles.

They were rockers who died, died. Here's the list, 2014 update.

Starling flocks, it turns out, are best described with equations of “critical transitions” — systems that are poised to tip, to be almost instantly and completely transformed, like metals becoming magnetized or liquid turning to gas. Each starling in a flock is connected to every other. When a flock turns in unison, it’s a phase transition.

Read the article at Wired

This news do not come as a surprise:

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd's (BABA.N) shares fell more than 10 percent early on Thursday, wiping more than $25 billion of market value after third quarter revenue at the Chinese internet giant fell short of analysts' expectations.

Stanford's free online course for developing iOS apps has been updated for iOS 8 and Swift.

Prerequisites: C language and object-oriented programming experience exceeding Programming Abstractions level, and completion of Programming Paradigms.

Recommended: UNIX, graphics, databases.

Crowdsourced map of sledding locations in New York CIty. Enjoy.

This opinion explains my postion on removing the password reset and retrival mechanism from the system:

It is my personal opinion that all password reset mechanisms in widespread use today are insecure. If you have high security requirements, such as an encryption service would, do not let the user reset their password.

Most websites use an email loop to authenticate users who have forgotten their password. To do this, generate a random single-use token that is strongly tied to the account. Include it in a password reset link sent to the user's email address. When the user clicks a password reset link containing a valid token, prompt them for a new password. Be sure that the token is strongly tied to the user account so that an attacker can't use a token sent to his own email address to reset a different user's password.

The token must be set to expire in 15 minutes or after it is used, whichever comes first. It is also a good idea to expire any existing password tokens when the user logs in (they remembered their password) or requests another reset token. If a token doesn't expire, it can be forever used to break into the user's account. Email (SMTP) is a plain-text protocol, and there may be malicious routers on the internet recording email traffic. And, a user's email account (including the reset link) may be compromised long after their password has been changed. Making the token expire as soon as possible reduces the user's exposure to these attacks.

Attackers will be able to modify the tokens, so don't store the user account information or timeout information in them. They should be an unpredictable random binary blob used only to identify a record in a database table.

Never send the user a new password over email. Remember to pick a new random salt when the user resets their password. Don't re-use the one that was used to hash their old password.

This simulator evolves increasingly effective walking creatures through genetic algorithms. "The names are generated based on each creature's genome. Since the genetic algorithm tends to produce creatures with similar genes, two creatures with similar names will have similar traits.

Sometimes two creatures can have the same name by coincidence, as there are nearly infinite genome possibilities and limited numbers of letters in each name. Much like two people in real life with the same name, that doesn't mean they will behave the same."

On servers running PHP, visit any page, remove the trailing slash, and append any of the following query-strings:

?=PHPE9568F36-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
?=PHPE9568F35-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42
?=PHPB8B5F2A0-3C92-11d3-A3A9-4C7B08C10000
?=PHPE9568F34-D428-11d2-A769-00AA001ACF42

If the vulnerability is present, requests made with these query-strings results in a variety of easter eggs and detailed PHP credits. When these easter eggs are visible, it means that expose_php is enabled on the server. And when expose_php is enabled, PHP-generated pages are sent with X-Powered-By response-headers that give PHP/version infos, such as “X-Powered-By: PHP/5.4.7”. Knowing the version number of software makes it easier for bad guys to research and exploit known vulnerabilities. So let’s take a moment to “plug the leak” by disabling expose_php.

Disable expose_php via php.ini

The recommended solution is to set expose_php = Off