Also, your statement that "if it can be done it will be done" is obviously false. It's essentially the most severe possible extension of the slippery slope fallacy.
Good heavens, not even absolutely false. Better yet, the question would be, if it can be done - why would it not be done?
Ah, now that's a more reasonable statement/question. Why indeed would it not be done? If doing it would destroy their business, you can be pretty certain it will not be done. If it would violate the moral sensibilities of the people in charge -- assuming they have any -- you can also have some assurance it will not be done.
I have no fear of large corporations. But not trusting them is not fear. Just common sense. There are shareholders that need served, and they are serving them, not me.
But in the case of Google, the leaders of the company have very little motivation to serve the shareholders. Because of the voting stock structure, Larry Page and Sergey Brin outvote the rest of the shareholders combined. And they really have no need to worry much about share price, either; the stock could drop by 90% and they'd both still be so wealthy that they could never spend their money.
There's a long litany of corporations who have done some shady and illegal things. And there really isn't much punishment when they get caught. All in all, it's pretty profitable.
Government punishment is pretty ineffective, true. What absolutely matters is customers. If Google's users begin to avoid its products, then advertisers will cease giving Google huge piles of money. Much of Google's profitability rests directly on the trust of the user base. Even if the leadership weren't composed of engineers whose goals tend to be oriented around doing great things for the world (yeah, a bit overblown on the rhetoric, but probably not surprising for people who rocketed from unknown Ph.D. students to an essential part of the world's information systems in a handful of years), and even if Google weren't an engineer-driven, bottom-up decision-making organization, cold-eyed, rational analysis would lead Google to avoid doing anything too offensive.
I don't lose any sleep over it, because corporations are made up of people, and I know people. It's just how things work.
Do you know geeks? Because that's what Google is, a company run by geeks for geeks. Personally, being a geek and knowing how geeks think about privacy, that gives me a great deal of confidence in Google's decisions around privacy.
Perhaps a decade or two down the road, Larry and Sergey will have sold off most of their stock to fund their respective foundations, and Google will be in more traditional hands and run more like a traditional company. Until then, I'm not worried.
All the teachers have e-mail addresses, and e-mail is our primary mechanism for communicating with them (we also go to parent-teacher conferences, but that's only twice per term). The teachers also have web pages where they post assignments, upcoming activities, and other notices. They use an electronic gradebook that we can log into to see not just our kids' grades, but also all of their individual assignment scores, what hasn't been handed in, etc. The school district automatically e-mails us for any unexcused absences, usually within an hour after the missed class starts. We can either call or use the web site to excuse their absences.
Our two younger kids are in a K-8 charter school, and one of the requirements is that parents have to give 20 hours per year of service. All of that is logged and reported on-line.
For the older kids, in Middle and High School, the school has a Google Apps account. All of the kids have school e-mail addresses which they can access like any gmail account, and many teachers distribute homework assignments and messages via e-mail and accept completed assignment submissions the same way. Many of the teachers have the kids do all of their writing, etc., assignments on Google Docs, which works beautifully. When my son writes an essay for English he "shares" it with me so I can proofread. For trivial stuff, I sometimes just fix it, but normally I add comments pointing out what he can improve/fix. When he's done, he shares it with his teacher, who can also mark it up and grade it -- with automatic e-mail notifications to my son to let him know what she said and what grade he received.
I think the schools here have embraced technology very effectively. They use it where it's useful, primarily for communications, and don't get hung up on useless stuff like trying to use automated teaching systems, or high-tech classroom presentations (a few teachers do use Google Docs presentations, but most just use a whiteboard).
As for the issues with kids who don't have access to computers at home... I don't know how much of a problem that is or is not in this area. My part of the school district is fairly affluent, but there are other areas which have a fair amount of poverty. I know all of the schools in the district have multiple, large computer labs, which are open for quite some time both before and after school. All of the libraries have computers, too.
Oh, I live in Colorado, about 40 miles north of Denver.
Most smart phones have a 'find my phone' feature that you can enable. Then you can log in to a webpage remotely to see where the device is currently located.
I'd suggest this for you since it requires 0 red tape or cooperation from local police.
Yeah, but her phone isn't a smartphone -- for good reasons, also related to her condition.
I agree with the idea of quick warrants -- in an emergency you get a judge to quickly review and sign off. Retroactive warrants... not so much. I was never a fan of the FISA warrant process, even before they began simply ignoring it.
No version of windows ever ran on an 8-bit processor. Windows 1.0-3.0 would run on an 8086, but that is still 16-bit, and Windows 3.1 won't even run on that, it needs a 286 or higher.
But you could run Windows on an 8-bit processor the same way this guy ran Linux on one -- write an 8-bit emulator for the 32-bit platform you want to run. Except that I don't think you could get any semi-modern Windows to run in 16 MB of RAM.
My teenage daughter suffers from a severe emotional disorder and when in a bad emotional state is often a danger to herself and others, so when she beat up my wife, locked her in the basement, stole the car and ran away, I asked the local PD to track her phone. They said they could only do it with a court order and that would take 24 hours -- way too long. Even when I pointed out that the phone was actually mine -- I bought it and I pay the bill -- they still said they couldn't.
In general, I heartily aprove of requiring court approval for such things, but it seems like in a case where it might literally be the difference between life and death for a young woman with a record of suicide attempts and who has committed serious crimes (assault, unlawful imprisonment, grand theft auto, driving without a license) and where the owner of the phone not only approved but requested that it be tracked, they should do it. I also asked the wireless carrier (Verizon) and they said they would only do it if the police requested.
(The outcome of the story was that I had a pretty good guess about where she was headed and I found her within a few hours, about 60 miles from home. The police then caught her and took her to the ER for suicide watch and psychiatric evaluation. I didn't find where she ditched the car until a couple of days later. It required about $2K in repairs. I wish my daughter could be "repaired" so cheaply and effectively.)
No I think you don't understand what "curated computing" means, it's basically synonymous with "walled garden computing."
Only if you re-define the word "curated". In the mid to late 90s "curated browsing" was a fairly common term, referring to the big collections of links that people collected and published. Yahoo's directory was a large-scale set of curated links. The notion of curation is a very old one and applying a very restrictive subset of the meaning of the word in this particular context seems jargonistic to the point of being misleading.
In the course of their duties, cops are required to take pictures of evidence such as injuries. They didn't do that so it's not a stretch to conclude that they didn't have anything to work with, else they would have worked with it...
Perhaps. Or maybe their department policy doesn't require such documentation, with the idea they can just rely on EMT reports instead. Or maybe they did and just don't plan to publish them until their investigation is complete.
And oddly, I'd say the ban is the system "working as intended" - ignoring the TOS violation (because does anyone honestly think *that* was the real reason), it's a case of Foursquare deciding that their business model is not well served by helping out these people, and cutting them off.
Sure. My point was just that a "fix" that involves blocking a specific abuse by a specific app is a lame fix. Much better would be to ensure that their users are only sharing with the world if they really intend to share with the world. Then, women who want random creepy guys to know their location could still do so conveniently and the rest would be protected.
I agree with you that I don't see a reason to post my exact location to the world (I don't even do it on the "friends only" settings)
I have Google Latitude make my location available to a very small and specific set of people: Basically, my wife and kids, some siblings and a couple of very close friends. A couple of my teenage kids have Android phones as well, so they voluntarily share their location with me also ("voluntarily" as in: "If you turn that off, I take the fancy phone away"). They mostly don't mind, though, since without Latitude they'd have to call me all the time to tell me where they are and where they're going.
That sort of location sharing makes a lot of sense to me (obviously).
Haha you fell for it. Repos are not curation because there is no limitation on which repos you can use, much like a jailbroken iPhone and the various jailbreaker app stores, to put it in terms you might be familiar with.
You don't know what curation means. You are also free to visit many different museums. Does that mean their collections are not curated?
Last I checked, no one has to jailbreak their Linux install to run their own applications. You can in fact unpack the source, compile and run just about any software from within ~. One only needs root to install it globally.
Repos generally only provide supported packages and are not a walled-garden. In fact many distros make it trivial to create custom repos.
But curation != walled garden. I'd say they're almost orthogonal.
If there's any misconduct here, I'd say it's on the part of Foursquare, by making checkins not only public but personally identifiable! This should clearly not be the default, and I question whether a responsible service should provide it at all. Publishing precise locations of individual people to the world just seems like a bad idea.
I don't use Foursquare, but my understanding is that being IDed is the point ("Bob just arrived at Bob's Bobporium").
That's fine, and I don't think there's anything wrong with publishing such data in a limited fashion, to a controlled set of people. I use Google Latitude and it provides location updates to people I've selected, and I find it tremendously valuable. Similarly, I can see lots of value in publishing aggregated, anonymized data to the whole world -- for example the recent discussion of Google Maps traffic data derived from Android handsets. I don't see any value in publishing personally-identifiable locations to the whole world. But perhaps other people who are looking to connect with random physically-nearby people do, so I suppose Foursquare's feature makes sense for some people. If those people are surprised and creeped out by discovering that it's possible to do what they've asked Foursquare to do, however, I'd say that Foursquare has at the very least done a poor job of communicating to its users.
I'd still lay the blame on the app maker, but purely in a shame fashion. Yes, you can build an app that combines all this information into something. But because you can doesn't mean you should, and since the stated goal was "pick up chicks", I have no objections to them getting a bit of shaming for building something lame. Same as I think fart apps are stupid as hell.
Sure. I don't think there should be any sort of barriers put in place to prevent people from doing lame and potentially shameful things, though. I disagree with Foursquare's decision to block the use of their maps by this one particular app, for example -- though I respect their right to do so, I just think it's the lame and shameful solution. Hopefully they have a better one in the works.
This is a good point, but on the other hand engaging in risky behavior cannot and should not make you responsible for the people who unscrupulously take advantage of that risky behavior. The culpability always lies in the hands of those who actually engage in wrongful conduct.
No argument... but I also don't see anyone here who engaged in any wrongful conduct. This app is "creepy", yes, but mostly because it makes clear to people who might not have realized it that they're publishing information they might not want others to know. Arguably, that's a good thing... because the absence of the app doesn't mean the information isn't available and easily accessible. Hopefully this will motivate some women to be more circumspect about who they publish their checkins to (does Foursquare offer the option of making checkins available only to designated friends, like the way Google Latitude works?).
If there's any misconduct here, I'd say it's on the part of Foursquare, by making checkins not only public but personally identifiable! This should clearly not be the default, and I question whether a responsible service should provide it at all. Publishing precise locations of individual people to the world just seems like a bad idea.
What package curation has been done in Linux? Protip: If you say repos, you'll make yourself look like an idiot.
How are repos not curation? They may use different standards about what to include or exclude than you might like, but the process is absolutely curation.
Upon what do you base that view? What I see of Google's privacy policy and behavior around privacy -- both what I see publicly and what I see internally (I work for Google) -- leads me to a very different conclusion.
you make a very big assumption that anyone trusts you. If it can be done, it will be done.
I don't think I'm making any assumptions, just drawing conclusions based on observations. I guess my one assumption is that one can draw conclusions and apply them to the future based on observations of the past. But if we throw out that assumption, well, then we can't ever know anything.
Also, your statement that "if it can be done it will be done" is obviously false. It's essentially the most severe possible extension of the slippery slope fallacy. I'm not saying that we can discount the possibility that people or organizations may change their behavior in the future, and potentially for the worse, nor that we should ignore the possible implications of what changes in behavior may allow, based on the data we provide today, but assuming the worst possible outcome in all cases is just as misleading as wearing rose-colored glasses.
Bottom line, if you have reasons for assuming Google will make a major turnaround in its privacy policies in the future, spit them out. If it's just generalized fearfulness of all large organization, then say so.
While Zimmerman's decision to ignore the 911 operator's suggestion to hang back and let the police handle it was stupid, it wasn't criminal and it didn't deprive him of the right to defend himself. If his story is true, that after he had spoken to Trayvon and left, that Trayvon came back, punched him in the face, knocked him down and began pounding his head on the pavement, then the shooting was self-defense and fully justified.
The problem is that it's hard to know if his version of the events is what happened. His alleged injuries argue in his favor. This analysis of the screams argue against him. That's really about all we have AFAICT.
Problem is, he's not had to defend himself in court, to bring all that exonerating evidence. Police just took his word for it.
Well, the police presumably not only talked to the EMTs but saw any injuries first-hand. So they didn't need to take his word for it. I'm not saying they aren't covering -- I don't know -- but the police had more to work with than just his word.
My view is that whatever Do Not Track tools Google has/used to have, either now or very soon they will be eclipsed by the "we will track you more" anti-privacy policy.
Upon what do you base that view? What I see of Google's privacy policy and behavior around privacy -- both what I see publicly and what I see internally (I work for Google) -- leads me to a very different conclusion.
Let's *suppose* it's not a prank. Yahoo has a chance to make a comeback by being Not-Google.
Except that Google has had do-not-track tools in place for a long time now. Yahoo would need to do more than that. Auditors might be a good idea... actually, that's something that Google should probably consider.
I understand that your needs are different. I think there might be a lot of people interested in a group oriented more toward numbers like 50 GB, 80% uptime, >384kbps upstream.
The issue with 80% uptime is that it makes the odds of a node being available both when you store your share and when you retrieve your share a little on the low side. Not that it isn't doable, but it means you need to plan for a lot more redundancy -- and hence a lot more expansion. The Reed-Solomon coding scheme allows you to break files into N shares, any K of which are required to reconstruct the data and in the process your file size increases by a factor of N/K. You could set N to, say, 10, and K to 1 and that would effectively be the same as uploading a copy of your file to each of 10 servers -- great redundancy, but if you're only providing 50 GB to the grid, then you can only store 5 GB in the grid, because of expansion.
I have enough data to back up that I don't want expansion factors greater more than about 2, and I also want a strong guarantee that my file will still be available later. Specifically, I want to be able to recover my file with 99.9999% probability (one in a million chance of loss). To achieve that, based on the current size of the VG2 (volunteer grid 2) grid, I need at least 93% uptime for all nodes. As the grid grows that can actually be lowered. In fact with 100 nodes, I could use N=100, K=50 and achieve six-nines reliability for my files with 71% node uptime -- but I'd still rather keep the uptimes high and be able to lower my expansion factor (N=100, K=81 provides 99.9999% reliability with only 23% expansion, assuming 95% node uptime).
With enough nodes in a system like that, the lower upstream bandwidth might not matter as much--it could be almost like BitTorrent, in that many slow downloads add up to a high effective speed.
In theory, yes. In practice, a bug in the current implementation means that Tahoe doesn't achieve that. Though that bug could be fixed.
You might think that bandwidth number is too low, but I don't want to use up 50% of my upstream 100% of the time.
In practice people don't really notice a problem with Tahoe consuming a great deal of their bandwidth. That might be different in a large grid, though. To date the only grids much larger than 20 nodes that have been deployed (AFAIK) have been in data centers with very high bandwidth between nodes.
I do have several offsite network backup solutions in use, but I like the idea of a community-based, FOSS solution. Is Tahoe a feasible possibility for numbers like these? How many nodes can it scale to? I'm imagining, basically, two-way BitTorrent for backups.
The biggest deployment to date has been around 200 nodes. That was the allmydata.com commercial backup system (which developed Tahoe). Their system failed due to scaling problems, but not because Tahoe couldn't handle it. The reason they failed was because they hadn't fully worked out the reliability math, which led to reliability problems, and (even more) because they were unable to keep up with the increasing storage demands of their customers. The latter part of that is a typical startup funding issue and not very interesting. The former part is more interesting.
They were using N=10, K=3 which on paper seems to offer crazy high reliability -- eight nines, assuming 95% uptime (which is about what they had -- they bought cheap hardware). However, with the 10 shares of any given file randomly distributed across 200 servers, this led to the probability of any two files being available at a given moment being effectively independent. This meant that the probability that some file was unavailable for any given user was not nearly as high, and virtually guaranteed that at any given time there were a number of users who couldn't access some of their files.
doesn't like every laptop now have a built-in microphone, an HDTV camera
Most (all?) laptops at least have a light that turns on to let you know the camera is active. Though microphones don't provide any indication, usually.
I find social networking to be most useful not so much with friends (though it's great there, allowing me to stay in touch with many more people than I could without it), but with family. Perhaps you don't come from a large family, but I do, and my wife does, and our combined extended families exceed 200 people. We're only close to maybe 50 of them, but sufficiently close to all of them that keeping updated about important life events -- jobs, kids, illnesses, etc. -- is of great value to all of us. And with social networks we can have much more frequent interactions than that. I have cousins I wouldn't normally speak to for more than a few minutes per year at family reunions, but with Google+ I "talk" to them multiple times per week.
I also find it to be a great way to keep in touch with old acquaintances. Over the course of my 40+ years of life, I've accumulated a lot of friends who've since moved of my life, but I like them and am interested in what they're doing and thinking.
By lowering the effort required to connect and communicate, social networking applications make it feasible to be connected to more people -- and lots of people like that! You may prefer to have only a very small circle of very close friends and avoid others, but if so you're the exception, not the rule. I have a small number of friends that I talk to daily, one way or another. But I keep in touch with a much larger group of people, and social networks make it possible for me to keep in touch with even more.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, your statement that "if it can be done it will be done" is obviously false. It's essentially the most severe possible extension of the slippery slope fallacy.
Good heavens, not even absolutely false. Better yet, the question would be, if it can be done - why would it not be done?
Ah, now that's a more reasonable statement/question. Why indeed would it not be done? If doing it would destroy their business, you can be pretty certain it will not be done. If it would violate the moral sensibilities of the people in charge -- assuming they have any -- you can also have some assurance it will not be done.
I have no fear of large corporations. But not trusting them is not fear. Just common sense. There are shareholders that need served, and they are serving them, not me.
But in the case of Google, the leaders of the company have very little motivation to serve the shareholders. Because of the voting stock structure, Larry Page and Sergey Brin outvote the rest of the shareholders combined. And they really have no need to worry much about share price, either; the stock could drop by 90% and they'd both still be so wealthy that they could never spend their money.
There's a long litany of corporations who have done some shady and illegal things. And there really isn't much punishment when they get caught. All in all, it's pretty profitable.
Government punishment is pretty ineffective, true. What absolutely matters is customers. If Google's users begin to avoid its products, then advertisers will cease giving Google huge piles of money. Much of Google's profitability rests directly on the trust of the user base. Even if the leadership weren't composed of engineers whose goals tend to be oriented around doing great things for the world (yeah, a bit overblown on the rhetoric, but probably not surprising for people who rocketed from unknown Ph.D. students to an essential part of the world's information systems in a handful of years), and even if Google weren't an engineer-driven, bottom-up decision-making organization, cold-eyed, rational analysis would lead Google to avoid doing anything too offensive.
I don't lose any sleep over it, because corporations are made up of people, and I know people. It's just how things work.
Do you know geeks? Because that's what Google is, a company run by geeks for geeks. Personally, being a geek and knowing how geeks think about privacy, that gives me a great deal of confidence in Google's decisions around privacy.
Perhaps a decade or two down the road, Larry and Sergey will have sold off most of their stock to fund their respective foundations, and Google will be in more traditional hands and run more like a traditional company. Until then, I'm not worried.
All the teachers have e-mail addresses, and e-mail is our primary mechanism for communicating with them (we also go to parent-teacher conferences, but that's only twice per term). The teachers also have web pages where they post assignments, upcoming activities, and other notices. They use an electronic gradebook that we can log into to see not just our kids' grades, but also all of their individual assignment scores, what hasn't been handed in, etc. The school district automatically e-mails us for any unexcused absences, usually within an hour after the missed class starts. We can either call or use the web site to excuse their absences.
Our two younger kids are in a K-8 charter school, and one of the requirements is that parents have to give 20 hours per year of service. All of that is logged and reported on-line.
For the older kids, in Middle and High School, the school has a Google Apps account. All of the kids have school e-mail addresses which they can access like any gmail account, and many teachers distribute homework assignments and messages via e-mail and accept completed assignment submissions the same way. Many of the teachers have the kids do all of their writing, etc., assignments on Google Docs, which works beautifully. When my son writes an essay for English he "shares" it with me so I can proofread. For trivial stuff, I sometimes just fix it, but normally I add comments pointing out what he can improve/fix. When he's done, he shares it with his teacher, who can also mark it up and grade it -- with automatic e-mail notifications to my son to let him know what she said and what grade he received.
I think the schools here have embraced technology very effectively. They use it where it's useful, primarily for communications, and don't get hung up on useless stuff like trying to use automated teaching systems, or high-tech classroom presentations (a few teachers do use Google Docs presentations, but most just use a whiteboard).
As for the issues with kids who don't have access to computers at home... I don't know how much of a problem that is or is not in this area. My part of the school district is fairly affluent, but there are other areas which have a fair amount of poverty. I know all of the schools in the district have multiple, large computer labs, which are open for quite some time both before and after school. All of the libraries have computers, too.
Oh, I live in Colorado, about 40 miles north of Denver.
Most smart phones have a 'find my phone' feature that you can enable. Then you can log in to a webpage remotely to see where the device is currently located.
I'd suggest this for you since it requires 0 red tape or cooperation from local police.
Yeah, but her phone isn't a smartphone -- for good reasons, also related to her condition.
I agree with the idea of quick warrants -- in an emergency you get a judge to quickly review and sign off. Retroactive warrants... not so much. I was never a fan of the FISA warrant process, even before they began simply ignoring it.
I didn't just make the term up, it's almost as old as iOS:
That old, huh? Five whole years! Sorry, the term "curated" has been around for centuries; you can't just redefine it on a whim.
No version of windows ever ran on an 8-bit processor. Windows 1.0-3.0 would run on an 8086, but that is still 16-bit, and Windows 3.1 won't even run on that, it needs a 286 or higher.
But you could run Windows on an 8-bit processor the same way this guy ran Linux on one -- write an 8-bit emulator for the 32-bit platform you want to run. Except that I don't think you could get any semi-modern Windows to run in 16 MB of RAM.
My teenage daughter suffers from a severe emotional disorder and when in a bad emotional state is often a danger to herself and others, so when she beat up my wife, locked her in the basement, stole the car and ran away, I asked the local PD to track her phone. They said they could only do it with a court order and that would take 24 hours -- way too long. Even when I pointed out that the phone was actually mine -- I bought it and I pay the bill -- they still said they couldn't.
In general, I heartily aprove of requiring court approval for such things, but it seems like in a case where it might literally be the difference between life and death for a young woman with a record of suicide attempts and who has committed serious crimes (assault, unlawful imprisonment, grand theft auto, driving without a license) and where the owner of the phone not only approved but requested that it be tracked, they should do it. I also asked the wireless carrier (Verizon) and they said they would only do it if the police requested.
(The outcome of the story was that I had a pretty good guess about where she was headed and I found her within a few hours, about 60 miles from home. The police then caught her and took her to the ER for suicide watch and psychiatric evaluation. I didn't find where she ditched the car until a couple of days later. It required about $2K in repairs. I wish my daughter could be "repaired" so cheaply and effectively.)
No I think you don't understand what "curated computing" means, it's basically synonymous with "walled garden computing."
Only if you re-define the word "curated". In the mid to late 90s "curated browsing" was a fairly common term, referring to the big collections of links that people collected and published. Yahoo's directory was a large-scale set of curated links. The notion of curation is a very old one and applying a very restrictive subset of the meaning of the word in this particular context seems jargonistic to the point of being misleading.
In the course of their duties, cops are required to take pictures of evidence such as injuries. They didn't do that so it's not a stretch to conclude that they didn't have anything to work with, else they would have worked with it...
Perhaps. Or maybe their department policy doesn't require such documentation, with the idea they can just rely on EMT reports instead. Or maybe they did and just don't plan to publish them until their investigation is complete.
And oddly, I'd say the ban is the system "working as intended" - ignoring the TOS violation (because does anyone honestly think *that* was the real reason), it's a case of Foursquare deciding that their business model is not well served by helping out these people, and cutting them off.
Sure. My point was just that a "fix" that involves blocking a specific abuse by a specific app is a lame fix. Much better would be to ensure that their users are only sharing with the world if they really intend to share with the world. Then, women who want random creepy guys to know their location could still do so conveniently and the rest would be protected.
I agree with you that I don't see a reason to post my exact location to the world (I don't even do it on the "friends only" settings)
I have Google Latitude make my location available to a very small and specific set of people: Basically, my wife and kids, some siblings and a couple of very close friends. A couple of my teenage kids have Android phones as well, so they voluntarily share their location with me also ("voluntarily" as in: "If you turn that off, I take the fancy phone away"). They mostly don't mind, though, since without Latitude they'd have to call me all the time to tell me where they are and where they're going.
That sort of location sharing makes a lot of sense to me (obviously).
Haha you fell for it. Repos are not curation because there is no limitation on which repos you can use, much like a jailbroken iPhone and the various jailbreaker app stores, to put it in terms you might be familiar with.
You don't know what curation means. You are also free to visit many different museums. Does that mean their collections are not curated?
Last I checked, no one has to jailbreak their Linux install to run their own applications. You can in fact unpack the source, compile and run just about any software from within ~. One only needs root to install it globally.
Repos generally only provide supported packages and are not a walled-garden. In fact many distros make it trivial to create custom repos.
But curation != walled garden. I'd say they're almost orthogonal.
If there's any misconduct here, I'd say it's on the part of Foursquare, by making checkins not only public but personally identifiable! This should clearly not be the default, and I question whether a responsible service should provide it at all. Publishing precise locations of individual people to the world just seems like a bad idea.
I don't use Foursquare, but my understanding is that being IDed is the point ("Bob just arrived at Bob's Bobporium").
That's fine, and I don't think there's anything wrong with publishing such data in a limited fashion, to a controlled set of people. I use Google Latitude and it provides location updates to people I've selected, and I find it tremendously valuable. Similarly, I can see lots of value in publishing aggregated, anonymized data to the whole world -- for example the recent discussion of Google Maps traffic data derived from Android handsets. I don't see any value in publishing personally-identifiable locations to the whole world. But perhaps other people who are looking to connect with random physically-nearby people do, so I suppose Foursquare's feature makes sense for some people. If those people are surprised and creeped out by discovering that it's possible to do what they've asked Foursquare to do, however, I'd say that Foursquare has at the very least done a poor job of communicating to its users.
I'd still lay the blame on the app maker, but purely in a shame fashion. Yes, you can build an app that combines all this information into something. But because you can doesn't mean you should, and since the stated goal was "pick up chicks", I have no objections to them getting a bit of shaming for building something lame. Same as I think fart apps are stupid as hell.
Sure. I don't think there should be any sort of barriers put in place to prevent people from doing lame and potentially shameful things, though. I disagree with Foursquare's decision to block the use of their maps by this one particular app, for example -- though I respect their right to do so, I just think it's the lame and shameful solution. Hopefully they have a better one in the works.
This is a good point, but on the other hand engaging in risky behavior cannot and should not make you responsible for the people who unscrupulously take advantage of that risky behavior. The culpability always lies in the hands of those who actually engage in wrongful conduct.
No argument... but I also don't see anyone here who engaged in any wrongful conduct. This app is "creepy", yes, but mostly because it makes clear to people who might not have realized it that they're publishing information they might not want others to know. Arguably, that's a good thing... because the absence of the app doesn't mean the information isn't available and easily accessible. Hopefully this will motivate some women to be more circumspect about who they publish their checkins to (does Foursquare offer the option of making checkins available only to designated friends, like the way Google Latitude works?).
If there's any misconduct here, I'd say it's on the part of Foursquare, by making checkins not only public but personally identifiable! This should clearly not be the default, and I question whether a responsible service should provide it at all. Publishing precise locations of individual people to the world just seems like a bad idea.
What package curation has been done in Linux? Protip: If you say repos, you'll make yourself look like an idiot.
How are repos not curation? They may use different standards about what to include or exclude than you might like, but the process is absolutely curation.
Upon what do you base that view? What I see of Google's privacy policy and behavior around privacy -- both what I see publicly and what I see internally (I work for Google) -- leads me to a very different conclusion.
you make a very big assumption that anyone trusts you. If it can be done, it will be done.
I don't think I'm making any assumptions, just drawing conclusions based on observations. I guess my one assumption is that one can draw conclusions and apply them to the future based on observations of the past. But if we throw out that assumption, well, then we can't ever know anything.
Also, your statement that "if it can be done it will be done" is obviously false. It's essentially the most severe possible extension of the slippery slope fallacy. I'm not saying that we can discount the possibility that people or organizations may change their behavior in the future, and potentially for the worse, nor that we should ignore the possible implications of what changes in behavior may allow, based on the data we provide today, but assuming the worst possible outcome in all cases is just as misleading as wearing rose-colored glasses.
Bottom line, if you have reasons for assuming Google will make a major turnaround in its privacy policies in the future, spit them out. If it's just generalized fearfulness of all large organization, then say so.
No.. you obviously skipped the conversion from yuan to USD.
Ah, so I did. Thanks for the correction. I was really floored that Huawei had revenues far in excess of IBM.
Huawei had 28 billion USD in revenue in 2010. Which means (by revenue) it is larger than Facebook, Google, and Amazon
s/revenue/profit/. Google and Amazon both had revenues well in excess of $28B in 2010, but Huawei's 2010 profits were $28B, on $185B in revenues.
It's not that clear.
While Zimmerman's decision to ignore the 911 operator's suggestion to hang back and let the police handle it was stupid, it wasn't criminal and it didn't deprive him of the right to defend himself. If his story is true, that after he had spoken to Trayvon and left, that Trayvon came back, punched him in the face, knocked him down and began pounding his head on the pavement, then the shooting was self-defense and fully justified.
The problem is that it's hard to know if his version of the events is what happened. His alleged injuries argue in his favor. This analysis of the screams argue against him. That's really about all we have AFAICT.
Problem is, he's not had to defend himself in court, to bring all that exonerating evidence. Police just took his word for it.
Well, the police presumably not only talked to the EMTs but saw any injuries first-hand. So they didn't need to take his word for it. I'm not saying they aren't covering -- I don't know -- but the police had more to work with than just his word.
My view is that whatever Do Not Track tools Google has/used to have, either now or very soon they will be eclipsed by the "we will track you more" anti-privacy policy.
Upon what do you base that view? What I see of Google's privacy policy and behavior around privacy -- both what I see publicly and what I see internally (I work for Google) -- leads me to a very different conclusion.
Let's *suppose* it's not a prank. Yahoo has a chance to make a comeback by being Not-Google.
Except that Google has had do-not-track tools in place for a long time now. Yahoo would need to do more than that. Auditors might be a good idea... actually, that's something that Google should probably consider.
I understand that your needs are different. I think there might be a lot of people interested in a group oriented more toward numbers like 50 GB, 80% uptime, >384kbps upstream.
The issue with 80% uptime is that it makes the odds of a node being available both when you store your share and when you retrieve your share a little on the low side. Not that it isn't doable, but it means you need to plan for a lot more redundancy -- and hence a lot more expansion. The Reed-Solomon coding scheme allows you to break files into N shares, any K of which are required to reconstruct the data and in the process your file size increases by a factor of N/K. You could set N to, say, 10, and K to 1 and that would effectively be the same as uploading a copy of your file to each of 10 servers -- great redundancy, but if you're only providing 50 GB to the grid, then you can only store 5 GB in the grid, because of expansion.
I have enough data to back up that I don't want expansion factors greater more than about 2, and I also want a strong guarantee that my file will still be available later. Specifically, I want to be able to recover my file with 99.9999% probability (one in a million chance of loss). To achieve that, based on the current size of the VG2 (volunteer grid 2) grid, I need at least 93% uptime for all nodes. As the grid grows that can actually be lowered. In fact with 100 nodes, I could use N=100, K=50 and achieve six-nines reliability for my files with 71% node uptime -- but I'd still rather keep the uptimes high and be able to lower my expansion factor (N=100, K=81 provides 99.9999% reliability with only 23% expansion, assuming 95% node uptime).
With enough nodes in a system like that, the lower upstream bandwidth might not matter as much--it could be almost like BitTorrent, in that many slow downloads add up to a high effective speed.
In theory, yes. In practice, a bug in the current implementation means that Tahoe doesn't achieve that. Though that bug could be fixed.
You might think that bandwidth number is too low, but I don't want to use up 50% of my upstream 100% of the time.
In practice people don't really notice a problem with Tahoe consuming a great deal of their bandwidth. That might be different in a large grid, though. To date the only grids much larger than 20 nodes that have been deployed (AFAIK) have been in data centers with very high bandwidth between nodes.
I do have several offsite network backup solutions in use, but I like the idea of a community-based, FOSS solution. Is Tahoe a feasible possibility for numbers like these? How many nodes can it scale to? I'm imagining, basically, two-way BitTorrent for backups.
The biggest deployment to date has been around 200 nodes. That was the allmydata.com commercial backup system (which developed Tahoe). Their system failed due to scaling problems, but not because Tahoe couldn't handle it. The reason they failed was because they hadn't fully worked out the reliability math, which led to reliability problems, and (even more) because they were unable to keep up with the increasing storage demands of their customers. The latter part of that is a typical startup funding issue and not very interesting. The former part is more interesting.
They were using N=10, K=3 which on paper seems to offer crazy high reliability -- eight nines, assuming 95% uptime (which is about what they had -- they bought cheap hardware). However, with the 10 shares of any given file randomly distributed across 200 servers, this led to the probability of any two files being available at a given moment being effectively independent. This meant that the probability that some file was unavailable for any given user was not nearly as high, and virtually guaranteed that at any given time there were a number of users who couldn't access some of their files.
What made this worse was the fact that
doesn't like every laptop now have a built-in microphone, an HDTV camera
Most (all?) laptops at least have a light that turns on to let you know the camera is active. Though microphones don't provide any indication, usually.
I find social networking to be most useful not so much with friends (though it's great there, allowing me to stay in touch with many more people than I could without it), but with family. Perhaps you don't come from a large family, but I do, and my wife does, and our combined extended families exceed 200 people. We're only close to maybe 50 of them, but sufficiently close to all of them that keeping updated about important life events -- jobs, kids, illnesses, etc. -- is of great value to all of us. And with social networks we can have much more frequent interactions than that. I have cousins I wouldn't normally speak to for more than a few minutes per year at family reunions, but with Google+ I "talk" to them multiple times per week.
I also find it to be a great way to keep in touch with old acquaintances. Over the course of my 40+ years of life, I've accumulated a lot of friends who've since moved of my life, but I like them and am interested in what they're doing and thinking.
By lowering the effort required to connect and communicate, social networking applications make it feasible to be connected to more people -- and lots of people like that! You may prefer to have only a very small circle of very close friends and avoid others, but if so you're the exception, not the rule. I have a small number of friends that I talk to daily, one way or another. But I keep in touch with a much larger group of people, and social networks make it possible for me to keep in touch with even more.