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The Zii Egg (dumb, dumb name) doesn't seem to be a real product. And the Archos Internet tablet got badly panned in a recent review.

Not exactly starting off with a great lineup of critters. This is what bothers me about Android: a bunch of manufacturers running off making half baked, poorly thought out products with an occasional bright spot perhaps, but surrounded by numerous mediocre products. Sounds kinda like the Windows Mobile experience. And we all know how well that's turned out.

But they simply asked for what the market will bear and still made more money off of that album than any single project they did with a label (straight from one of their interviews).

Maybe. I did read that statement in a news article, but it wasn't said by the band, and it was based on speculated numbers. (But, maybe the band said it as well, I don't know.) In any case, Radiohead seems to have distanced themselves from the experiment, which makes me wonder how successful it really was. From April 2008:

CNet: Radiohead won't repeat 'In Rainbows' giveaway

Radiohead made it official: the band won't be giving away music like it did with the album In Rainbows.

"I think it was a one-off response to a particular situation," the band's lead singer Thom Yorke told The Hollywood Reporter. "It was one of those things where we were in the position of everyone asking us what we were going to do. I don't think it would have the same significance now anyway, if we chose to give something away again. It was a moment in time."

Many music fans had hoped that the band's now famous pay-what-you-want promotion was an attempt by the group to discover a new way to sell music. Now it appears Radiohead at best was after publicity.

Radiohead has never revealed the promotion's sales figures but there was speculation that the money wasn't very good. Nine Inch Nails, led by Trent Reznor, followed Radiohead by offering the digital version of the album Ghosts I-IV for free as well as charging for premium versions. Reznor said last month that to that point the album had generated 781,917 transactions and $1.6 million.

Reznor was critical of Radiohead during an interview with The Chicago Tribune.

"I think the way (Radiohead) parlayed it into a marketing gimmick has certainly been shrewd," Reznor said. "But if you look at what they did, it was very much a bait and switch, to get you to pay for a MySpace quality stream as a way to promote a very traditional record sale."
...
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9932361-7.html

I don't care for iTunes either. Amazon MP3s or rips from my CDs for me. The kids get iTunes cards for their iPods though. I try and tell them to stick with the MP3s, but I guess some lessons take some experience to learn. I don't use Bing - I tried it and it just doesn't give me what I need from a search engine. Pretty though. I don't care for voice recognition, even in the hypothetical cases that it works well.

Telepresence is essentially webcam chat. When I saw my son's Nintendo DSI (which has wifi and a webcam, but no telepresence app) I knew it was time. Dick Tracy watch, here we come!

Google is about to become Apple's biggest competitor in the phone space. And Apple doesn't play nicely with Google on their app store for apps where they compete on features apparently. Y'know, I still think Google will cut Apple a square deal anyway - at Google they like to hold the moral high ground.

Office for Mac? Is that still around? Does it still lack the most important features, like VBA or images? I always thought that buying it for compatibility was kind of pointless if you couldn't open the same documents with it. I have an XServe and work with the Macs a bit, but don't use them for daily work so I don't know.

W7 does run well on most netbooks, and that's surprising since the 945G chipset is not legendary for its graphics performance, to be kind. Apparently those problems Vista had with Intel video are gone.

Tablets? They're about to change, and not just a little.

Not much on the phone. Windows Mobile is not at all competitive and hasn't been for a long time. In terms of usefefullness and coolness, the Blackberry, iPhone and Android past it like it was standing still.

Im not sure what your point is about the netbook. We certainly havent done anything to inhibit them. We like them quite a bit, most of them ship with Windows. Linux is said to run well on them, but I havent tried it myself. I do know that W7 runs great on them. My friend just bought a Asus for his daughter. Single core Atom, 1GB memory, Intel 945G graphics - runs W7 just fine. I ask his daughter how often she plugs it in. She said "at night, like my phone".

Well there be a market for something less capable that doesnt run Windows? Say something with 512MB of memory, a 16GB SSD and something like the Intel GMA 500 Graphics? I dont know. We shall see.... Consumers want general purpose computing devices - even as phones. Apple has proved that. Palm proved that with their original Pilot device.

On the tablet space, Microsoft has been the leader there for a long, long time. Have you tried W7 on a tablet PC? I have it on a Toshiba M4 and its really good. Despite the crappy hardware (and them M4 is crappy), it works extremely well. Systems like the Lenovo tablet are really, really good.

The Windows handwriting recognition is excellent. No funny virtual keyboard needed. My daughter writes entire papers for school on it with ease and accuracy

The Multi-touch in W7 is pretty good too - especially considering its first generation.

Of course, there is TONs of hype about the new Apple iSlate. Well see how that works. Is it just a big iPhone? Or will it be a general purpose computing device? For example, will it run Windows office for the MAC. Here is my prediction: If it does, then it will be a hit, if not then it will be a niche produce. But if you believe the speculation, then it will be a MAC, but look a lot like the iPhone. The puported specs are very PC like... Apparently well see on Tuesday.

One thing Apple does great is engender customer happiness and loyalty. Heck, my direct family has five iPhones! We love them. (note, iTunes surely truely sucks, the Zune software is light years better....) Wikipeida says that through Q2 of 2009, Apple had sold a total of 21.17 million iPhones. Thats pretty spiffy. To put things in perspective:

Apples iPhone hhas topped Microsofts Windows Mobile in U.S. market share of smartphone operating systems for the first time, putting it in the No. 2 spot, according to a report from ComScore released Thursday. [ cnet december 2009 ]

Its phenomenal that the iPhone went from zero to #2 in three years. But as awesome as it is, it is still just now #2 with Blackberry still being #1 and Windows Mobile a close #2. People tend to forget that its not the dominant smart phone - its one of three.

Im not sure what you mean by diction, but I think you mean voice recognition. That hasnt yet arrived as a technology. But its starting to be pretty useful. Have you tried Bing on the iPhone? Its better than Google on the iPhone and it has server based voice recognition. I think its based on the Tellme technology we acquired in 2007. Microsoft has long invested heavily in speech recognition research. The stuff in Vista was actually pretty good - better than Dragon Naturally speaking. The W7 stuff is better still. But! Its still not ready for prime time like on the Jetsons or Star Trek.

But its getting there: Of course we are running the lat

Not much on the phone. Windows Mobile is not at all competitive and hasn't been for a long time. In terms of usefefullness and coolness, the Blackberry, iPhone and Android past it like it was standing still.

Im not sure what your point is about the netbook. We certainly havent done anything to inhibit them. We like them quite a bit, most of them ship with Windows. Linux is said to run well on them, but I havent tried it myself. I do know that W7 runs great on them. My friend just bought a Asus for his daughter. Single core Atom, 1GB memory, Intel 945G graphics - runs W7 just fine. I ask his daughter how often she plugs it in. She said "at night, like my phone".

Well there be a market for something less capable that doesnt run Windows? Say something with 512MB of memory, a 16GB SSD and something like the Intel GMA 500 Graphics? I dont know. We shall see.... Consumers want general purpose computing devices - even as phones. Apple has proved that. Palm proved that with their original Pilot device.

On the tablet space, Microsoft has been the leader there for a long, long time. Have you tried W7 on a tablet PC? I have it on a Toshiba M4 and its really good. Despite the crappy hardware (and them M4 is crappy), it works extremely well. Systems like the Lenovo tablet are really, really good.

The Windows handwriting recognition is excellent. No funny virtual keyboard needed. My daughter writes entire papers for school on it with ease and accuracy

The Multi-touch in W7 is pretty good too - especially considering its first generation.

Of course, there is TONs of hype about the new Apple iSlate. Well see how that works. Is it just a big iPhone? Or will it be a general purpose computing device? For example, will it run Windows office for the MAC. Here is my prediction: If it does, then it will be a hit, if not then it will be a niche produce. But if you believe the speculation, then it will be a MAC, but look a lot like the iPhone. The puported specs are very PC like... Apparently well see on Tuesday.

One thing Apple does great is engender customer happiness and loyalty. Heck, my direct family has five iPhones! We love them. (note, iTunes surely truely sucks, the Zune software is light years better....) Wikipeida says that through Q2 of 2009, Apple had sold a total of 21.17 million iPhones. Thats pretty spiffy. To put things in perspective:

Apples iPhone hhas topped Microsofts Windows Mobile in U.S. market share of smartphone operating systems for the first time, putting it in the No. 2 spot, according to a report from ComScore released Thursday. [ cnet december 2009 ]

Its phenomenal that the iPhone went from zero to #2 in three years. But as awesome as it is, it is still just now #2 with Blackberry still being #1 and Windows Mobile a close #2. People tend to forget that its not the dominant smart phone - its one of three.

Im not sure what you mean by diction, but I think you mean voice recognition. That hasnt yet arrived as a technology. But its starting to be pretty useful. Have you tried Bing on the iPhone? Its better than Google on the iPhone and it has server based voice recognition. I think its based on the Tellme technology we acquired in 2007. Microsoft has long invested heavily in speech recognition research. The stuff in Vista was actually pretty good - better than Dragon Naturally speaking. The W7 stuff is better still. But! Its still not ready for prime time like on the Jetsons or Star Trek.

But its getting there: Of course we are running the lat

You are quite right. Taken further, the simplest tools are paper and pencil. Also blocks, builders of some sort (like Legos), and "manipulatives". But nothing beats basic human interaction, one on one. For young children this all that is needed.

I believe too much technology exposure at a young age is actually detrimental to learning. I'm not the only one. See:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13507_3-9757396-18.html

In my experience, the best teacher IS experience. Kids just need to get outside more and play.

You're missing the point. You log when they enter and log when they leave. Anyone who isn't logged leaving is counted as still being in the country. This lets you know how many people are still there and how many have overstayed. You can circulate the details of people who have overstayed to law enforcement and pick them up when they use a credit card or similar.

As you point out in your subsequent anecdote, we already log I-94 forms when visitors leave. We have been doing this for many years. The additional ID checks do nothing to help log when people leave.

Also, perhaps you haven't noticed, but as of January 18, 2009, even permanent residents, who by definition are not capable of overstaying their visa, are also fingerprinted at the border.

Yeah, this is a desktop. You are the foolish one, if you think the specs will not filter down in a couple of years to the laptop space. Here, have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and 1GB of graphics card RAM. Here is a laptop with 6GB of RAM and 512MB of graphics card RAM. Not thin and light enough? Here, have a 4GB of RAM Lenovo U150 with a 11.6" screen.

But of course, if you currently do not need 64-bits, surely no one else does either.

Yeah, this is a desktop. You are the foolish one, if you think the specs will not filter down in a couple of years to the laptop space. Here, have a laptop with 4GB of RAM and 1GB of graphics card RAM. Here is a laptop with 6GB of RAM and 512MB of graphics card RAM. Not thin and light enough? Here, have a 4GB of RAM Lenovo U150 with a 11.6" screen.

But of course, if you currently do not need 64-bits, surely no one else does either.

Hell no, bro. I finally transitioned to an all-Linux household after the release of the ultra-mature, ultra-stable Ubuntu 9.10. It worked wonders right out of the box. The only gripe I have about 9.10 is the default desktop wallpaper which is colored like tubgirl's whale-spout.

My 7 year old Dell Latitude D600 runs the compiz cube and with all the pretty window effects and dosen't even slow down until a skydome image or 3-d windows on cube rotate are added. All hardware is detected with the best drivers and there are no issues with hibernation. There's also no need for command-line boot options. It just works(tm).

Next up for Linux, media production software. What the fuck is up with Hydrogen and Ardour? Can't they get at least one real musician on their design staff?

The way laws in the UK are going, soon it will be a crime to have an internet-capable device. (We can't have those prisoners using it as a shank!)

Fortunately, it's not a crime if slashdot links to cnet who claims cbnsews has the scoop, where we find that CNN is the source.

Otherwise, where would we get "news for nerds, hyperlink puzzles that matter"?

* For the lazy, here's the solution: http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~jdevor/links/n_nfshost_com-solution.htm

I'd look into Orange --- from what I understand they don't care for non-residents registering ( though they used to, and may still do, allow an hotel as a valid address ) --- but here is their Camel Pay-As-You-Go sim, if you hit show details you can see the rates for each country which average 15p a minute ( but 6p for the USA ). http://shop.orange.co.uk/mobile-phones/plans/paygSimPlanList.jsp?selectedTariffName=Camel You could prolly get someone in England to post you one, or buy one off Ebay.co.uk. If there was difficulty registering to a non-British credit card ( and that's not a given ), nearly every other damn shop in Britain sells top-ups for all the sim providers. Alternatively, starter packs of sims are sold in stores, but those would not have cheap roaming. Here are a couple of quite recent links discussing this problem: http://www.ricksteves.com/graffiti/graffiti134.html http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10251727-94.html The latter affirms: 'Buying a SIM card when you get to London from a local operator, such as Orange, can offer even better deals. Orange offers a variety of service options for prepaid customers. In general, domestic calls range from 30 cents to 40 cents a minute, depending on the exchange rate. (All calls are billed in local currency.) And texts are about 20 cents to send and receive. With a special international plan, customers can also make international calls for as low as 10 cents a minute. Orange also offers free text messaging for customers when they "top up" or add money to their phones. One plan offers 300 free text messages with a 10-pound top up. And you can get 600 free text messages with a 20-pound top up and a 30-pound top up gets you unlimited text messages until the card expires.'

http://news.cnet.com/Breathalyzer-source-code-must-be-disclosed/2100-1028_3-5931553.html Florida police can't use electronic breathalyzers as courtroom evidence against drivers unless the innards are disclosed, a state court ruled Wednesday.

I lost all data-related connections as of about 3:00 PM, yesterday, on my Verizon BB Storm. As of this morning, the internet is back, but e-mail is still down.

I called Verizon's tech support yesterday and the rep said that they were flooded with calls from Blackberry users all asking the same questions, so I am pretty certain that this was, in the words of Ron Burgundy, "kind of a big deal". The worst part is that this is the second such outage in a week! It is starting to look as though Gmail has better uptime than BIS.

And no, before you ask, Bing has not mysteriously appeared on my phone. The default search provider is and always has been Google.

Rhetoric was not just part of Obama's campaign. Rhetoric was his entire campaign...

Really? All rhetoric? No policy? Not, say, on Net Neutrality?

Not to say that some of the rhetoric wasn't impressive on its own. The speech on race that he gave in response to the Reverend Wright controversy showed some pretty strong insights.

It's not because people knew or particularly cared about his policy plans

Maybe you didn't. Personally, I got on board precisely because I thought some policy positions like the one above demonstrated some insights I didn't see elsewhere, or at least that he spent some time talking to the right people.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that a lot if not most people vote on rhetoric and symbolism -- what a candidate means to them, how it fits into whatever political narrative they've internalized. That's almost certainly true no matter which election or candidates we're talking about. But that's a really different statement from yours, which appears to be that there was no policy substance to the Obama campaign, and I don't think that statement is particularly defensible.

The ad was banned later:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-10108679-37.html

Link for the video (compared with reality):
http://blog.websourcing.fr/wp-content/plugins/embedded-video-with-link/mediaplayer/player.swf?file=http://movies.itpro.co.uk/pcpro/online/appleadlow_DI_New_4x3_001.flv

Lawrence Lessig argued that before the SCOTUS, and they wouldn't buy even that basic point, IIRC.

I think it's stunningly short-sighted to assume that only oil company executives and their shills are opposed to a global tyrannical government.

I thought it was common knowledge that Al Gore is poised to make billions if something like cap-and-tax gets implemented - especially if it's an enforceable international treaty. He's a major owner in a British LLC doing a lot of investing in the kind of green tech that needs major subsidy, and in companies like Hara that will either make it big under cap-and-trade or fail because there's no market. He claims to give certain moneys to charities - but the charity 501-c(3) that he and his wife fully control, and he buys carbon offsets for his lavish lifestyle, but he buys them from a company that he owns.

> Yes, actually, but that's not the material issue here. If they want to put in an instruction that says "if processor_type 'Intel' then skip_optimizations=1" then all the power to them. It's theirs. Not AMDs. Not yours.

Be that as it may, their intent was clear. They could have done it the normal way, but they went out of their way to make a crappier product. And, frankly, if I catch anyone pulling crap like this (sabotaging their own products in the name of "competition"), I go out of my way to harm their business by any legal means possible. Granted, there's not much I can do against a giant company like Intel, but I'll still try. And I can hold a grudge like that for quite a while, unless they do an about-face. And even though I can only do so much, I don't think I'm the only person who does this.

In other words, even if you think that businesses can or should be able to do this, make damn sure you don't pull crap like this yourself. Because if enough customers like me find out, we can and will try to drive you out of business. Heck, I go one further. I'll shaft even the businesses of those who think it's their right to do something like this, because I believe that they would feed me intentionally crippled products given the opportunity.

And, incidentally, it's not their "right" anyhow. Read chapter 15 of the US Code, in particular the section Intel is accused of violating, per the FTC complaint.

That AC below has it exactly right: "The accusation is that the compiler probed to see if the CPU was AMD based and if it was it stopped all optimizations, not for user safety or reliability but just to fuck over AMD."

Just for your own information...

sync issues:

http://mashable.com/2009/11/09/iphone-windows-7-sync/
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10330485-263.html
http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/intel-responds-on-iphone-sync-issues/
http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/ipod-iphone-software-apps/139937-i-have-mind-boggling-iphone-3g-sync-problem.html
http://www.iphonefaq.org/archives/97665

Random shutdowns/decreased battery life:

http://www.iphonehacks.com/2009/09/iphone-os-31-problems-random-shutdown-poor-battery-life-bricked-iphone-slow-performance.html
http://www.theiphoneblog.com/2009/09/16/iphone-31-bugs-random-freeze-shut/
http://iphone-chat.org/31-random-shutdown-and-battery-death-iphone-3g-65401/
http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/iphone-therefore-iblog/2009/09/iphone-shutdown.html

As far as overheating/burning/asploading, it isn't a widespread problem...but...well...I'll just let the 103 million results speek for themselves:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGLL_enUS354US354&q=iphone+fire

I wonder if she'll pay for this sort of thing in the future?: http://download.cnet.com/BulletProof-FTP-Client-2009/3000-2160_4-10009523.html

What? The scheduler for Larabee doesnt run on the host - it runs on the graphics chip (cite). Note, this is different from scheduling that happens in the traditional graphics driver (shader compiling etc). Even if it did run on the host, it would have its own scheduler, just like DirectX10 adapters do today with WDDM drivers, and just like OSX.

What is so special about Grand Central Dispatch? It is a decent thread pool implementation. NT has had one of those for a LONG time (cite). The .NET base class library supports it directly (cite). We have some really cool stuff in Parallel LINK (PLINK). C# 4.0 (and .NET4.0) provide a set of very sophisticated mechanisms for data and task level parallelism (cite, cite, cite) .

Said another way, Windows has supported task level parallelism for a long time and .NET makes it super-duper easy to use. (the Win32 stuff isn’t as clean as it could be..., but it works just fine and isn’t terribly difficult to use).

Regarding Snapdragon, the article you linked to on semiaccurate.com is the worst kind of yellow journalism. It is the inter-tubes after all - nobody realizes they are a dog... Windows Mobile has run on ARM forever. Its not exactly the dominant OS.

Talk about dominance, Qualcoms chip sets and software are way, way more proprietary and closed than anyting from MSFT. I have a friend who is a mobile developer (doesnt work for MSFT) and it just drives him batty how controlling and closed Qualcom is with their stuff.

-Foredecker

Ixquick deletes logged data within 48 hours and does not record your IP address.

I also found this link interesting (from 2007).

I encourage anyone who mistakes Monty for a friend of Open Source to do a little reading...

The case against the case against Oracle-MySQL

MySQL and a tale of two biases

Monty Program AB's Suggestion to EU Commission to Get Rid of the GPL on MySQL

How Many Times Can Monty Sell MySQL?

One thing to ask your self is would Apple (or other unnamed companies operating in the OS space)
allow such a case of the above screen flickering, or would it be dealt with even if the X server had to be replaced (if that is the problem)

Actually, yes they would:

http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-13727_7-10329627-263.html

(Caveat: This has been fixed now. I mention this, though, because it drove me nuts on my unibody MacBook Pro for a good while).

Microsoft is feeding poor people, though.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-10322201-56.html

t doesn't have a keyboard, nor can you even connect one to it.

FTFY. Why won't Apple include a Bluetooth keyboard driver, or at least allow one to be installed without jailbreaking the phone?

And yet ... http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12261_7-10371298-10356022.html

From that artcle..

The company's annual report indicates it spent about $20 billion in capital expenditures for its wireless and wireline networks in 2008. And this year AT&T is estimating it will spend between $17 billion and $18 billion on its wireless and wireline networks.

Of course that doesn't follow the Slashdot groupthink.. but oh well.

And yet ... http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-12261_7-10371298-10356022.html

From that artcle..

The company's annual report indicates it spent about $20 billion in capital expenditures for its wireless and wireline networks in 2008. And this year AT&T is estimating it will spend between $17 billion and $18 billion on its wireless and wireline networks.

Of course that doesn't follow the Slashdot groupthink.. but oh well.

Speaking of which, when have you bought a game at the store, and found it pre-infected with malware?

Okay, technically, it's not a game, but how about this? Otherwise, I pretty much agree with you.

Patches? What patches? In order to release the patch you would actually have to have the developers to write it and since EA shut down Pandemic studios and fired its 200 employees shortly before they released the game... well you can draw the conclusions on whether there will be any patches any time soon.

Yeah, because nVidia never put bad shit out the door.

If you are running XP you might be able to pull it off using system restore, but there isn't any way of doing a fall back through Firefox, no. Are you on dialup? As I have found FF 3.5 sucks on slower connections and has to be seriously tweaked to regain its former speed, it uses too many connections for slower connections with low bandwidth on the newer version.

Here is the tweaks I use for my customers on slower connections. I hope this helps!

Eric Schmidt is a two faced hypocrit about privacy.

Ask Cnet about Eric's belief in privacy:

1. http://news.cnet.com/Google-balances-privacy,-reach/2100-1032_3-5787483.html?tag=nl
2. http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/05/technology/google_cnet/
3. http://www.siliconbeat.com/entries/2005/08/08/googles_hissy_fit_about_cnet.html

you are basically contending that it's impossible to illegally pirate content using P2P networks in Canada

No. It's not piracy, it only applies to music, and it depends on how the specific P2P network operates.

I would be very surprised if what you say is actually true.

It doesn't really matter what you believe, it's true whether you believe it or not.

Update: So that I don't appear to be trolling, let me point out that I just noticed this: Apple did approve that political app that I was just referring to.

Google and privacy. You might want to check out this, this, this, or this. People also forget that the majority of the world population is not living in the USA. US agencies are allowed to spy on non-US citizens as they like, although this is usually not emphasized for diplomatic reasons. Thus, not only terrorists and wrongdoers should be concerned about their privacy...unless Schmidt thinks that all non-US citizens are terrorists. Foreign governments should actually be much more concerned about Google than they seem to be, but as far as I know only former French president Chirac was concerned about Google and as a politician he turned out to be a wrongdoer, of course. LOL

You can make scroogle your search engine of choice although we all know that it helps less than some people might expect, because normally configured browsers leak a lot of information.

We all know that if you pay for the law that law cannot be used against you - it's like you are the owner of the law and you can direct the minions to use it as you see fit.

History disagrees with you. Bill C-32 (which was bought and paid for by the CRIA) established the CPCC levy. That same law was then used against the CRIA when they tried to sue people on filesharing networks.

I have no idea when you worked at a call center. July 1, 2007 was the deadline for all _new_ cable boxes from cable companies to use cable cards inside them. (http://news.cnet.com/Set-top-shakeup-is-in-the-cards/2100-1033_3-6194323.html) Existing stock that was Cable Card-less could still be deployed. (There are waivers for very very small cable companies for Cable Cards at all..)

There's been some shakeup lately wrt. the "DTAs" that cable companies are giving people so they can go all (or virtually all) digital. Basically minimal cable boxes for only the 'extended basic' level of channels, so people can use them on other TVs. (IMHO, something to placate people to give them _close_ to having the easy experience of just having cable-ready tuners in everything with analog channels, without having to pay extra for a box at every TV.) But apparently now these DTAs are going to be allowed to use some sort of 'privacy' mode, which is IMHO a weasly way of not using clear QAM, but not being quite as encrypted to require Cable Cards.

On the other hand, I trust my hosting provider to provide sufficient DNS; but if I were hosting my application on a cloud somewhere, I'd want some cloud-based DNS;

Could you give me an example of an "Internet-based DNS" that isn't also "cloud-based"? The definition of "in the cloud" IS "on the Internet". Your arbitrary distinction simply makes no sense at all. You are asking for DNS with a "distributed architecture" but DNS itself IS a distributed architecture!

I hate to sound trollish, but your over-eager Google fanboyism betrays your underlying non-comprehension of the issues involved! DNS is a distributed architecture, and all that's necessary for you to provide extremely high availability is to provide two (or more) DNS servers at different locations. This eliminates the "single point of failure" and with each location providing better than 99.95% uptime, the odds of both going down at the same moment is measured in hundreds of years. When you consider DNS caching, due to its distributed architecture, (there's that word again) if your hosted DNS were actually completely down for an hour or so, that few of your customers would even notice, that makes the problem even that much more tractable.

PS: "Cloud-based" IS "Internet-based". Please don't treat "the cloud" as if it were different. "The cloud" only has relevance in sales meetings - it's otherwise just Internet-based computing! See what Larry Ellison has to say about this!

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10410074-1.html

Hell, some snot-nosed terror banging away on a picture of his absentee mother is probably 10x smarter than most Twitterers. "Look at me! Look at me! I'm special! I feel so empty inside if I'm not prattling on about my inane life to other depressed losers!"

Here's the answer. I was wondering the same thing myself. It appears that the solution was very low tech: just get a bunch of people, and when they see a balloon, send a message to the group. Instead of splitting the 40k among the group, they donated it to charity. Reward for MIT? Bragging rights.

Maybe you are not aware that the article and discussion you have linked to have no evidence of rick-rolling with the bait.

Right, but even that article acknowledged that the potential for abuse is definitely there:
"Civil libertarians warn that anyone who clicks on a hyperlink advertising something illegal--perhaps found while Web browsing or received through e-mail--could face the same fate."

Show me evidence of 3rd parties deliberately rick-rolling innocents with FBI controlled kiddie porn URLs or go home.

Unlike canajin56, I don't claim that "FBI rolling" has actually happened -- just that it's very possible. No need to be an asshole about it.

They don't. But they can show up when people click on bait links that the FBI themselves plant:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html

Did you read the link you posted? Re-read the scan of the first court document, specifically the description of the video file, it turned my stomach. Also note that the files are 4 parts to a .rar file. My guess is that is to further show 'intent', the person would have to download all 4 parts to have it work. If only one of the files was download, I'm sure the 'accidental' defense would work.

> I'd suspect that it wasn't just one file that was old. The FBI doesn't just show up to random people's houses to look for child porn.

They don't. But they can show up when people click on bait links that the FBI themselves plant:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-9899151-38.html

So Mr Smythe one day accidentally clicks and downloads a child porn image. He deletes it.

Then maybe a year later, Mr Smythe is looking for porn, and clicks on various links, and by mistake (or curiosity) clicks on "Minors having sex".

And the next day the FBI kick down his door, and search his computer for child porn.

They find nothing, except one _deleted_ child porn image.

From the article - the FBI won't provide any files: "The supposed video files actually were gibberish and contained no illegal images."

Think that can't happen? Why not? The "Justice System" has been merrily charging children for "distributing child porn" when they consensually send each other nude pics of themselves.

They love to say they are protecting the children. But it's clearly a lie!

How can you say you are protecting children when you are charging _children_, threatening them with decades in prison and actually sending some of them to prison for _consensual_[1] sex.

Which do you think will scar the child more and for longer? Being "touched" by the Government or being touched by the average pervert?

[1] How do you think you would feel if you were a 14 year old girl, have a 17 year old boyfriend, and you two have sex a few times (hey it feels good right?) and then sometime later, the cops take him away and The Government sends him to prison for a few decades and everyone says bad things about him and that he did a very bad thing to you. So who is scarring who for life here? If it was clearly consensual, maybe just let the minor decide whether it was rape or not, when the minor achieves legal adulthood.

You can see here what I was thinking of. Also covered on cnet.

and dont engage in illegal practices

brian reid would have a different view from you, I think.

http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-137384.html
http://public.getlegal.com/articles/cultural-fit
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9792046-7.html

from what I've read of the case, it sure seemed illegal to me. I've been in that situation before, myself (age discrimination) and it SUCKS. very shameful for google to do that.

google has done evil and they have lost all their 'shine' when they pull crap like this.

read that and then tell me google is 'all wonderful'.

(sigh)

> In effect Google has given me a "hit" on my search then led me to a place where not even the search terms are present... Google crawler has access to it but I do not.

Google punished BMW.de for doing something similar to this before.

http://news.cnet.com/Google-blacklists-BMW.de/2100-1024_3-6035412.html

Quote: This is a violation of our Webmaster quality guidelines, specifically the principle of 'Don't deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users,'" Cutts' blog said.

Go figure.

Actually, Adobe is happy to for you to use their Web-based version of Photoshop: http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9903446-7.html