FOR IDEAL MARITAL HAPPINESS, sex three to four times a week is best, according to researchers.

PROGRESS: Watch a single autonomous car prevent a traffic jam. “The team’s results show that by having an autonomous vehicle control its speed intelligently when a phantom jam starts to propagate, it’s possible to reduce the amount of braking performed further back down the line. The numbers are impressive: the presence of just one autonomous car reduces the standard deviation in speed of all the cars in the jam by around 50 percent, and the number of sharp hits to the brakes is cut from around nine per vehicle for every kilometer traveled to at most 2.5—and sometimes practically zero.”

WHAT’S SAD IS HOW LAX SECURITY STILL IS IN ALL SORTS OF IMPORTANT PLACES: ‘Accidental hero’ halts ransomware attack and warns: this is not over.

The ransomware used in Friday’s attack wreaked havoc on organisations including FedEx and Telefónica, as well as the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), where operations were cancelled, X-rays, test results and patient records became unavailable and phones did not work.

But the spread of the attack was brought to a sudden halt when one UK cybersecurity researcher tweeting as @malwaretechblog, with the help of Darien Huss from security firm Proofpoint, found and inadvertently activated a “kill switch” in the malicious software.

The researcher, who identified himself only as MalwareTech, is a 22-year-old from south-west England who works for Kryptos logic, an LA-based threat intelligence company.

“I was out having lunch with a friend and got back about 3pm and saw an influx of news articles about the NHS and various UK organisations being hit,” he told the Guardian. “I had a bit of a look into that and then I found a sample of the malware behind it, and saw that it was connecting out to a specific domain, which was not registered. So I picked it up not knowing what it did at the time.”

The kill switch was hardcoded into the malware in case the creator wanted to stop it spreading. This involved a very long nonsensical domain name that the malware makes a request to – just as if it was looking up any website – and if the request comes back and shows that the domain is live, the kill switch takes effect and the malware stops spreading. The domain cost $10.69 and was immediately registering thousands of connections every second.

MalwareTech explained that he bought the domain because his company tracks botnets, and by registering these domains they can get an insight into how the botnet is spreading. “The intent was to just monitor the spread and see if we could do anything about it later on. But we actually stopped the spread just by registering the domain,” he said. But the following hours were an “emotional rollercoaster”.

Half the stuff that’s connected to the Internet probably shouldn’t be, and much of the rest is insecure.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Students’ Insult to DeVos Embarrasses HBCUs. It’s worse than mere embarrassment, as the Trump Administration has been interested in helping these institutions, most of which are in pretty sad financial condition. This sort of childish behavior isn’t likely to increase their enthusiasm.

THANKS, NSA! An NSA-derived ransomware worm is shutting down computers worldwide.

SAD! Comey was a quixotic individual who was so wrapped up in his own delusions about being the “last honest man in Washington, D.C.,” that he brought professional ruin to himself and likely damaged the reputation of the FBI.

REMEMBER, WE’RE SUPPOSED TO BE OUTRAGED ABOUT THE COARSENESS OF THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION: Liberals are making sex jokes about VP Mike Pence and this horse.

KYLE SMITH: Why working class Americans voted with their middle finger:

[Hillary’s] rhetoric about helping the poor also turned off the WWC: The have-a-littles disdain the have-nots. Working people in the middle are proud of their discipline and resent the spongers they perceive as being rewarded for having none. They don’t romanticize welfare recipients as being hapless victims of circumstance because they see them at the grocery store every week.

Even when they qualify for aid, they sometimes make a point of rejecting it: “I don’t want a government handout,” they say. “I can do this on my own.” Accepting welfare is seen as a character flaw and leads to a serious loss of social standing in the community, according to a study of rural voters in California. Without such standing, you don’t get considered when there’s a job opening.

Bill Clinton understood this kind of thinking, which is why he signed welfare reform in 1996, when he carried such states as West Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri and Louisiana. No Democratic presidential candidate since has won any of those states, and they’re no longer even trying.

Bill famously advised his wife’s campaign to do more to reach out to the WWC, but in what will surely be recalled as one of the defining moments of hubris on Team Hillary, campaign manager Robby Mook replied, “the data run counter to your anecdotes.”

It’s just too perfect that Clinton lost the election in part because she relied on a gay, 36-year-old Ivy League data nerd rather than a two-time winner of a presidential election to show her the path to the White House. If she wants to learn some anecdotes about how to repel people you’re supposed to be wooing, [law professor Joan C. Williams’ new book White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America] is an excellent place to start.

Read the whole thing.

I DUNNO, MOST LAWPROFS I KNOW SEEM PRETTY OKAY WITH LIFE: Why Are Law Professors So Unhappy? I mean, it’s a sweet gig.

IT’S BASICALLY THE “NO-CHANNEL” QUANTUM COMMUNICATION OF GREG BEAR’S EON BOOKS: Scientists Achieve Direct Counterfactual Quantum Communication For The First Time: Communication without particle transmission.

WELL, STABLE LOW OIL PRICES DUE TO FRACKING PROBABLY PLAYED A ROLE: The Porsche 911 Plug-In Hybrid Is Dead for Now.

FREUD’S QUESTION, ANSWERED. What Do Women Want? Freedom from body hair.

And here’s why: This Fitness Blogger Hasn’t Shaved Her Body Hair in Over a Year.

LACI GREEN, THE MATRIX, AND THE FUTURE OF FREE SPEECH. “If she thinks she can present diversity of opinion, with appeals to science, and be met with acceptance and rational discussion by her previous in-group, she may find herself in for a rude awakening. And unfortunately, this is exactly where we are at as a society. Isolated pockets of small groups policing the ideas and language of others.”

IT’S LIKE OUR ELITES’ ATTITUDES ARE OUT OF SYNC WITH THE PUBLIC: “A year after Caitlyn Jenner announced her new name and gender, the popularity of the name Caitlyn plummeted more than any other baby name, according to Social Security’s annual list of the most popular baby names.”

UPGRADING STRYKERS: The Pentagon continues to upgrade the U.S. Army Stryker armored personnel carrier. Good to see its upgrading to 30 mm cannons.

Survivability is an immediate concern of the Army’s Stryker program office, with officials worried that Russian vehicles pose too much of a threat. The service has obtained funding for larger 30mm cannons for the 2nd Cavalry Regiment’s Stryker fleet, and it plans to spend $300 million for eight prototypes and upgrades to 83 production vehicles, plus spares.

RELATED: Strykers are already tough vehicles. This one survived the blast of a 500 pound bomb hidden in a car along a road in Iraq. look at the photo then read the caption. Here’s a photo of a Stryker on a training exercise in Europe.

SO NOW I’M READING GREG BENFORD’S The Berlin Project, an alternative-history take on the Manhattan Project. It’s pretty interesting: Almost all of the characters are real historical individuals, many (like Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, etc.) personally known to Benford in his youth. The difference between this and our real history is that they went all-in on centrifuges from the start, producing a bomb a year earlier. I have to say, I’d rather live in the resulting post-war alternate timeline, I think.

NOBODY TELL NOTORIOUS ROBOPHOBE MATTHEW YGLESIAS: Fred Reed on Sexbots. “In the documentary, the short-haired reporteress talked to an ugly anti-sexbot crusader woman who said testily that using sexbots “objectified women.” (To me it sounded more like womanizing objects, but never mind.) These two dragons continued to the effect that sex was about intimacy and closeness and bonding. I wondered how they knew. But understand: They weren’t worried about competition. Oh no. They wanted to preserve intimacy and bonding. They were worried about those poor miserable men. Uh…yeah. In modern America I see no sign that women are concerned about masculine misery, and indeed that most of them rather like the idea. . . . Finally, it might be worth keeping in mind that a rich vein of hypocrisy underlies the prissy female horror at men coupling with electrically-heated plastic. As many studies have shown, women watch porn too, and buy vibrators, objectifying men, or at least part of one.”

That’s different, that’s Female Empowerment.

SO MUCH FOR “RAPE CULTURE:” 89% of colleges reported zero campus rapes in 2015.