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lol.. There is no municipalities rights in the US constitution that is supposed to limit what the feds can do.

Well, kinda there is. The 10th amendment expressly reserves for the states any powers not specifically specified by the Constitution to the Fed. On the other hand, your local municipality only has powers as outlined by your state constitution. Typically, any city is completely subordinate to whatever state it happens to be in, but states, and therefore cities, have rights over the Feds unless the Constitution specifically says otherwise (most often, by virtue of the commerce clause).

With municipal broadband, however, things get really twisted. It's not the Feds who are trampling on local efforts to set up public broadband... the states are doing the trampling, perhaps because the states are easier and cheaper for big telecom to lobby, and the Feds are trying to use the authority of the FCC to preempt the power of the states to squash what local authorities want to do within their community. Follow?

Lots of the successful municipal internet projects grew out from local municipalities that already own and run their own electric grid. Since they already own the poles and other conduits for carrying cables, along with trucks and technicians and other infrastructure for supporting them, running fiber is easy. But this makes Big Telecomm upset. Competition takes money out of their pockets. So, they lobby the states to restrict it.

So, in this case, the Fed is a city's or county's best friend, because its state wants to shut down what the citizens wanted to do for themselves. Either the FCC comes to the rescue, or the city has to go it alone in the state capitol against a very very wealthy powerful lobby whose money can easily make the difference between winning and losing in a state election. Suck it up. Sometimes, the Feds are the only friends you've got... if they have the authority, that is, and if big lobby has anything to say about it, they don't.

lol.. There is no municipalities rights in the US constitution that is supposed to limit what the feds can do.

Well, kinda there is. The 10th amendment expressly reserves for the states any powers not specifically specified by the Constitution to the Fed. On the other hand, your local municipality only has powers as outlined by your state constitution. Typically, any city is completely subordinate to whatever state it happens to be in, but states, and therefore cities, have rights over the Feds unless the Constitution specifically says otherwise (most often, by virtue of the commerce clause).

With municipal broadband, however, things get really twisted. It's not the Feds who are trampling on local efforts to set up public broadband... the states are doing the trampling, perhaps because the states are easier and cheaper for big telecom to lobby, and the Feds are trying to use the authority of the FCC to preempt the power of the states to squash what local authorities want to do within their community. Follow?

Lots of the successful municipal internet projects grew out from local municipalities that already own and run their own electric grid. Since they already own the poles and other conduits for carrying cables, along with trucks and technicians and other infrastructure for supporting them, running fiber is easy. But this makes Big Telecomm upset. Competition takes money out of their pockets. So, they lobby the states to restrict it.

So, in this case, the Fed is a city's or county's best friend, because its state wants to shut down what the citizens wanted to do for themselves. Either the FCC comes to the rescue, or the city has to go it alone in the state capitol against a very very wealthy powerful lobby whose money can easily make the difference between winning and losing in a state election. Suck it up. Sometimes, the Feds are the only friends you've got... if they have the authority, that is, and if big lobby has anything to say about it, they don't.

lol.. There is no municipalities rights in the US constitution that is supposed to limit what the feds can do.

Well, kinda there is. The 10th amendment expressly reserves for the states any powers not specifically specified by the Constitution to the Fed. On the other hand, your local municipality only has powers as outlined by your state constitution. Typically, any city is completely subordinate to whatever state it happens to be in, but states, and therefore cities, have rights over the Feds unless the Constitution specifically says otherwise (most often, by virtue of the commerce clause).

With municipal broadband, however, things get really twisted. It's not the Feds who are trampling on local efforts to set up public broadband... the states are doing the trampling, perhaps because the states are easier and cheaper for big telecom to lobby, and the Feds are trying to use the authority of the FCC to preempt the power of the states to squash what local authorities want to do within their community. Follow?

Lots of the successful municipal internet projects grew out from local municipalities that already own and run their own electric grid. Since they already own the poles and other conduits for carrying cables, along with trucks and technicians and other infrastructure for supporting them, running fiber is easy. But this makes Big Telecomm upset. Competition takes money out of their pockets. So, they lobby the states to restrict it.

So, in this case, the Fed is a city's or county's best friend, because its state wants to shut down what the citizens wanted to do for themselves. Either the FCC comes to the rescue, or the city has to go it alone in the state capitol against a very very wealthy powerful lobby whose money can easily make the difference between winning and losing in a state election. Suck it up. Sometimes, the Feds are the only friends you've got... if they have the authority, that is, and if big lobby has anything to say about it, they don't.

lol.. There is no municipalities rights in the US constitution that is supposed to limit what the feds can do.

Well, kinda there is. The 10th amendment expressly reserves for the states any powers not specifically specified by the Constitution to the Fed. On the other hand, your local municipality only has powers as outlined by your state constitution. Typically, any city is completely subordinate to whatever state it happens to be in, but states, and therefore cities, have rights over the Feds unless the Constitution specifically says otherwise (most often, by virtue of the commerce clause).

With municipal broadband, however, things get really twisted. It's not the Feds who are trampling on local efforts to set up public broadband... the states are doing the trampling, perhaps because the states are easier and cheaper for big telecom to lobby, and the Feds are trying to use the authority of the FCC to preempt the power of the states to squash what local authorities want to do within their community. Follow?

Lots of the successful municipal internet projects grew out from local municipalities that already own and run their own electric grid. Since they already own the poles and other conduits for carrying cables, along with trucks and technicians and other infrastructure for supporting them, running fiber is easy. But this makes Big Telecomm upset. Competition takes money out of their pockets. So, they lobby the states to restrict it.

So, in this case, the Fed is a city's or county's best friend, because its state wants to shut down what the citizens wanted to do for themselves. Either the FCC comes to the rescue, or the city has to go it alone in the state capitol against a very very wealthy powerful lobby whose money can easily make the difference between winning and losing in a state election. Suck it up. Sometimes, the Feds are the only friends you've got... if they have the authority, that is, and if big lobby has anything to say about it, they don't.

5) Uses Intels new-ish RDRAND instruction for a higher quality random number gen as the basis for ASLR

The ones that FreeBSD de-emphasized due to security concerns?

Ars technica reference for memory pressure

FTA: "Restricting the FCC's Section 706 powers could also interfere with the commission's plans for preempting state laws that prevent cities and towns from building broadband networks." http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

So their masters were worried about cities building their own fiber network.

Hah...my parents use the *exact* same statement. The funny part is, I can hear Fox News in the background when I call. This may be presumptuous, but I have a hard time believing you.

Have you read articles about this issue, like this one?

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

If so, and if you still maintain that your position is the right one, can you please provide more specific points in contradiction? If the article above is missing some details, I would be interested in learning those.

"The leaders have announced that their respective intelligence agencies will mount ongoing cyber-attack "war games" starting this summer in an effort to strengthen the West's tarnished reputation following the Sony hacking scandal."

'Inside the “wiper” malware that brought Sony Pictures to its knees Analysis of code shows it used knowledge of Sony's Windows network to spread and wreak havoc.'

Or the "Compute Stick" shown recently at CES? (intels-compute-stick-is-a-full-windows-or-linux-pc-in-an-hdmi-dongle) http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

He's referring to this bit of news:

http://arstechnica.com/securit...

More like changing 00000000 to 999999999

TMYK

Except that google do support older devices in the form of Google Play Services. This provides the latest and greatest APIs as far back as gingerbread:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

In fact many of Google's own apps are updated to use the material designs etc on Gingerbread devices:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

All this should make it easier for the developer community to keep up with the newer API versions, and support the older ones.

Except that google do support older devices in the form of Google Play Services. This provides the latest and greatest APIs as far back as gingerbread:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

In fact many of Google's own apps are updated to use the material designs etc on Gingerbread devices:
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

All this should make it easier for the developer community to keep up with the newer API versions, and support the older ones.

Furthermore we are up to version 5 of android and there is still no way to push security updates? That's a pretty serious fail IMO. Google might want to rethink that strategy before it seriously burns them in the long run.

They have rethought that strategy, and the solution is Google Play Services. All of the critical functionality has been moved there, which they can update via the Google Play store. Most of the individual apps have moved to independently-updatable Google Play apps as well. The WebKit based library discussed here has been replaced by a Chrome-based version, which also receives regular updates.

And yes, all devices Gingerbread (2.3) and above get these updates. The problem is that the WebView is one of the remaining pieces that was still tied directly to the OS in those earlier versions, so it can't be updated directly.

I'm not excusing Google for not fixing it here, but saying that version 5 still has no way to push security updates directly is incorrect.

Occasional security vulnerabilities are inevitable, which means you always have to be careful what you're exposing to the world. AiCloud exposes way too much. The February disaster showed why it's just a fundamentally flawed idea.

Indeed. I think he was originally on record as wanting to find a solution that didnt involve title II -- but this is what got the FCC into trouble with the Open Internet Order.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/em...

Yet a couple of days ago he is now hinting he will use title II.

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

So I guess we will see.

There was this article that was pretty comprehensive and fair...

Here's the article I just read: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

VSS (shadow copy / system restore) is essentially Time Machine on Windows.

No, not by a long shot. They both allow you to take snapshots of your files/drive, but that's where the similarity ends.
Time Machine's implementation, both from the technical standpoint and from the user experience one, sets it apart from VSS. A consequence of that is that Time Machine is a system that even clueless end users can (and do!) take advantage of.

For a good summary of Time Machine's implementation see the excellent Ars Technica review of OS X 10.5 Leopard by John Siracusa.

Quite frankly the only backup+versioning system that I can recall that has similar functionality to Time Machine is tym, a rather complex bash script that leverages the --link-dest option of rsync. I use it to back up other Unix-like systems, as well as data on OS X machines for which I don't have administrative access.

But quite frankly it has many technical disadvantages, and furthermore it is not something that I would expect an end user to be able to configure and use. Of course you can roll out a much simpler script like this, but then again you are losing even more functionality and still suffer from the technical drawbacks without really improving the usability for non-technical users.

There is a reason that Dick Cheney had the wireless capability disabled on his souped up pacemaker.
http://arstechnica.com/securit...

In fairness, security is frequently hampered by management that refuses to understand how critical infosec is. The Home Depot hack? Take a look at this:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-18/home-depot-hacked-wide-open

Security staff had urged that a feature of their malware protection systems be turned on, for months.

"The former information security managers say that executives, including information security supervisor Jeff Mitchell, rebuffed efforts to bolster cyberdefenses. Two of the managers, who left the company in 2011 and 2012, both say Mitchell told them to settle for “C-level security” because more ambitious measures would be expensive and might disrupt critical systems. These priorities frustrated workers in the information security department, leading in the past three years to dozens of departures from a team of fewer than 50, the former managers say. Mitchell didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As it turns out, that manager was a criminal: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/09/home-depots-former-security-architect-had-history-of-techno-sabotage/ He's also the source of the infamous "We sell hammers" quote. So management was not only deliberately hindering security measures, they had a manager who eventually got convicted for deliberately destroying equipment and data at a previous job. It doesn't appear that HD fired him when the accusations came to light.

Hollywood bullies Netflix into implementing draconian DRM.

But like any abusive relationship they're too afraid of losing their sugar daddy to speak out against it in public.

From the leaked Sony emails: "Netflix are heavily resistant to enforcing stricter financial geofiltering controls, as they claim this would present a too high bar to entry from legitimate subscribers. For example, they want people to be able to use various methods of payment (e.g. PayPal) where it is harder to determine where the subscriber is based. They recognize that this may cause illegal subscribers but they (of course) would rather err that way than create barriers to legitimate subscribers to sign up."

Yeah, right. I'll consider Netflix "heavily resistant" to draconian DRM when they launch a PR campaign publicly skewering Hollywood for asking for it.

Instead this leaked email tells us only that in private they're mildly uncomfortable with draconian DRM but at the end of the day they don't really give a shit and will fall in line in public for The Almighty Hollywood.

Keep taking those beatings, Netflix. Keep doing your abuser's bidding.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

"Netflix are heavily resistant to enforcing stricter financial geofiltering controls, as they claim this would present a too high bar to entry from legitimate subscribers. For example, they want people to be able to use various methods of payment (e.g. PayPal) where it is harder to determine where the subscriber is based. They recognize that this may cause illegal subscribers but they (of course) would rather err that way than create barriers to legitimate subscribers to sign up.

We have expressed our deep dissatisfaction with their approach and attitude."

You're an idiot

Ad hominem attacks will get you nowhere. But then again I guess that's why you're an AC.

Nvidia has been worse for nearly a decade

That article is from 2008 (seven years isn't exactly "nearly" a decade in my book) and reflects an issue specifically involving causes of crashes for Windows Vista about a year after the OS came out. And you'll notice that while Nvidia is the largest single contributor to that pie, less than 30% of crashes were their fault. And, actually, if you read the original article from which Engadget derived their story this is a study from specifically around the launch of Windows Vista, not its entire lifecycle. And the data is very vague, as they say in the article, "in theory, NVIDIA's proportion of total driver crashes could be inflated by a relatively small handful of systems with severe driver issues." So this statistic is actually pretty useless without additional data.

That also doesn't indicate anything having to do with non-system-crash related issues, such as non-fatal crashes or poor system performance. It's also reasonable to assume that Nvidia has since fixed that issue with Windows Vista, as I don't remember there being any kinds of crashing plagues involving Nvidia hardware in Windows 7, 8, 8.1, or even 10 Technical Preview.

and most of the time ATI cards have a better performance/price ratio too, as you can see in most articles, including tomhardware's "best graphics card for the money" series (90% or so have been ATI cards for as long as I remember).

From when, and in what categories? I'm not denying that AMD makes a good graphics card and they have delivered, and do deliver the most bang for your buck at certain price points, but your claim is flimsy at best since Tom's updates these almost quarterly, as GPU manufacturers release new hardware throughout the year, and across several performance/price points. So naturally when AMD releases a new GPU they're likely to take the top spot in the high performance category, just as it's likely that when Nvidia releases a new GPU they might take the top spot.

not north korea, is slashdot becoming just another source for government misinformation and propaganda???

I figure this article isn't misinformation and propaganda, but an avenue for an active discussion of dissent.

I read an article on North Korea not being responsible for the Sony intrusion; I'm fairly sure on http://arstechnica.com/ mayhaps within the article itself a key phrase used through out was "I can't believe I have to say this". Looking for the article I Googled: sony I don't beleve I have to say this" -with the misspelling or not

At this time of the first 20 hits or two pages, all call BS on the claim as well.

Even the http://www.drudgereport.com/ claimed below a link of the intrusion, that a fired employee was responsible (not mentioned in the link/article).

I'm convinced through the article linked from arstechnica.com (?), North Korea isn't responsible, if only for the fact it has no reason to be interested in Sony, movie or not.

I won't even get into the executable used.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2...

The good news is people globally can avoid all that by just not using standard US communications networks anymore.
With the new VPN news more people are starting to understand that their telco, VPN, provider is not really secure.
"NSA has VPNs in Vulcan death grip—no, really, that’s what they call it" (Dec 31 2014)
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
The world is now more aware of the internal working of networks after the news about BLEAKINQUIRY, TOYGRIPPE and XKEYSCORE.
What is a telco or provider now reduced to trying to distance its reputation from?
They are not a front company set up by the US security services?
Staff who work with the security services do not have total control over internal networks?
The network is under some secret court oder and has to provide all data over years but the legal team is now more responsive?
Staff are just lazy and let the security services of a few nations into their internal networks over decades?
Secret courts, other methods to get around the lack of legal paperwork, parallel construction is now in the media :)
The rest of the world can just route around junk network encryption and tame legal protections.
The fun part is the UK and US are now left with a huge military industrial complex budget to keep on tracking the worlds communications networks.
The rest of the world can just opt to use other older, more secure methods of communications or keep junk networks open for long term disinformation.

Partly right, partly wrong.

AT&T has publicly announced that it would like to abandon the old copper POTS network by 2020. And, yes, that means not upgrading something that they are trying to get rid of. The company's stated goal is to have fiber in the vast majority of areas by then to replace the copper, although I think at least in most cases the copper will still be the actual physical connection at your home or building's NID.

But the reason is almost certainly not to push cellular broadband on a wide scale. Cellular uses up a finite resource of very expensive wireless spectrum. It's much better to transport fixed phone and data over fiber, and save that spectrum and capacity for mobile users. The main reason to get rid of the all-copper (TDM) infrastructure I believe, is that if you are limited to DS-3 backhaul into an area, at best it only lets you sell phone or DSL service, whereas a fiber-driven infrastructure (all the way to the curb, or at least fiber to the neighborhood and copper for the very last leg of the trip) lets you sell cable TV services, high-speed Internet, etc. That's what FiOS and Uverse are.

From what I understand, the idea is only to push cellular broadband as a replacement for USF obligations where it is cost prohibitive to run fiber (think rural areas). That at least would make much more sense than trying to get everyone to go wireless when you have a perfectly good wireline connection to use.

Better to have cameras than not; maybee...... juries can be played by selective use of cams, excluding other cam footage, and plain old laying a trap for the unwary citizen.

You asked: I read the news. Google for you:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ka...
"But it goes both ways; video – or the lack of it – can also damn officers. Two on the Daytona Beach force lost their jobs after a video mysteriously blanked out in the middle of an encounter with a woman who allegedly hid a bag of cocaine in her mouth; she said the officers knocked her down, shoved a flashlight between her lips and kicked her in the head, but that part of the encounter wasn’t caught on film thanks to one officer failing to turn his camera on and a “malfunction” with the other officer’s camera midway through the arrest. A forensic analysis of the cam showed that the “malfunction” was caused by the officer shutting it down. Chief Chitwood has said the policy there is, “If you turn it off, you’re done.”"

That's Daytona. In Oakland. Mysteriously Shut Off Camera Syndrome doesn't hurt and officer much:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
"OAKLAND, Calif.—Over the last two years, the Oakland Police Department (OPD) has disciplined police officers on 24 occasions for disabling or failing to activate body-worn cameras, newly released public records show. The City of Oakland did not provide any records prior to 2013, and the OPD did not immediately respond to Ars’ request for comment.

http://www.eastbayexpress.com/...
"Hargraves was found to have violated policy by taping over his nametag, and Wong was found to have acted improperly by failing to report the incident to internal affairs and also turning off Hargraves' lapel camera"

http://crooksandliars.com/susi...
"However, the above video, which shows several officers with their body-mounted cameras turned off – a departmental violation - is just the latest example of Oakland police officers not wanting any accountability.The video is also a clear demonstration of just how high tensions are between Oakland police and citizens."

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12...
"In other cases it was the absence of video that got the officer in trouble. An officer in Daytona Beach, Fla., was forced to resign after he was caught turning off his camera at critical moments. An Albuquerque officer who shot and killed a woman in April — and whose camera was off at the time — was fired on Monday after being investigated for not complying with department orders that required officers to record all interactions with civilians.

But even when video does exist, it is often not decisive. In the case of Mr. Garner, the Staten Island man who died in July after a police officer put him in a chokehold, a video of the encounter taken with a bystander’s cellphone and viewed millions of times was enough to stir visceral outrage — but not to secure an indictment."

The records show that on November 8, 2013 one officer was terminated after failing to activate his camera. Less than two weeks later, another resigned for improperly removing the camera from his or her uniform. However, most officers received minor discipline in comparison."

Antenna removal:
http://www.latimes.com/local/l...
"os Angele

Schwab has plenty of more glaring security issues than just making it hard to enroll a compatible token you already have. http://www.jeremytunnell.com/posts/swab-password-policies-and-two-factor-authentication-a-comedy-of-errors

Backup confirmation from a non-blog site if you want http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/why-your-password-cant-have-symbols-or-be-longer-than-16-characters/.

You'd be surprised how many other brokers were still doing the same bone headed crap (storing only first 8 chars of password or using a hash scheme designed around touchtone phone keypad entry) until recently, but Schwab seems to stand out as a laggard.

Google is lobbying the AG's themselves, but they seem to be on the defensive. From Ars: http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

Several weeks later, a meeting took place between Google executives and Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen. The same morning the meeting took place, MPAA's Perrelli was informed about it by two attorneys at the AG's office, who offered to send Google's presentation to Perrelli. Jepsen reached out to the MPAA, seeking demands that he could press against Google.

The article makes clear that many AG offices seem to be favoring the MPAA side, even after hearing from Google. I'd be really interested to see a survey of who's funding election campaigns for all state AGs in the country. Follow the money and see what shows up.

Yeah. But which government?

Estonia!

Yup, NSA has full access to Skype, with their cooperation.

You know what, we're getting caught up in what models can or cannot do but in the end it doesn't matter. Climate models are just tools to investigate our understanding of the interaction of the different components of the climate system. As I said they will always be imperfect but they are useful. So I guess I'm changing the subject but so be it.

The diagnosis of anthropogenic global warming comes from the basic science of the radiative characteristics of greenhouse gases. That is fundamental falsifiable science that you can't get around. The effects of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere can be measured by taking radiative energy reading starting from the surface to the top of the atmosphere and observing how that changes at different elevations. The effects of the different greenhouse gases are relatively easy to extract from that data.

The scientist who Gore cited whoever that is is late to the parade after Fourier, Tyndall in the 1850's, Arrhenius in the 1890's, Gilbert Plass in the 1950's and James Hanson in the 1970's & 1980's. His change of heart doesn't really change anything else.

Regarding UN reports, the IPCC Working Group I reports were all completely written by scientists involved in the research. Even the Summary for Policy Makers is written by scientists although it gets vetted by politicians. Still nothing gets through it without the approval of the authors of the WG1 full report. The Working Group II and especially the Working Group III reports do have some non-scientists helping to write them but the WG1 report is the critical one to our scientific understanding of climate change.

The politicization of the issue is almost entirely due to people who don't like the implications and proposed solutions. As Upton Sinclair said "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Can you cite a reference for the Japanese studies? I'd be interested in see what it actually had to say rather than just taking your word for it.

So far as I can see the output of models has generally been pretty good and nothing that has happened has shown the models are just flat wrong. Of course they will be better in the future as we learn more and can apply more computing power to them but they're the best thing we have now so we might as well use them. It seems to me that your expectations for what models are capable of may be a little off. Here is some suggested reading to help you understand them better:

FAQ on Climate Models
FAQ on Climate Models: Part II
Why trust climate models, it's a matter of simple science

Oh please the only ones pulling a EEE is Google but the FOSSies are too busy pretending its 1999 and the desktop is still the battleground to see the buttfucking they are about to get from their supposed "friend"

TFA is beyond simple, BALMER WAS A SHITTY CEO who thought the way you win is by sticking a WinFlag on knockoffs of other people's shit. Flash? Silverlight. Java? .NET, iPod? Zune. iPad? Surface. Balmer was the Pepsi guy of CEOs who couldn't think beyond whatever was getting buzz at the moment. Compare this to Nadella that...get ready for this, its a mind blower...actually tries to give the customers what they want! Gasp! what we are seeing with Nadella is a Steve Jobs style transformation of MSFT and like Jobs Nadella is focusing on his customers. the reason why he is opening .NET is VERY simple, the way you make money on a language is support, not by waving the WinFlag so surprise surprise THAT is what he is doing!

After a decade of the Balmernator squirting his Zune as an Apple wannabe I'd say Nadella is a breath of fresh air and if his common sense moves make the FOSSies miss the Googlefucking until its too late? Bonus.

That way they will always have a ready market of users waiting to upgrade. They did the same thing with the big phones. The demand was there for years but they carried on selling small form phones till the market for small form phones is going to fall. Then when they release the big phones, boom!! the pent-up demand guarantee increased sale.

Not hardly.

"Big phones" was a private "thing" with the then-CEO. I think his last name was "Jobs".

Considering the timing of SJ's demise, relative to the introduction of the iPhone 5, then 6 and 6 Plus, I would venture to say that Apple approved the iPhone 5 (the first "big" iPhone) as a sort of "marketing test" on the very day that Steve J. stopped breathing.

Remember, it takes TIME to approve new case designs, displays, etc; not to mention new SoCs to drive the extra pixels. It isn't like you just put the old phones in the Incredible Blow-Up Machine and voila!

Then, when the market acceptance of the iPhone 5 was encouraging, they started market research and engineering R&D on the (bigger still) iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

But if you want to talk about Planned Obsolescence by continually releasing "The Next Big Thing" that is simply the "The Previous Big Thing" with a slightly different/better "Gotta Have It" geegaw or case design, look no further than Samsung; with their FIFTY NINE new models of Smartphones released in 2014 alone.

So stop your ridiculous Apple Hating. They are actually a pretty "restrained" tech-driven Company.

Have not read any documets so far.... But your post is just a rant about privacy...

Sony have not cared about privacy or morals for many years...

3 hits from a quick search......
http://boingboing.net/2005/11/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://arstechnica.com/uncateg... ---- This one was actually quite nice to read..

I'm just saying... If they do not care about my privacy (like the PSN leaks with data in the clear!) and my security (the drm rootkit-crap with all it's sideaffects.)
With the above 2 i can just say that i will not buy Sony any more... And when things like th is happen i actually think that they deserve it.. It's the only way a company can learn... Do X and Y will happen... before only goverments had the possibility to punish the companies... this time it's a hacker-group (no clue of the whole thing was goverment-financed)..

Groklaw folded mainly due to e-mail privacy concerns. PJ wanting more of her personal time back was a factor, as she'd tried to back away from the site a few times already. But it wasn't the main stated reason for the shutdown. I could understand that some people feel e-mail privacy was a silly reason to fold the site, even if I don't agree myself.

Update: I just learned that there is indeed a way to tag files in Linux (well, in KDE apps at least). In its current incarnation it is called Baloo, and it is now implemented pretty much like tags are implemented in OS X, that is by incorporating the tags in an extended attribute for the file.

Unfortunately when I google "baloo kde" I do see quite a bit of pages asking or showing how to disable Baloo. I guess it's still in its infancy and still suffers from performance issues. (Baloo actually does much more than tagging, it is the whole file indexing system, so it is more akin to Spotlight on the Mac side.)

That is fantastic! Thank you very much for the info!

For others that may be interested in file tagging in Linux, it seems there are two systems: the old one called Nepomuk and its replacement Baloo.

Nepomuk uses a database that needs to be running permanently which associates tags and files. That approach has too many drawbacks, and quite frankly would be an unsatisfactory substitute for OS X's tagging.

Baloo, on the other hand, does things the right way, by incorporating the tags into an extended attribute for the file. That is exactly the way it's done in OS X, and it works awesomely provided that you have a good indexing system that indexes those extended attributes like Spotlight does. (Close-to-immediate searches are fundamental for the success of a system-wide tagging system.)

Thanks again for the info!

I am aware that the original poster wants to use Linux and may be talked into using Windows but probably not into buying a Mac. But since other people will have the same question and some of them may be Mac users, here it goes:

Many responders have already suggested creating ingenious folder structures that will help you keep a basic level of organization to the photo collection. Use any of those systems, and augment it by making use of OS X's extremely useful tagging feature.

Furthermore, there are many applications, such as the ones made by Ironic Software, that allow you to search, organize, and work with your files in very powerful ways using those tags. Since the tagging system is common to all of them you are not tied to any particular application.

The only downside of this is that you do become dependent on OS X at least until other systems implement tagging.

I guess it's not your system of choice (nor the submitter's), but OS X does have a very useful tagging feature on the filesystem.

Furthermore, there are many applications, such as the ones made by Ironic Software, that allow you to search, organize, and work with your files in very powerful ways using those tags. Since the tagging system is common to all of them you are not tied to any particular application (although you do become dependent on OS X at least until other systems implement tagging).

wasn't lexmark one of the more evil ones?

News of this release seems to address many of the short-comings Ars Technica had when Ars reviewed FreeNAS.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

that fact that you dont even compherend that "climategate" was a completely fabricated scandal shows how ill informed you are.
you also are apparently ignorant of how scientfic funding works.

you're also wrong about how science works. climate science is a real phsyical science, unlike economics which is a behavorial science. physical science does not lend itself to different conclusions as the methods of science itself quickly weed out conclusions that arent supported by evidence. This is very different from economics in which the unpredictability of the human animal is a tremendous factor. in a phsyical science the same inputs cause the same outputs. In a behavioral science like economics there is no such garuntee.

you are in short, an ill informed idiot.

http://arstechnica.com/science...
http://mythopedia.mediamatters...
http://www.skepticalscience.co...
http://mythopedia.mediamatters...

this is two day old news. there is a new plaintiff as of yesterday.

The article's behind the curve. The class has a plaintiff for the suit and it will continue.

When I can just cross-compile my favorite Linux software into APKs, install and run them on my phone or tablet, then you can call Android a Linux distro.

I wonder why someone hasn't cooked up something with a lightweight X server and window manager that wraps a standard GNU/Linux app compiled with NDK. What's the biggest obstacle for that? Is it the 50 MB limit for APKs on Google Play Store?