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This was posted a while ago as "real reason for drm".

https://plus.google.com/107429617152575897589/posts/iPmatxBYuj2

TL;DR: control hardware manufacturers, not consumers.

How about we just attach a giant magnet to the back of space craft similar to what you'd see behind the rear or front tires of an RV to pick up road debris before it punctures the tires.

Citation: http://www.google.com/patents/US3956111

When the M$ mole infested Nokia, Nokia tanked

Sales tanked, share price tanked, everything tanked

Will Washington state be next ?

This is Nokia's 5-year share price trend. Can you spot any change where Elop joined?

They actually state: "LivingSocial passwords were hashed with SHA1 using a random 40 byte salt." Source: https://www.livingsocial.com/createpassword

I'm glad they aren't using MD5, but wish they were using at least SHA-256 (SHA-1 has had flaws exposed). Or ideally bcrypt.

Honestly, as a web developer myself, there really is no reason not to use bcrypt.

Torque is all the OBDII goodness I need, along with an ELM327 dongle from Amazon.

Sorry to be pedantic, but unless I missed it, you pointed out only potentially factual errors in the original, not any logical fallacies. So while it certainly raises some questions, it does not "beg" any in your example. (Though I think a thorough analysis of TFA's original premise could find some petitio principii in the author's logic.)

Here is a good explanation of why that is so.

Torque for Android
I've used this:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.prowl.torque&hl=en
$4.95 or Free for the "lite" version.

I use a $10 bluetooth ELM327 adapter and the free version of Torque for Android. It doesn't do any of that chirp stuff, but it easily could with the right software. On top of that, access to ALL sensors and codes.

Not only that, the GPS in our trucks at work do exactly what this thing does.

It's not new, it's not even a good price.

get one of these

Install this for free

Or get the pro version for $5.

does almost the same things for more than $50 less.

The rest is just common sense and marketing hype.

Then again, there are a lot of folks out there who need to spend money and have a "cool" app.....

I'd rather die in my boots than live on my knees.

Excellent choice of words there. But like most internet tough guys you've never been in anything worse than a schoolyard punch-up, and until you have it's all big talk.

Don't comment on peoples post when YOU have no idea what they mean.
Glass eye is slang for a device with a lens.
http://books.google.com/books?id=QesppquBwgsC&pg=PT1603&lpg=PT1603&dq=%22glass+eye%22+slang+camera&source=bl&ots=F7bu5zYwOh&sig=ZyVKQ1DS1qRjaCZN1FfWjdleyVM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=o696UcfJJKmFiALro4CICA&sqi=2&ved=0CEIQ6AEwAg

Apparently monsanto already owns the EU. With predictable results:

See here (german, google translate,
open letter,
petition (german).

Bottom line: Everyone, down to hobby farmers, will be forbidden from using any seeds unless regulated, registered, allowed.

405 means N/S off shoot to the 5 that reconnect.

That why there is more then one 405.

and this make it hard for me to feel sad:
"is commute between home in Bel-Air and his Space Exploration Technologies factory in Hawthorne."
What a tragic life he has.
  20 miles through some of the densest population. You can blame the city planners who abandoned the much more logical freeway expansion in the 70's.

https://maps.google.com/maps?saddr=Hawthorne,+Los+Angeles,+California&daddr=Bel+Air,+Los+Angeles,+CA&hl=en&sll=34.009839,-118.406011&sspn=0.380785,0.437393&geocode=FfOFBQIdQRXy-CnxLsxaK7TCgDEBszjMHXHBYg%3BFe5YCAIdk3zw-Cn78k5sGb3CgDFY1NTXKyVR5A&t=h&mra=pd&z=11

https://www.google.com/search?q=10%5E15+eV+in+joules

First of all, I apologise for the tone of my post... lkcl's posts frequently attract trolls and, posting at a late hour again, my hasty judgement got the better of me. :-(

When you give your bittorrent client a magnet link with a "btih" (BitTorrent Info-Hash) component, it starts looking up the DHT (asking other peers it's already made contact with) for peers sharing that infohash's torrent. As soon as it finds at least one, it connects to that peer ("joins the swarm") using the BT protocol and asks for the torrent's metadata (the.torrent file's info section). It is at this point where it will pop up a window asking you where to save the torrent and/or which files to download from it.

Given the above, one way that "gittorrent" could work would be the following:
1. Each Git object (file/file tree/commit) would be a separate "torrent", identified by its hash. Information about which peers have which hashes (i.e. objects) would be stored in the DHT. Nothing new for DHT so far. With this in place, you could checkout any individual git file/tree/commit and its history (each git commit references its parent).
2. Here we introduce a DHT protocol extension (let's call it "get_hash_addenda") using which you could get information stored in the DHT (this is the major difference with .torrent files) about newer commits. With this in place you would also find other users' "forks". This would also be useful for ordinary torrents by the way (get subtitles/new episodes for this torrent).
3. With these in place, you now have a (very slow) "gittorrent" implementation. Additional extensions/local DHT data caching/assumptions/whatever) would be used to speed the whole thing up. Existing BT trackers (fast peer lookup for a given infohash) would work as is. Existing git daemons would also work, and could also be extended to speak DHT and the BT protocol. All these things map well to existing BT concepts.

The protocol(s) used for transferring objects between peers could be the BT protocol (provided we treat each git object as a separate torrent, as lkcl recommended), and/or any protocol already supported by Git (as an analogue of "web seeds").

Example bare bones magnet links:

magnet:?xt=urn:git:<object id>
magnet:?xt=urn:git:<long hex number representing a user>/<repo>[/<branch|tag name>]

or even magnet:?xt=urn:git:<user>/<repo>/<branch|tag name>
if a way of having non-spoofable and globally unique nicknames is found (probably in an FCFS fashion).

A nice research project on extending BT (which already somewhat implements the "get_hash_addenda" functionality) is Tribler.

The earlier "gittorrent" effort that lkcl criticised can be found here. A cursory glance reveals an emphasis on trackers and almost no mention of DHT, probably due to it being written in 2008.

Disclaimer: All this is from a layman's point of view and horribly inaccurate. The DHT protocol extension especially could probably be avoided using some convention. I've been reading up on how BitTorrent and DHT works lately and, honestly, I can't blame you: apart from the BEPs it's basically UTSL.

He's the "business" guy. Seems like he's not really a computer guy, he's just another executive type. He says things and does things not out of interest in computers or altruism, he seems to behave exactly as any other executive type stuck in that position would, just out to make money and screw everyone else over. The only thing that's different is that the company happens to be Google, and they at least have the motto of "don't be evil." I'm obviously not in on the inner workings of Google, but I suspect were Schmidt the only guy in charge from the start, everyone here would hate Google just as much as apple or MS.

Enlightened self-interest can be a good thing, but seems hypocritical if you're the company that spies into everybody's backyard from airplanes:

https://maps.google.com/maps?q=2101+Waverley+Street+Palo+Alto,+CA+94301&hl=en&ll=37.434864,-122.14041&spn=0.000567,0.000423&sll=35.101934,-108.896484&sspn=52.768214,55.458984&hnear=2101+Waverley+St,+Palo+Alto,+Santa+Clara,+California+94301&t=h&z=21

(Steve Jobs really doesn't seem to have been much of a gardner.)

You sir are truly and wholly full of shit. Microsoft began this attack BEFORE android was even on the radar. Theyexplicitly said that Amazon is paying them for a License to run Linux servers. Buffalo, Konica Minolta, A-Data, Casio Amdocs and others are among the device manufacturers that do not make Android devices. This is about Linux nothing more nothing less.

Forget tinfoil; woven stainless steel is the in thing for wallets. I got mine more for the durability, but blocking RFID readers is a nice bonus.

Good job that's not in the slightest bit radioactive then.

If nuclear adopted the same attitude that coal has always had, then reactor leaks would be result in a shrug and a response of "So what, you can't see it, so it can't hurt you."

The author's proposal sounds suspiciously like he has fallen for the seductive path of elegant generalizations(that are too theoretical for the ugly details to yet be visible) instead of confronting the ugly details that our current attempt at standardization has made visible...

To be sure, the sausage-by-comittee that tends to result when you try to standardize something is quite ugly and takes ages to settle down; but if the proposal is "Just let people use whatever shims they want for everything" you haven't really solved the problem, just comitted yourself to standardizing a suitably powerful interface for the shims to sit on, along with giant piles of shim-dependent code that crawlers and any other applications that break the shims' assumptions won't be able to make the slightest sense of.

Heck, for maximum elegance in the core standards, we could just replace virtually everything with the "Object" tag, and let people embed whatever they want, or abandon this 'HTML' nonsense entirely and just make Native Client the standard, freeing developers to implement pretty much any conceivable structure, from a legacy browser engine, to a Flash client, to a TECO interpreter built entirely out of Minecraft redstone logic, as the shim for their 'site'. A glorious age of unfettered freedom!

<Something something> communism <something something>FOSS

<more communism>

It seems like you haven't used proprietary software at all... I've seen a lot of QA issues like those mentioned in your rants in proprietary software, as well as OSS. On the other hand, I regularly use two very slick OSS projects both privately and at work: calibre and Sigil. Both are hands down the best option available in their category, proprietary or not. Nothing else even comes close. Both are maintained by extremely competent devs, have quick issue turnaround, and are relatively simple to run from source, as I have done to make (and contribute) a couple of fixes and improvements myself. In the case of calibre, millions of non-tech users are happily using it to catalogue their ebooks.

In your case, as it seems like OSS ate your dog, feel *very* free to look elsewhere. I've done so as well when I can't find anything that suits my requirements. There have been a few of your kind visiting the forums of those two projects. These people make incoherent, irrational demands, rant, won't listen to reason, and even refuse to explain what they mean so that people can help them. None of this is constructive for anyone. Although they're generally treated politely, we're frankly better off without them. Then you have people who bring rationally presented and relevant complaints to the table while behaving themselves, they usually walk away with a fixed issue, a workaround they're happy with, or a good explanation why a solution is not forthcoming (and yes, this can be "I'm not personally interested in implementing this feature, patches are welcome"). The project benefits from these people as well. Of course there are also bad and irrational maintainers out there, as well as projects so bad they're worthless, the barrier of entry isn't exactly high.

The point is: No, OSS devs aren't your employees. Neither are you their paying customer, and you have no right to make demands. No, not even if you donate $3. Take what they offer, or not. Nonetheless, if you can't see the indescribably huge value in a plethora of OSS projects, including Wikipedia, I feel sorry for you. There are millions of people with better people skills and/or technical knowledge than you who actually make OSS work for themselves, every day.

just saying...

The Shelf-life of beer depends on the alcohol content. Stronger beer lasts longer. Homebrew tends to have a higher alcohol content than commercial beers, especially if you pull the double fermentation trick (add more sugar after 6 weeks and wait another 6 weeks).

What is it, exactly, that Google didn't do? Offer 32/64GB capacities? LTE?

Oh, wait: https://www.google.com/search?q=Nexus+4+lte

I'm going with: whoopdedoo. Is it even possible to actually take advantage of LTE with SoC mobile hardware or typical network congestion? Even it is, what's the point if you hit your data cap after 5 minutes and get wallet-raped by your carrier?

I'm aware of exactly one regional carrier in all of Canada, and maybe one in the US that actually offer unlimited data in only specific areas, not nation wide (subject to arbitrary "excessive use policies" of course ... so it's not really unlimited so much as it's "unlimited"). Everyone else makes a big fucking deal about one whole gigabyte and it's absolutely hilarious how anyone thinks that is any real amount of data in 2013.

No, it most certainly was Google who started upsetting the status quo. The Nexus line has always been available unlocked straight from Google, and for an extremely palatable price. Pop in your SIM card, no plan restrictions*, no contract, it just goes.

I will admit that HTC's One is proportionately well priced. They also get kudos for a big fuck-you plainly directed at AT&T.

* I have my Nexus 4 on a voice & text plan (no data) because I can wait until the next available wifi signal or until I get home to check this or that and I don't need to post every damn meal I eat on shitsagram. Yes, I'm aware that some carriers will automatically tack on charges to your bill for features you never even used when they detect your phone model from the IEMI. Fortunately, the government here still seems to give a modicum of shit about us, as we have specific laws disallowing any carrier from adding adding features or changing plans without a customer's explicit consent.

Exactly what I got in my mind.

So many things has been done with Unix programs decades ago but problem is that mainstream has not known about them who just want to get stuff below 5 second timeline and fall to all kind stupid marketing lies like "Cloud" and this kind so easily.

Today to run own server does not even require a much. A 20-50 dollar Android smartphone + 32-64GB MicroSD card and you get very capable low-power server.
I made one by buying a totally new Huawei U8160 (70 bucks, second hand were between 20-50 at that time) and then slapped a 32GB microSD card on it.
WWW, EMAIL, NFS and SSH. You get even a webcam for security if wanted. Of course wireless connection is available but when you have option to buy SIM to get even a 3G, older Android smartphones becomes awesome computer-swissknifes for many house things with low-power demand and even multiple hour battery backup.

And if using something like this https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eu.kowalczuk.rsync4android&hl=en you get rsync to nicely sync important data as wanted.

Next thing what I propably do is to search how to get a MicroUSB Y-cable so I can power up the device and attach a USB HDD on it (required OTG support for device but...) so you could make a as big fileserver as wanted.

If only it were possible to edit comments.

Here's the key, and definative patent for air-metal batteries using a liquid electrolyte. Notice the date on that sucker.

how about these.

I actually read the article for once and it was just SIRI, VLINGO.
IMHO, this link here to android mirrors have much better promise for safe texting.
phone in rear view mirror

speed limit aware cruise control

Nothing has killed more than religion, Nazis had the backing of the church, and nothing about communism is inherently evil.

Communism is simply government ownership with the implication being that the government is us and "we the people" collectively are the owners instead of just any one individual.

Your local municipal water treatment plant is communism.
All parks, be they city, county, state, or national parks, are communism.

About 2 weeks ago or so, I stopped being able to watch any Amazon Prime video on my Ubuntu 12.10 box. I was fine previously, after installing HAL and disabling the Pepper flash plugin in Chrome, so the Adobe plugin was used. But suddenly, with Flash 11.2.202.280, it didn't work.

After experimentation, I found that video viewing was re-enabled by back-leveling to an earlier Flash plugin version. Instructions here.

Can't try it till tonight, but hopefully that workaround is effective still. Minor edit to the instructions, I later tried the plugin version right before 11.2.202.280 (can't recall the number) and it worked fine ... probably better than back-leveling all the way to 10.1, like I mentioned in those instructions.

I've been really, really excited about digital video distribution lately: first Netflix greenlights jms's return to science fiction TV

You might want to start by explaining who (or what) jms is, for the benefit of us who aren't hipster faggots like you.

According to google, J. Michael Straczynski was some guy worked on the show Babylon 5, and was somehow involved in some sort of fan-supported netflix or kickstarter thing or something. Apparently, he's important enough to warrant a medium-length wikipedia article, but it's almost impossible to understand why.

http://books.google.com/books/about/There_Are_No_Electrons.html?id=8e01Q3QSrS4C

I was gonna call the guy who wrote this a complete moron, except for this...

http://forums.androidcentral.com/tablet-apps/239022-amazon-prime-video-app.html

http://betanews.com/2013/04/22/why-is-there-no-android-app-for-amazon-instant-video/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed+-+bn+-+Betanews+Full+Content+Feed+-+BN

http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000645111

We're missing something here namely something like this: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.netflix.mediaclient&hl=en

Yep, there doesn't appear to be an Android app for amazon prime. So either Amazon is telling android users to f off, or they're unaware of the issue they'd cause with DRM.

Annoyed yet? It's available for iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/amazon-instant-video/id545519333?mt=8

PS - The video Trinity and Beyond is a chilling yet enthralling science documentary of the [mostly US but some USSR] nuclear bomb programs. You might ask your students to guess how many bombs were set off in testing, and where. Give them this Google Earth KML and show them all of the places and yields.

And like the Sirens beware what looks enticing from afar - the specs are great however the biggest problem with the Samsung Exynos processors appear to be that the largest consumer for Samsung ARM SoCs is Samsung and as such their external support, particularly for opensource projects is dire.

I don't have time to provide links but go and have a trawl through the Cyanogenmod and XDA developer forums in particular the comments from the developer Codeworkx.

http://www.google.com/search?q=codeworkx+cyanogenmod+Exynos

Support for Exynos based devices is far behind that of Qualcomm and TI OMAP that are reputed to be much more friendly to (opensource) developers.

By asserting that the 'rounded corners' critique is invalidated simply by pointing to multiple claims in a design patent, you might be the one repeating an ignorant meme here

Except its not even remotely true these are the design patents https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=www.google.com/patents/USD627777.pdf and https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/USD670286.pdf for your information the dotted lines are just there to add context so ignore them.

Link to an article for those who don't have firefox http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/08/apple_rectangle_rounded_corners/

Show me where it discusses the other generic things you randomly add. In fact specifically most of those "beveling, device face comprised mostly of screen, small number of buttons" are deliberately *NOT* part of the patent (they are only there for context). and icons!! on a phone unheard of on an electronics device in 2009!!!

Your post is a lie.

By asserting that the 'rounded corners' critique is invalidated simply by pointing to multiple claims in a design patent, you might be the one repeating an ignorant meme here

Except its not even remotely true these are the design patents https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=www.google.com/patents/USD627777.pdf and https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/USD670286.pdf for your information the dotted lines are just there to add context so ignore them.

Link to an article for those who don't have firefox http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/08/apple_rectangle_rounded_corners/

Show me where it discusses the other generic things you randomly add. In fact specifically most of those "beveling, device face comprised mostly of screen, small number of buttons" are deliberately *NOT* part of the patent (they are only there for context). and icons!! on a phone unheard of on an electronics device in 2009!!!

Your post is a lie.

I do agree you should not have been modded down. Contrary to what some might think (you included, apparently) since I defended Apple here, I actually prefer it when people correct errors that I make in my statements, or offer some well-considered dissension.

That said, I do disagree with you. You seem to be under the incorrect belief that the design patent you've cited is the relevant one when it comes to the rounded corners meme. It isn't. That one's for the iPad mini and was issued late last year. The iPhone design patents are what started the rounded corners meme and are what was being referenced. Regardless, the reason you're not correct about that patent is because the details of those diagrams constitute claims that are legally binding. As such, for a competing product to be infringing, it would need to be infringing on the circular corners, flat face and back, the shape of the tapered edge that leads to the rear case, etc., etc., etc.. So, yes, that design patent does contain quite a bit more than just rounded corners. I do consider myself an Apple fanboy, but I do my best to be fair.

Regarding Coca-Cola. your ad hominem paragraph doesn't seem to contain any specific, factual claims that contradict anything I said. In fact, I have no idea what precisely you're disagreeing with, since you resorted to attacking me instead of citing something in particular that you disagreed with. The fact is, I chose it specifically because it's the most famous example and I wanted to make sure everyone knew what I was talking about. I'm glad you're aware that it's famous as well, but I'm disappointed that you missed my point.

The Coca-Cola bottle design patent includes a diagram of the specific curves that are claimed, so while "curves" were indeed claimed in the design patent, it wasn't just "curves": it was THOSE curves, and as such, other bottlers were fully capable of making bottles with curved sides, so long as they were distinct from Coca-Cola's bottles. That was my point, since the same is true with Apple's design patents (though I'll readily agree that some of them are rather vague/broad, including the one you've cited). Other companies would not only need to be infringing on the curves that Apple chose, but also on the other features (e.g. in the iPad mini design patent you cited, they'd also have to have the flat front and back and the curved sides that taper into the back, among other traits). Microsoft made a big deal about their 22-degree chamfered edges on the Surface line, which elegantly gets around all of Apple's design patents, even if the other traits are the same. Other companies only need to change one trait significantly in order to circumvent those design patents.

As for the claim that Apple's patent didn't contain anything else, I've already addressed that point, and if you look through some of the various iPhone design patents, you can see that the same arguments I've made already would apply to them as well. Here are some of them:
http://www.google.com/patents/USD593087
http://www.google.com/patents/USD618677
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/D672769.pdf

Long story short, you seem to have accused me of derping on one point and automatically being wrong, then dismissed everything after that as being wrong as well, even though you never said why I was wrong in the first place. I'd actually be very eager to hear why you thought I was wrong about Coke.

I do agree you should not have been modded down. Contrary to what some might think (you included, apparently) since I defended Apple here, I actually prefer it when people correct errors that I make in my statements, or offer some well-considered dissension.

That said, I do disagree with you. You seem to be under the incorrect belief that the design patent you've cited is the relevant one when it comes to the rounded corners meme. It isn't. That one's for the iPad mini and was issued late last year. The iPhone design patents are what started the rounded corners meme and are what was being referenced. Regardless, the reason you're not correct about that patent is because the details of those diagrams constitute claims that are legally binding. As such, for a competing product to be infringing, it would need to be infringing on the circular corners, flat face and back, the shape of the tapered edge that leads to the rear case, etc., etc., etc.. So, yes, that design patent does contain quite a bit more than just rounded corners. I do consider myself an Apple fanboy, but I do my best to be fair.

Regarding Coca-Cola. your ad hominem paragraph doesn't seem to contain any specific, factual claims that contradict anything I said. In fact, I have no idea what precisely you're disagreeing with, since you resorted to attacking me instead of citing something in particular that you disagreed with. The fact is, I chose it specifically because it's the most famous example and I wanted to make sure everyone knew what I was talking about. I'm glad you're aware that it's famous as well, but I'm disappointed that you missed my point.

The Coca-Cola bottle design patent includes a diagram of the specific curves that are claimed, so while "curves" were indeed claimed in the design patent, it wasn't just "curves": it was THOSE curves, and as such, other bottlers were fully capable of making bottles with curved sides, so long as they were distinct from Coca-Cola's bottles. That was my point, since the same is true with Apple's design patents (though I'll readily agree that some of them are rather vague/broad, including the one you've cited). Other companies would not only need to be infringing on the curves that Apple chose, but also on the other features (e.g. in the iPad mini design patent you cited, they'd also have to have the flat front and back and the curved sides that taper into the back, among other traits). Microsoft made a big deal about their 22-degree chamfered edges on the Surface line, which elegantly gets around all of Apple's design patents, even if the other traits are the same. Other companies only need to change one trait significantly in order to circumvent those design patents.

As for the claim that Apple's patent didn't contain anything else, I've already addressed that point, and if you look through some of the various iPhone design patents, you can see that the same arguments I've made already would apply to them as well. Here are some of them:
http://www.google.com/patents/USD593087
http://www.google.com/patents/USD618677
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/D672769.pdf

Long story short, you seem to have accused me of derping on one point and automatically being wrong, then dismissed everything after that as being wrong as well, even though you never said why I was wrong in the first place. I'd actually be very eager to hear why you thought I was wrong about Coke.

These things already exist.

Yes, they do, and I've even tried two different models at Google I/O, but they're not the same as this thing. This Indian device promises to be a thousand times better and cooler. See pictures here and here.

Unfortunately, it seems to be a concept-only device right now. No outsider was given the actual prototype to try in real life, and no one was even shown a demo in real life. So to me, that means it's a concept-only device.

I generally do not trust picture mockups and PR people, especially from a company that I've never heard of before (the company could be legit, but honestly, I just don't know that either way). So one hopes that this device does work and does behave as described, and that it will come out soon. Because for all we know, this could be just another flying car concept: a very cool and attractive concept, but one that doesn't really work as originally advertised or as originally promised.

These things already exist. Make sure your websites are accessible for blind people.

iPhone already has a good accessibility system for blind people. You can drag your finger across the phone, and it will read whatever you are touching in a computer voice. It's amazing to watch a blind person using an iphone with it.

Android has a similar system, except it's better because it's open to third parties, and worse because it is buggy.

This guys built a much prettier chopper-airplane hybrid vehicle.

They assembled it in my hometown and I got to watch it fly in person.

In any case both require clear definition, but it would appear that this paper applies to "life" rather than the more restrictive "intelligence".

IMO "intelligence" is primarily the ability to refer to things outside the here and now, the property that linguists call displacement. See Derek Bickerton's "Adam's Tongue" for details.

a link to some random google analytics of words searched doesn't mean shit

It's actually a very specific Google Trends link, representing search interest for the term 'bitcoin', which didn't take off until roughly the same time as this interview. Google Analytics is something else.

Yep, I remember this too. I even found the site of someone who claims to have created it. But you and he are off by 10 years - it was July 1987.

Not quite $780 but pretty close.

I have loaded some 45000 pictures, almost all family pics, on to Picasa. Once I identify a face and tag it, it finds the same face in other photos. And as I mark yes/no for its findings, it improves remarkably. It is not confused by heavy make up worn by Bharatnatyam dancers. It is finding the correct faces of 20 such dancers lined up facing the camera. It picks faces obscured in dark backgrounds, in out of focus pictures, faces occupying hardly 50 x 50 pixels. Faces at all orientations, including upside down. Half faces, faces with just one eye... It is really amazing.

What is amazing is its mistakes. It mistakes mother for daughter and vice versa. Confuses brothers with sisters when they are toddlers but not when they are teens or adults.

But this is forward match, going from a known face and looking for it in a crowd. Boston police is trying the reverse look up on a massive scale. It failed today. But like Lycos and webcrawler being upstaged when Google solved the reverse look up problem, some day the reverse look up problem will be solved. With parallel technology? Through GPU's running million forward searches simultaneously? But someday soon, the reverse look up will be solved and the automatic photo identification will work.

If what she said is true then she has nothing to worry about. However she'll have to be able to prove it's true.

If it were in the US, that would be true. But she is in the UK. And in the UK, truth is not an absolute defense against libel charges.

Congratulations, you are the one millionth American to say this in this thread.

Your prize is a link to the following useful interent address: http://www.google.com/

Try using it to find out the truth about UK libel law.

The box was placed by the police department. See this follow up article (Google Translate), in which the police department (it doesn't specify which one, but probably that of The Hague) states that the box is theirs and it was being used in a large financial crime investigation. Nothing to do with investigating the recruitment of youths to come fight in Syria, as had been speculated. They say they had permission from the public prosecutor to use it.

Blockly is something like scratch, it also has the turtle, and is web based. https://code.google.com/p/blockly/ It is localized in Dutch here http://blockly-demo.appspot.com/static/apps/turtle/de.html Blockly is more an editor, but there are demos like the turtle one that create a pretty complete application! I used blockly for my app (here http://epleweb.appspot.com/ ) that serves as live coding / debugging platform for learners, not so young like your daughter :) All the best!