Slashdot Mirror

If you have a Google account.
Go here.
Once you see that you can see exactly what Google knows, and that you can have control over who can see it you will not worry as much.
Google has more info than anyone else, but many places have a lot of info on you. Most hide what they know about you and many sell the raw info.
Google, So far, only uses the info to target ads to you. Not really a bad thing. I would rather see a targeted ad than one for Maxipads or Viagra.
Google also give you quite a bit of control over it. The major plus though is that they do not split it up and make it difficult for you.
Google search, Play store, YouTube, Google Plus, Gmail, Drive and more. All those settings, all that information displayed for you to control in one place.
Name someone else that does that for you.

.
Ok, here is my point. Who do you think put that Advertisement on that video? It was the content provider, you know, the one that went through the trouble to put that video together and make it available for you to watch, that's who. If you don't like the advertisement placed on that video then I suggest you stop going to Youtube. If you want to skip that Advertisement by creating a Microsoft-like-add-skipping-app then you are in effect stealing money from the one producing the content. Why would they go through the trouble if they can't even meet their own financial needs to continue doing so. Think about who you are really screwing, only the content provider, and yourself because they will stop providing if they go in debt. Don't like it? Make a donation to the provider so they won't have to place adds! If you don't care about the content provider enough to do that then you don't need Youtube do you?

Enable and disable ads on my videos
https://support.google.com/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=94522&topic=1322133&ctx=topic

While I hate advertisements and do the best I can to block them for sites I don't need, I do go out of my way to actually donate to those that I don't want to place adds. I put my money where my mouth is. You should too. If your goal is to make sure Google makes as little money as possible, then donating to the content producer directly will achieve exactly that, and keep you from seeing any ads in the process. Think about it.

I know this is not appropriate to Orthdox Slashdotism, but if you had read TFA, you'd have found this link to the actual patent in play.

How did they end up owning this patent? Alcatel-Lucent is not on the original patent. Also, now that the patent has been thrown out, what changes in here? I can't find anything in there showing its updated status.

The google YouTube app came out in 2012, well after Andorid, which blows your entire argumment out of the water, as they did it when they were in a position of power. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&sqi=2&ved=0CCsQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerworld.com%2Fs%2Farticle%2F9231172%2FGoogle_debuts_its_own_iOS_YouTube_app&ei=cOqUUZGDF5OG9QSp2YCgCQ&usg=AFQjCNGbdHvSiOLoKEFeSz50CdVu4SVSpg&bvm=bv.46471029,d.eWU Also here google is not removing YouTube, just forcing them from stopping their abuse of their terms. Users can still go to the website.

That's assuming the poster supports the geek/hacker to strip the ads. I for one, am not, because I understand why ads are needed regardless if you're microsoft or working alone in your mom's basement.

The fact that the ads are need is irrelevant. I, and only I, chose to watch or ignore them. Or to display them on my computer.

I do not recognise 'term of service' and 'end user licence agreement', but Microsoft does. Microsoft cannot shove EULA and TOS all round while ignoring other's EULA and TOS. That would be hypocrite. Microsoft deserve all the flames its get for this.

Get a pair of these since ads are so important to you. Also fuck off.

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&ved=0CDIQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F2011%2F12%2F18%2F2643094%2Fnovell-microsoft-wordperfect-lawsuit-mistrial&ei=leGUUf27HvKx0QGUw4GgCw&usg=AFQjCNG99T_YDIThKmwHH3xjAtp91HaAeQ&bvm=bv.46471029,d.eWU

Without meaning to sound frivolous, do you have a link?

I actually had missed these things - Google didn't turn up much. From my brief Googling, it seems that at least the Swedish Pirate Party aren't in favour of actually abolishing copyright, they just want to give it a significant overhaul.

There is no routing as such. For each new "flow" the switch needs to ask a computer (controller) what to do. The controller will then program the switch with instructions for the new flow.

You claim that the flow table is just a glorified routing table. Maybe it is but much more fine grained, you can match on any fields in the IP packets, including layer 2 and 3 such as MAC, IP, port numbers, IP TCP packet types (syn packets) etc. Also you can mangle the packets, for example modify the MAC or IP address before forwarding the packet.

With this you can build some amazing things. The switch can be really dumb and yet it can do full BGP routing: RouteFlow: https://sites.google.com/site/routeflow/

The other canonical use case is virtualisation. No it will not be rerouting physical cables. But it can pretend to do so. Combine it with VMs you can have a virtual network that can change at any time. If you migrate a VM to another location, the network will automatically adapt. And still the switches are dumb. All the magic is in the controllers.

Before OpenFlow you would need to make a vlan (or MPLS). When moving the VM to a new location, you would need to reconfigure a number of switches to pass around this vlan and there is no standard protocol to do so.

OpenVSwitch supports OpenFlow so you can pretend your virtual network with virtual switches includes the VM host itself: http://openvswitch.org/

http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3AGoogle, Results 1 - 10 of 982

https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/

http://code.google.com/hosting/search?q=label%3AGoogle, Results 1 - 10 of 982

https://developers.google.com/open-source/soc/

You are running out of memory for 32 bit Linux builds, though, and there's no PGO involved there. See post in mozilla.dev.platform. The fix in that case is to move to a cross-compiler on 64 bit Linux, of course.

Awesome! If only we could teleport today's knowledge back to 1983! =)

I had been looking for a small demo to include with our Android .TAP-file renderer https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=co.kica.tapdancer, and this will be perfect! (Assuming it's free to distribute -- demos usually are but I'm attempting to clarify this...)

Suggested last year: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/openvirgle/QukA-eEPXVg/_7XkmJ1iHA8J

I just posted this comment to that page:
----
For some health advice on how to reduce the risk of further illnesses making this worse, please search for my post to the OpenVirgle Google group from 2012-06-23 entitled "Larry Page & Sergey Brin hopefully getting enough sunlight and vegetables?"

An excerpt: "I can wonder if, like so many indoor-types people in the technology field, those two hard working guys are both at risk from sunlight (vitamin D3) deficiency and vegetable deficiency disease? Or possibly some other nutritional issues (omega 3 deficiency, iodine deficiency, etc.) that can be caused by "The Pleasure Trap" and easy access to "Supernormal Stimuli"? (Both the names of good books BTW related to 20th and 21st-century health challenges.)"

Good luck with your new initiative. Google could someday become a leader in health sensemaking.

crap, so the weekly world news was wrong?

http://books.google.com/books?id=ZPIDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA6&lpg=PA6&dq=weekly+world+news+china+jump&source=bl&ots=AoEqCEJqth&sig=jdSlE5eZvZ2lmBsjE9SE2sZm7PE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=geOTUbLTEo2o9gSJ94HYAQ&ved=0CEcQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q=weekly%20world%20news%20china%20jump&f=false

I am a charity. If I do less than US$40k/yr, I am left alone. I plan on using bitcoin for all my transactions as soon as possible. It makes donating cheaper, easier. Its just what I have been wanting. Its like mana from heaven. I will keep a log, but the proof is on the government, not me.

But if I had one prediction for bitcoin, it will cause 2 things, a) everything will move offshore, a) a second-tier internet will emerge, people wanting to use it offshore.

Help eliminate stupid speeding tickets

When half or more of the people you know have a DUI, it's only a hassle, it's not embarrassing and carries no social stigma causing you to be less likely to avoid it in the future.

That's only a problem if the penalty for DUI is "only a hassle".

With the deterrence effect of stigmatizing DUIs diluted, all they can turn to are draconian laws -- soon we'd probably have a 3 strikes law for driving. Then we'd have a new problem of people driving without licenses, insurance, an increase in stolen plates (because you can't get your tabs without a license...).

First: I very much enjoy a beer or six, some wine or a single malt, and have absolutely no problem with people getting drunk. That said, I'll chime in with how we have reduced the problem in Norway: there are sensible campaigns to teach people to avoid driving when they have drunk alcohol, and conversely, avoid drinking when they are planning to drive afterwards (feel free to enjoy a few when you get home). Back it up with laws and *real* consequences. If this actually is a problem for you in your everyday life, maybe you should examine your drinking habits. The default state of most people most of the time is not "tipsy".

It's perfectly possible to have such campaigns without preaching, and without acting like some of the more irrational elements of MADD. But yes, the law should be harsh. If you turn out to be generally unfit to drive, you shouldn't have a licence, no matter what the cause. In Norway, where getting caught drunk driving have very real consequences, it has greatly decreased drunk driving and connected accidents. Not even the most populistic of our political parties argue that the current situation should be changed. The follow-up problems you mention (people driving without a licence and similar), while rare, are treated as any other criminal activity: fines/jail, and confiscation of property used to perpetrate the crime. I don't even know what to say about your "standing up to the man" parallel, but I did get a chuckle out of the vision of an entire drunk neighbourhood "standing up to the man" while driving :)

Ok, so it's not on the translator, but you can visit Google's homepage in Klingon. It's not as if MS is the first company to use Klingon on the web. Although they may be the first to attempt a translator. The best thing about a Klingon translator is that almost nobody knows how well it really works.

One more reason not to use Bing.

Because google is any different?
https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=xx-klingon

Its just a matter of time before they add klingon to their translate service.

Maybe some Mayans ignorant of English insist on that, but "Mayan" like "Polynesian" or "Hawaiian" or "German" or "Anglican" et cetera is the proper way of adjectivializing "Maya". You can have "the Maya" or "the Mayan People" but not "Maya People", "Mayan language" but not "Maya language". You can even have "the language of the Maya", but note, not "Maya" as adjective. Sorry. Welcome to English. cf. https://www.google.com/search?q=mayan+language

Using a 3rd party payment processor is against the Google Developer Terms of Service.

Section 3.3 : "All fees received by Developers for Products distributed via the Market must be processed by the Market's Payment Processor."

https://play.google.com/intl/ALL_uk/about/developer-distribution-agreement.html

Only if you can accept payments via Google Checkout/Wallet.

You see, the Play market is available in more countries that you can accept payment from - paid apps are simply not shown to those countries. (For a long time after Android first came out, the only supported country was the US, while the phone was available in a number of other countries, including Canada. End result is if you wanted a paid app, you had to pirate it because Google didn't make it available to you).

As a result, many apps went "freemium" because it's either not show up and be pirated, or go free and make up the money selling ads and in-app purchases (the latter being fairly new, which is why many apps use the ad model with fairly ... "liberating" permissions required).

So if you're selling in a country that can accept Google payments, you must use it. If not, you're free to engage Paypal and others (which until Google allowed in-app payments most devs used Paypal, and even after IAPs until Google cracked down).

Fact remains, Play is available in more countries than you can accept money from.

Electrowetting has actually been around 10 years at least, and when I wrote an essay on the topic some 5 years ago I found a lot of studies on the subject albeit mostly by the same few authors:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=electrowetting

At the time when I was studying the subject the spotlight was on LCD- and OLED-displays, as they were evolving rapidly. Electrowetting was not at the time utilized anywhere, except for conceptual designs and prototypes.

To be honest, I hadn't followed up on the topic at all and assumed electrowetting displays had died away. Hopefully Amazon can prove me wrong as the concept itself is quite innovative.

I guess you didn't actually read the reference pages you berating. From the Rotoscoping wikipedia page:

In the mid-1990s, Bob Sabiston, an animator and computer scientist veteran of the MIT Media Lab, developed a computer-assisted "interpolated rotoscoping" process which he used to make his award-winning short film "Snack and Drink". Director Richard Linklater subsequently employed Sabiston's artistry and his proprietary Rotoshop software in the full-length feature films Waking Life (2001) and A Scanner Darkly (2006).[7] Linklater licensed the same proprietary rotoscoping process for the look of both films. Linklater is the first director to use digital rotoscoping to create an entire feature film. Additionally, a 2005–08 advertising campaign by Charles Schwab uses Sabiston's rotoscoping work for a series of television spots, under the tagline "Talk to Chuck".

So, even though Rotoscoping was first a manual technique done in 1915 and patented in 1917 (tracing live action frames that are projected onto the back of a frosted glass panel), that process moved to using a computer, and then was automated within the Rotoshop software.

There's even a patent from 1994 mentioned: US Patent 6,061,462 http://www.google.com/patents?vid=6061462 for a digital rotoscoping process (that's a separate work from the Rotoshop software).

These may all be listed in Microsoft's patent - I haven't read it - but they certainly seem related, if not prior art.

Sucks since I don't have a data plan... But an (very short) explanation is here http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/yKG7BGro7QQ/ntAXQWWKj70J

How does "Closing products always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Streamlining our services enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives" qualify as an explanation?

That's just a employee shilling the company line.

Especially when the same response showed up more than once word for word from different people.

Do you have a citation for what is the most common mechanism of Glyphosphate resistance in weed plants?

I read about in the May 2011 edition of Scientific American. I cannot find it on their site, but here is a google groups repost. The article describes the same wastewater bacteria that you mention, so I originally misremembered that. It is a good article, with an overview of lots of issues about herbicide resistance. It is definitely worth reading if you are interested in these issues.

Here is a better overview of big-carbon tax loopholes, and what they cost. Some of these subsidies go back 100 years.

Big Oil’s Misbegotten Tax Gusher

Conservative media consistently cover-up for the oil industry. And people like you believe that someone the oil industry is a poor-begotten pillar of US society, and not just a seminal example of crony capitalism.

I wont pretend to be a "creative person", whatever that means. But this:

The file system restrictions alone make it unsuitable for all but the most casual of casual users. No, iCloud is in no way an adequate replacement -- not even close.

Is the dumbest thing I've read in this thread. Sandboxes still allow for interoperation and file/data sharing between apps. Without iCloud. They just require handlers to register and receive permission. There may be certain things that are harder on the iPad for creative work, but it's certainly possible, because people are doing it

Besides, you seem to be missing the original point -- no one is arguing that the iPad should replace the PC for everyone. No one is trying to "kill" the PC. Apple realized that most people don't even like to use the computer, but they put up with it because what they get (access to entertainment, communication with anyone on earth, and the sum of human knowledge) is valuable. They provided a better interface for those people to use.

I make stuff. Mostly software. I work mostly on a combination of a Linux box I built myself and a Macbook Pro (and, sometimes, a Chromebook). But I find the iPad indispensable all the same, because anyone who creates knows that being a good creator means consuming a lot, and the iPad is an outstanding way to brainstorm, research, and do rudimentary design.

AIDE works on Android.
Mr Lee's C/C++ compiler works on iDevices.

I wouldn't say it's easy to use those devices, but it can be done.

The Schmeiser case and Bowman cases are the most oft-repeated examples of Monsanto suing innocent farmers. Except that the farmers weren't innocent victims and acted specifically to violate Monsanto's patents. It's hilarious that they anti-GMO/anti-Monsanto crowd continues to trot them out as shining examples of corporate evil. OTOH, I've never seen anyone provide a citation for Monsanto actually suing innocent farmers who are victims of unwanted cross pollination.

That may have helped ice the unanimous SCOTUS decision, but that's not what the lawsuit was really about. The lawsuit was about planting unauthorized Monsanto seeds, pure and simple. Monsanto is constantly suing farmers who never buy or plant any kind of Monsanto seeds merely because some Monsanto seeds show up in their fields from cross-pollination. In some of these cases Monsanto is even suspected of causing the cross-pollination so they can bring a lawsuit.

http://www.dailytech.com/Monsanto+Defeats+Small+Farmers+in+Critical+Bioethics+Class+Action+Suit/article24118.htm

There's a big fight going on between organic farmers and Monsanto over this issue, because the organic farmers don't want the Monsanto seed at all.

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/17/local/la-me-gs-organic-farmers-sue-monsanto-to-stop-patent-suits-20120217

A quick google search shows dozens of articles about this.

https://www.google.com/search?q=monsanto+cross+pollination+lawsuit

The interesting part is that they looked at the "habitats that these species now live in". They did not look at habitats that are not currently suitable for the species to live in. For all we know there could be more area that species could live in when the climate changed. By concentrating on current species ranges the scientists are skewing the results. One should look at the whole system before coming to a conclusion.

I see your point, but you seem to be oversimplifying the complexity of 'the problem'. Some plants are capable of dispersing their seeds on the wind. Others don't use mechanisms which allow them to 'migrate' as quickly. Regardless of the natural methods they depend upon, including dispersion via carriage in the guts of birds or mammals, the environment in which the seed finds itself has to be favorable for germination, growth and reproduction, including pollination.

With or without human intervention, the probability that existing plant species will find favorable habitat and do so in a timely manner so as to avoid extinction is a crap shoot. Even animals can't outrun climate change if there's no path suitable; case in point, the Golden Toad that used to exist in the cloud forests of Costa Rica. Remember, Man has to support +7 billion people and therefore, we're competitors for the habitat that wild species need as well. Farmers that depend upon the 'conventional' means of production are apt to be far more concerned with finding reliable fields for their monocultures and pesticides than they will be interested in taking on the task of assisting the rest of the naturally occurring species. The destruction of rainforests in Brazil is accelerating due to just such 'free market' forces.

And lest ye forget, there are plenty of specialized relationships between plants and pollinators. In many scientifically documented cases, earlier and earlier warm weather causes the plant to flower before the insect has pupated. Fewer and fewer flowers feed decreasing numbers of butterflies or moths. The feedback loop dooms both the plant and the insect.

The Checkerspot butterfly (now endangered) used to be so common that vast clouds were seen in California. Now up and down the west coast, there are only isolated pockets left. They depended upon a relatively common plant which is also in decline. A subspecies in the northwest, the Edith's checkerspot, exists in only 5 small micro-niches. The temperature and timing of the plant's life cycle caused these populations to exist in concert at higher and higher elevations where the plant would grow and butterflies would hatch out consistently within the appropriate time frame. This mutualism is common place in nature, but it's developed over vast amounts of time.

Raising the temperature of the earth an average of 4 degrees Celsius over 100 years is hardly enough time for Man to respond in order to protect his infrastructure and interconnected economies. If you think the current crises in Europe, the U.S. or those that recently preceded in Japan, Thailand, Argentina or Chile were large or that they took a while to iron out, get ready for what's likely to come with increasingly frequent drought, decreased snow pack and agricultural yield volatility which results from these two phenomena in tandem. The notion that nature will be able to respond to such radical change while competing with the 800 lb. hairless gorilla who now dominates the entire world with his agricultural needs is ludicrous.

Unless we develop our collective prefrontal cortex and create a plan to deal the predictable results of the last 150 years of accelerating environmental abuse, it really won't matter

In many cases, you can actually have those rights returned to you even if you are convicted.

In some (all?) states, you cannot ever have the right to own a gun returned to you.

can anyone recommend an app that denies (per app) access to various Android facilities (contacts, dialer, etc) that works w/Android 4.1+? (Why do so many basic apps, like for example a flashlight (I'm making this example up) need access to my contacts and call logs? )

If your phone is rooted you can use LBE https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.lbe.security.lite It worked fine for me on my rooted HTC Sensation running ICS, but looking at the current reviews there may be a problem on JB leading to boot loops.

I have no idea how it looks, but apparently only Chrome has implemented this via Mute Tab. I'm kindof annoyed that searches show this existed back in August 2011, and there is so little else out there, especially built in.

Sucks since I don't have a data plan... But an (very short) explanation is here http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/yKG7BGro7QQ/ntAXQWWKj70J

How does "Closing products always involves tough choices, but we do think very hard about each decision and its implications for our users. Streamlining our services enables us to focus on creating beautiful technology that will improve people’s lives" qualify as an explanation?

That's just a employee shilling the company line.

A quick google image search its just a motorized paraglider with a car body.. I've flew a friend's motorized paraglider about 15 years ago and it was pretty scary getting off the ground with the extra weight and higher than I was used to speeds.. Once in the air, it was still subject to gusts of wind deflating the wing.. There are many safer ways to fly for $94,000.. But... glad no one was seriously hurt...

A ball inside a ball-bearing race typically fails by "spalling": a tiny flake breaks off of the surface of the ball.

As it rolls around the race, the ball makes a periodic "tick" sound whose frequency is related to its rotation.

So... if you record the sound coming from an engine, and you have an index mark input (when the flywheel reaches TDC, for instance) and you know the gearing ratios of all the shafts, the inner race and outer race diameter of the ball bearing races, and the number of balls &c you can relate the frequency to a particular bearing which is going bad before it fails.

You can do the same thing for the races: the inner and outer races rotate with a particular speed relative to the balls, so a crack or spall on a race will also make a sound at a particular frequency.

Essentially, look for energy in the particular frequency that a particular failure in a particular bearing would make based on the engine RPM, and repeat for all races. If you find enough energy (ie - audio volume), you know which bearing is going bad and the nature of the problem.

A bad gear typically starts with a broken tooth: a crack forms at the base of the tooth, resulting in a tooth which doesn't push as hard against the mating tooth in the next gear. This causes the driving shaft to speed up slightly as the cracked tooth mates, and slow down for the next tooth due to inertia.

If you continuously monitor an accelerometer attached to one of the engine shafts you can see this speedup/slowdown signature, and if you know the gearing ratio you can figure out which gear is going bad within the engine. The crack tends to mature over time, so an individual tooth will first become "wobbly" before complete failure.

A Journal Bearing typically wears when the "hole" becomes bigger than the shaft (the oil and mating shaft grind the hole bigger over time). When this happens, the mating shaft and attached mechanics will "wobble" within the hole, causing a noticeable shift in the mass of the engine.

If you continuously monitor an accelerometer attached to the engine block, you can index this wobble to the shaft speed based on the engine RPM and tell if any bearings are failing and how bad they are.

In all cases you can determine the nature and extent of the damage while it is relatively minor - before it damages other parts of the engine (scored shafts, pieces breaking off, catastrophic failure in flight, &c.)

At the time this was figured out the technology was expensive to implement, so it was only appropriate in select situations - aircraft maintenance, for instance.

Nowadays with the rise of high-power microprocessors and personal phone displays, perhaps some enterprising hobbyist will figure out a way to implement this for automobile maintenance.

https://code.google.com/p/cryptonite/

this looks like it could help

Sucks since I don't have a data plan... But an (very short) explanation is here http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!msg/websearch/yKG7BGro7QQ/ntAXQWWKj70J

Google National Self Defense Survey. 2.5 million preventions a year

This was the first link I got when Googling that...

Regardless, I'm still unsure what you mean by that reference. Was 2.5 million rapists shot by armed citizens? Or do rapes happen much less in the US than other places because you have armed citizens?

A "solid knowledge" of "different programming styles and software architectures" probably won't be so solid if it doesn't include the technologies that have come about in the last 5 years!

Get back to me in 10 or 15 years on that.

Of course there are genuinely new developments in the field from time to time, but the real pace of advancement is much, much slower than the pace of buzzword advancement. The trick is to be aware enough of general industry trends that when something truly new or a significantly better way of doing things comes along you can pick up on it and study it further.

For example, if you work on browser-side code for a web app, I'd say interesting developments over the past few years have included AMD, Google's Closure Compiler, and much better debugging and profiling tools for JavaScript in browsers.

However, I'm not particularly interested in yet another lightweight framework that lets me do a limited version of MV* as long as I'm willing to write my entire codebase following that framework's conventions. Usually, IME, the time to learn these tools in details and the lock-in effect cost far more than any benefit you get from using them. If anyone does write one that really is in a different class and worth the effort, I'm pretty sure the entire web will tell me over the weeks and months following its release so I can investigate it.

Hell if I know how, but his behavior shows clearly what he is.

Ah, should have understood that a conspiracy theory would have such a solid foundation. BTW This is Nokia's 5 year stock price chart, can you spot where Elop ruined the company?

then i have to call my provider and ask them to send me a micro-sim

You could just cut your SIM to fit. Here's how.

Brute-forcing an iPhone's lock code is relatively trivial with freely available tools. This puts the device in DFU mode, so "Erase device on X unlock attempts" doesn't take effect. That version of the tools only bruteforces lockcodes, but there's no theoretical reason you couldn't try at least a dictionary attack on a password, too. Since it's also possible to dump the hardware key and a complete (encrypted) image, I imagine an offline attack on the image is possible, too. You wouldn't have to rely on the relatively slow hardware in the iPhone.

Using those tools I have successfully bruteforced the 4-digit lockcode to an iDevice running 6.0.2, and that's with no prior experience with or knowledge of iOS. I even used an emulated Mac to compile the necessary firmware patch. And that's just what I was able to do in with a few hours of fiddling. There are people who do this for a living, and tools dedicated specifically to extracting data from mobile devices. Are these PDs really saying they can't get into devices with simple lock codes?

Dismantling Utopia: How Information Ended the Soviet Union

Synopsis from Google Books, emphasis added:

By the 1980s the Soviet Union had matched the United States in military might and far surpassed it in the production of steel, timber, concrete, and oil. But the electronic whirlwind that was transforming the global economy had been locked out by communist leaders. Heirs to an old Russian tradition of censorship, they had banned photocopiers, prohibited accurate maps, and controlled word-for-word even the scripts of stand-up comedians. In this compellingly readable firsthand account, filled with memorable characters, revealing vignettes, and striking statistics, Scott Shane tells the story of Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt to "renew socialism" by easing information controls. As newspapers, television, books, films, and videotapes flooded the country with information about the Stalinist past, the communist present, and life in the rest of the world, the Soviet system was driven to ruin. Shane's unique perspective also places one of the century's momentous events in larger context: the universal struggle of governments to keep information from the people, and the irresistible power of technology over history.

Don't forget that the "right" people will still be able to own weapons. One famous "anti-gun" columnist who frequently wrote about the need to ban guns shot a teenager who was swimming in his pool. He thought no one should own guns except of course for elite liberals such as himself. A common attitude.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1876&dat=19880615&id=Bz4sAAAAIBAJ&sjid=cc4EAAAAIBAJ&pg=6879,6595637

Err.. a) Mexico doesn't have a total ban on guns (gun ownership is a constitutionally protected right), it's just been limted to purchasing from a single army-run shop in Mexico City; b) Mexico happens to have this large nation to the immediate north with relatively limited small arms gun control, and the border heading south is only marginally guarded; so unsurprisingly c) The US Justice Department estimates 70% of guns recovered from Mexican cartels were legally purchased in the US. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5guv1zxttoSAF-NOJzZkAJV2R93mg

I wouldn't be shocked to hear cartels are also buying abroad, but why bother when you can get most of what you need immediately to the north?

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=slashdot

For the curious here's a link to a youtube fixin' chromium extension. This is the full, improved version of Youtube Options in the Chrome store. Download directly from spoi.com to get the full range of features that aren't allowed by Chrome Store's TOS. I only wish there were a reliable Firefox equivalent to de-crap Youtube and show it in naked glory as nature intended.

Also recommended: Herp Derp for Youtube. Fun to install on a friend's chromium.

For the curious here's a link to a youtube fixin' chromium extension. This is the full, improved version of Youtube Options in the Chrome store. Download directly from spoi.com to get the full range of features that aren't allowed by Chrome Store's TOS. I only wish there were a reliable Firefox equivalent to de-crap Youtube and show it in naked glory as nature intended.

Also recommended: Herp Derp for Youtube. Fun to install on a friend's chromium.