But the co-creator (with Ken Thompson) of the Unix operating system and author of the C programming language deserves more than just a moment of silence from programmers everywhere. The modern digital world is built out of the tools that he created, and their descendents. A lifetime employee of Bell Labs and its various corporate spawn, Ritchie was a geek Prometheus. His gift of fire was code that worked on all kinds of different machines and made possible the interconnection of, well, everything. Unix and C are embedded in the deep structure of the Internet and the entire networked computer domain. The world owes Ritchie an awful lot.

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First, it gives people who have something to say an unprecedented audience that’s both instantaneous and quintessentially democratic. The eulogy is no longer the preserve of the great and the good. Online, anyone can be a broadcaster, a commentator or a curator of news and information.

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Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science and security experts at the Vulnerability Assessment Team at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The experts say the newly developed hack could change voting results while leaving absolutely no trace of the manipulation behind.

"We believe these man-in-the-middle attacks are potentially possible on a wide variety of electronic voting machines," said Roger Johnston, leader of the assessment team "We think we can do similar things on pretty much every electronic voting machine."

The Argonne Lab, run by the Department of Energy, has the mission of conducting scientific research to meet national needs. The Diebold Accuvote voting system used in the study was loaned to the lab's scientists by VelvetRevolution.us, of which the Brad Blog is a co-founder. Velvet Revolution received the machine from a former Diebold contractor

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Someone made a mashup of this weekend's CGI blockbuster and footage of actual gorillas in the wild.

  Now I can sleep peacefully, knowing a giant monkey will never try to commandeer my helicopter. Or at least, not yet.

2. Humanoid robot learns to love bake:

Is this really the best idea that the greatest scientific minds of our century could come up with when they were dreaming up an android?  "Forget that Isaac Asimov stuff, I want my robot to make me delicious cookies!"

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How did this happen? Early today, stories began popping up on Twitter and other social-networking sites hinting at the actor's demise, with links promising "breaking news" on the event. To be fair, considering where we left the warlock, it wouldn't be unreasonable to wonder whether his winning luck had run out.

Fortunately for Sheen, he's not dead. He's just been taking a really long nap, according to a recent tweet from the actor's account.

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A little late to this party, but have you been wondering about that strange name while reading those stories in the past month? Here's a primer of what was -- and may still be -- a grade-A team of mischief makers.

What was LulzSec?

LulzSec emerged suddenly, forcefully and seemingly out of thin air last month. Early on, the group set its sights on Sony, targeting the electronics giant on multiple occasions. (It's unclear whether LulzSec, Anonymous or another party entirely was responsible for the massive PlayStation Network hack that plagued Sony in May and exposed 70 million members' data. But, regardless of its inolvement in that particular coup, LulzSec has continuously terrorized Sony with relish.) 

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2. Flowchart of the day: The major differences between Mac and PC users include a gap in political bias (36 percent of PC users are liberal while 58 percent of Mac users are), education (54 percent had a higher education with a PC, versus 67 with a Mac), and ability to party.

3. Permanent bachelor of the day: Hugh Hefner, whose fiancée Crystal Harris called off their wedding five days before the duo was due to walk down the isle.

4. Amazing machine of the day: This gel-scooper-upper  doesn't seem like it would have much of a purpose ... until you spill mayonnaise on the floor in the exact shape you would have wanted it on your sandwich! Now who is laughing, Dad?!

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IMF spokesman David Hawley says the fund's computer systems are fully functional. IMF told staffers about it on Wednesday but hasn't released a public announcement. The IMF wouldn't give further details.

The New York Times cited unnamed IMF officials as saying the attack was sophisticated and serious.

The IMF is already facing a headache after the arrest of its former leader, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was charged with sexually assaulting a maid in a New York hotel.

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This is probably because Flash programs are those things you only notice when they're terrible: those early animations that looked like someone made a flip book of MSPaint scribbles and called it a cartoon; when your computer crashed because you don't have the right plug-in; when you tried to make a reservation online and the restaurant's totally overwhelming site was way more interactive than necessary.

So why not take the time to recognize Flash programming for what we've accomplished with it? From the looping Nyan Cat to Mark Fiore's Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoons to immersive game play, raise your glass to some of the most innovative uses of Flash!

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"So what about the small fortune that publishers have poured into developing tablet editions that dazzle the senses with sleekly produced animation, live video and audio? They’re fine for the men, but a lot of women think there is nothing wrong with plain old words and pictures. "

I'd be offended if the subtext wasn't that women actually just want to read, dammit, without checking Twitter or Facebook every five minutes.

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If this looks like something you've seen in the movies before, it's because you have. From 3Live's site:

The system is capable of detecting multiple fingers and hands at the same time it allows the sales person to interact with products on the display while it’s all recreated on the customer’s side. Think Tom Cruise goes phone salesperson in Minority Report!

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Back then (it seems like a lifetime ago), personal computers were new, just beginning to penetrate people's lives, as they slowly warmed up to the idea of buying large, bulky desktop computers in order to do spreadsheet analysis and a little bit of word processing. The Internet was still largely the isolated province of scientists like me, cranking out equations to fellow scientists in an arcane language.

There were raging debates about whether this box sitting on your desk would dehumanize civilization with its cold, unforgiving stare. Even political analyst William F. Buckley had to defend the word processor against intellectuals who railed against it and refused to ever touch a computer, calling it an instrument of the philistines.

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U.S. Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey is just such a scientist.

The success of Holt -- a five-time champion during the trivia show's original run 35 years ago -- topped the IBM computer Monday night in a "Jeopardy" exhibition match of congressmen vs. machine held at a Washington hotel.

Holt, a Democrat from the Princeton area, built a lead in categories including "Presidential Rhyme Time," in which the correct response to "Herbert's military strategy" was "Hoover's maneuvers." The congressman also correctly identified hippophobia as the fear of horses.

Watson beat him to the buzzer with the answer "love" when prompted on what Ambrose Bierce described as "a temporary insanity curable by marriage."

Holt played the first round along with Rep. Bill Cassidy, a Louisiana Republican. At the end of the round, Holt had earned $8,600 to Watson's $6,200.

But the computer ultimately triumphed in later rounds against other representatives, amassing a combined $40,300 to the humans' $30,000.

Holt received a round of applause Tuesday at a hearing of the House Natural Resources Committee for besting the computer.

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Christian played the piquant role of "confederate" in the 2009 Loebner Prize competition, an annual Turing Test sponsored by an eccentric entrepreneur. His job was to seem more human than the computer software entered by the primary contestants, who are programmers. The prize money goes to the author of the most human-seeming chatbot, but there's also a citation for the confederate rated "most human" by the judges. "Most Human Human" was the title that Christian, a science writer and poet, coveted for himself.

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So I am naturally envious of the two (?) brilliant minds behind the recently released "Waiting For Godot" and "Great Gatsby" video games. Oh yeah, you can spend hours trying to solve the boss level on the Beckett-Atari cartridge. Seriously, play it here.

Great Gatsby is a little weirder, if only because of the back story behind it. The people running GreatGatsbyGame.com claim they found an old Nintendo cartridge at a garage sale, and it turned out to be a laser-shooting, giant crab-destroying adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's book. This is the cover:

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The idea of man-against-machine competition is a source of constant fascination, one in which the dark fear that we could be bested by our creations always lurks right underneath the surface. Everybody may love GPS, but nobody wants to wind up in the Matrix. And as technology leaps forward at an increasingly breathless pace, the possibility of our obsolescence starts to seem less like science fiction and more like straight up science.

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Human player Brad Rutter and the supercomputer named Watson ended an initial round tied at $5,000. The other challenger, human Ken Jennings, was far behind with $2,000.

Rutter (the show's all-time money-winner with $3.25 million) and Jennings (who has the longest winning streak at 74 games) are the most successful players in "Jeopardy!" history. Watson, named for IBM founder Thomas J. Watson, is powered by 10 racks of computer servers running the Linux operating system.

"You are about to witness what may prove to be an historic competition," host Alex Trebek told viewers at the top of the answer-and-question quiz show.

No question, Watson proved to be an amazing competitor -- maybe even a little creepy in the speed and accuracy it displayed.

With categories including Beatles People, Olympic Oddities and Name the Decade, the round got started with Rutter choosing the first answer, Alternate Meanings for $200: "4-letter word for a vantage point or a belief."

"What is a view?" was Rutter's correct response.

But Watson took charge with its question to Alternate Meanings for $400: "4-letter word for the iron fitting on the hoof of a horse or a card-dealing box in a casino."

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However, news of the company's monster success, accredited largely to holiday sales of the iPhone4, iPad and Macs, was overshadowed by the disclosure that the company's CEO, Steve Jobs, is taking medical leave.

Jobs has suffered pancreatic cancer in the past and took six months off in 2009 when he underwent a liver transplant. He has provided no timeline of when he'll be back to Apple, if at all. Apple's COO Tim Cook will take over the day-to-day operations of the company.

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It couldn't hit a buzzer.

But that's been fixed, and on Thursday the hardware and software system named Watson was to play a practice round against Ken Jennings, who won a record 74 consecutive "Jeopardy!" games in 2004-05, and Brad Rutter, who won a record of nearly $3.3 million in prize money.

"'Jeopardy!' felt that in order for the game to be as fair as possible, just as a human has to physically hit a buzzer, the system also would have to do that," IBM spokeswoman Jennifer McTighe said. "Now Watson has its own real buzzer."

The practice round was to be played on a stage at an IBM research center in Yorktown Heights, 38 miles north of Manhattan and across the country from the game show's home in Culver City, Calif. A real contest among the three, to be televised Feb. 14-16, also will be played at IBM, but the date hasn't been made public.

The winner of the televised match will be awarded $1 million. Second place gets $300,000, third place $200,000. IBM, which has headquarters in Armonk, said it would give its winnings to charity while Jennings and Rutter would give away half theirs.

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