My favorite press release was the one from Paramount that introduced Seven of Nine. The release itself is mildly amusing in retrospect, but the best part was the MST3K filk of it that was posted use Usenet.
The fact that you listed a lot of upcoming 2009 movies, but not Avatar, and listed some already-out movies but not Moon, makes me think that there's a problem, here.
That excuse was invalid when it was first asserted, and is equally invalid today. The claim is that at 1million articles, Wikipedia was at the bursting point, and deletion was necessary to keep spam and abuse at bay. Now the claim is that at 3mil, WP is at the bursting point, and deletion is necessary to keep spam and abuse at bay. Guess what, neither was true.
Wikipedia could allow articles about everything anyone ever cared about in a reasonable way, without any loss of quality overall if it started from the premise that every possible string of letters on length n or less (where n is the maximum allowed length in MediaWiki) is a valid article. It just requires a tiered system of article management. I don't think that an article about Simpson characters' nose lengths should show up in initial search results. However, I don't understand the seemingly "natural" desire to exclude such an article from an online database of the collected knowledge of mankind. How is a censored list of articles ever to be exhaustive? Is it somehow more comprehensive because it's censored based on popular consensus rather than societal taboos? I don't think so.
No, he's about the 10 millionth. The other 7 million were deleted because they weren't considered "notable," but were actually better known and more readily written about than Beate Ericksen.
I agree completely. I generally tell people that it's far, far, far better to have a strong password which you write down than a weak one which you can remember.
PasswordSafe is the happy medium. You don't write it down, you write it on disk, encrypted with a single password that's the only one you have to remember (aside, perhaps, from the one you use to log in to the machine that has PasswordSafe installed).
I've been using PasswordSafe now for about a year, and there's no turning back. All of my passwords are insanely cryptic things that are much longer than I could remember, and they're all encrypted with a single password that I do remember.
Available on Windows, Linux and just about everywhere else as a Java app.
"Yes, new APIs are a serious problem... Sorry, what?!"
Think of it like the legal system. Too many fucking laws nobody can be bothered to remember them all.
Too many fucking APIs nobody can be bothered to settle on one implementation
You've gone off the rails. Google's APIs are many and various, but I'm actually not aware of any API that they have that's redundant.
What two APIs are you having to choose between, exactly? The only example I can think of is very much required: Blogger has a full-featured API, but it also offers feed-oriented access through RSS/Atom. A blogging site that didn't offer RSS/Atom wouldn't have many users, so there's nothing they can do there. However, it's not possible to provide a full API within the context of either of those standards, so a full-featured API was created and deployed. It's very much the same API that Google uses for Calendar and App Engine and so on. They're very consistent across their tools and sites.
Quantum computing is a whole new world of computing; because it's based on the principles of quantum physics. This means that a quantum computer does not resemble the computers of today at all. In a quantum computer, information is stored in "qubits", which is 0, 1 or "undetermined / both".
Yeah, I'm still not buying it. Quantum computing has yet to do anything that lives up to even its basic promise. If it's possible to harness these states, we should have been able to demonstrate, at the very least, the capacity for computation on the scale of, say, the average pocket calculator. And yet, we've still gotten nowhere. Why? Well, there are many possible reasons, but I tend to favor the simplest: quantum mechanics is a field that is built on some very nice math and as many intersections with reality as we've been able to test, but fundamentally we don't really understand what's going on at the level of the atom, much less at the level of its constituent parts. As we gain that understanding, our math is likely to be revised and refined several times.
Put simply: we're like Aristarchus of Samos measuring the relative sizes and distances of the sun and moon. He was more accurate than any before him, and his understanding drove countless others' discoveries, but if he'd tried to put a man on the moon using that math, he would have failed.
We're doing roughly that: trying to put a man on the moon at quantum scale, and while the discoveries of Plank and Dirac and all of their successors to the current day have enlightened us as to the nature of the quantum world, we're still not so much farther along than Aristarchus. I expect there to be at least one more wave of truly physics-shattering discoveries on par with the uncertainty principle before we even start to be able to perform real computation at the quantum scale. Even then, it's entirely possible that those discoveries will invalidate the entire idea of using superposition for computation.
Then again, I could be completely wrong, and quantum computing could be workable tomorrow. Just don't go betting the farm on it.
Except that, ever since the 1984 debacle, Amazon's trustworthiness, especially in regards to the Kindle, has been slowly eroding away. I'm definitely waiting to see what Amazon does. If they do hand it over, deleting all of the personal data in my account may be worth considering.
Amazon's trustworthiness is not and has never been an issue. Their willingness to champion consumers in intellectual property disputes is not a matter of trustworthiness, and would never have any bearing on my expectation of privacy. If they ever violated that, I'd cancel my Prime subscription in a heartbeat.
But amazon does know who the WSJ/Kindle subscribers are. The article summary is painting Murdoch as a dinosaur who just doesn't understand how things work these days: "In yet another move to display how antiquated and completely ignorant of digital culture he is, Rupert Murdoch has started demanding that Amazon hand over user info for all Kindle users"
Yes, notice the word "culture". Of course Amazon COULD turn over the goods on their users (likely they'd have to change their privacy policy, but that's doable). The question is SHOULD they, and would they suffer backlash and a loss of faith and face as a result.
I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes." I don't want my name and various demographics going to Rupert Murdoch, even if I do subscribe to his rag (which, sadly, used to be an excellent paper).
Here's a clue for all of you that posted so far: The abstract of a patent is not the patent
In general, I agree with you, and have made this point, here, before. However, in this case it's moot. The target of the suit is Twitter. Twitter itself does nothing even remotely new. Zephyr did everything Twitter is doing 20 years before. Read that again: TWENTY YEARS. So, it really doesn't matter what it is that this patent covers. Unless it was granted prior to 1990 (by which time Zephyr had, I believe, all of the features of Twitter other than being HTML-based), there's nothing that this patent can claim AND Twitter is infringing that isn't covered by prior art.
As a developer, I can say that Google's product suite is unsettlingly dynamic. There's a new API every week or so,
Yes, new APIs are a serious problem... Sorry, what?!
and no asssurance of futures.
This is different from... what? If Google goes away or (more likely) drops a project, the APIs aren't going to be worth much, but if [company X] goes away or drops a project the same is true. Was there a point in that?
For example, I was all excited about using Google's JS extensions (with the ability to load/save data locally)
That's a standard HTML5 feature now. Bad choice.
but I've yet to see this working anywhere but Windows.
Firefox 3.5.x on all platforms. I believe IE has committed to this or possibly even shipped, but for now you can use gears under IE. Latest Safari also supports HTML5, which is why the Latitude app on the iPhone can get your location.
Chrome is nice but Windows only, there's now (finally!) a Linux version, but it's so buggy that it often crashes X windows.
OK, seriously are you just trolling?! I've run Chrome under X and never seen this happen. Are you using an experimental X server?
And now they have their own O/S!? Two?! But which one should I use?
Ah, you are trolling. OK, sorry, nevermind.
PS: For the readers who are confused: Google has one released OS and it's currently supported on phone handsets only (Android). Google Chrome OS has not been released and there's no indication of exactly what niche it will fill once it is, so there's no sense in getting worked up over "choices" that don't exist.
No matter how ironclad the agreement or how draconian the penalties your data will still be public. Sue Google into non existence and well your data is still public.
As the grandparent suggested, "Google" is a red herring here. We've had this debate before, and it's over. Every industry that handles sensitive data has been working for the last 10+ years to determine how to contract with third parties to manage that data. It's been a long and difficult road, and some kinks are yet to be worked out, but to suggest that it's not possible to do right seems to be contradicted by the thousands upon thousands of hospitals, government contractors, law firms, courts, government agencies and so on that have been doing it very well for some time now.
In fact, the exact same argument can be applied to your personal release of this information to a third party (e.g. the firm in question) in the first place, and we've long since come to understand that our personal data needs to be shared with those who provide us valuable services. We, as a society have come to terms with this and developed models for how that should work. These rules are ingrained in our laws and even the fundamental rules upon which our laws operate (e.g. Common Law). While it will likely take another 100 years to work out exactly how technology and the web of corporate interaction will fit into that framework, to stick your head in the sand and pretend that it's not a part of our world is rather silly.
IANAL... once you voluntarily hand information off to an uninvolved third party, the veil of privilege is breached and it can be discovered
I don't buy this. you might be right, but I think it's worth suggesting that an actual lawyer who has handled such cases should be consulted on this point.
Sure, if you hand your records to someone else causally (e.g. you CC the wrong person on an email thread) or you use a public mailbox for business communications, then there's no expectation of privilege. However, when another company is handling your internal email, I don't buy this at all. To say that that can be discovered is like saying that your leased office space can be searched because it's not owned by the law firm. Just not buying that at all, and legally it would be a very, very hard point to make.
It doesn't take a "computer security expert" to know that you're unnecessarily risking your clients' confidentiality by sending your communications wholesale to a 3rd party.
And yet, it does take a computer security expert (or so it would seem) to realize that this is how modern businesses operate. Law firms, doctors, insurance companies and thousands of other companies have backup services; outsourced printing services for sealed cases and hundreds of other reasons to have to contract with third parties for the handling of sensitive data. Heck, your hospital probably goes through a dozen other companies just to run your bloodwork and store/backup the records.
You're coming very late to this party by suggesting that outsourcing sensitive data is a problem. See Slashdot posts from 5 years ago for many examples of companies figuring out (painfully) how to do this right.
Google is as good a choice for outsourced data as any. Apps is kept (painfully, from my point of view as a non-business user) separate from the rest of the Google infrastructure and has totally separate guarantees in terms of uptime (that is to say, any), service and confidentiality. They even have services for SOx compliance (through a third party) and long term archival policies.
The whole concept of the "debt to society" is hosed. Was Bruce Perlowin's debt paid? The so-called "King of Pot" is an unrepentant smuggler of marijuana who has now gone legit, and is the head of a successful public company that's helping to promote the medical use of the plant. It's not a debt, it's an agreement. We have an agreement that we want to live in a certain kind of world. If you don't agree, we'll lock you up and smack you around for a while. If you still don't agree, we'll do it again until we just decide to stop letting you roam the streets. If you play ball, you get a house and 2.5 kids. That's the American Dream.
What's problematic, here, is that we have a class of "disagreement" that we won't let go, so no matter how reformed you are, we won't shake hands and make nice. In essence, we're violating the agreement.
IMHO, there's a place for laws like this. I do think that someone who has committed violent acts in the past should be monitored for some period of time after they're released. If those violent acts are against children, I can see parents wanting to know if they're moving into an area where someone who hasn't yet been cleared lives. Problem is a) we don't classify crimes in a way that maps to future risk and b) we don't have any way that someone can clear their name by demonstrating an ability to abide by the agreement over time.
If we solved those two problems, then this iPhone app would only be a concern in so far as people tend to take the law into their own hands. Because of that, I do think that the information should be anonymized for the public (knowing that there's someone living on this block is one thing... knowing their address and name is asking for problems).
What it is is a way to permanently marginalize an increasingly large segment of society. In Miami, I think it is, there's now a community that sex offenders have to live in. "Community" is a nice way of saying, "a bridge they have to live under." This is because the city won't let them live within a certain radius of any school, day-care or other facility that has children. So... what you get is a rapidly growing, very disenfranchised group of people, essentially randomly selected from society (of course, if you had enough money to hire a really good lawyer, you won't be there). How long before they out-number other neighborhoods? Who knows, but then we'll have to build a wall, right? I mean, think of the children.
Of course, at some point, the wall will seem insufficient. We'll have to move them all forcibly out to less populated areas. But they won't have any way to support themselves... hey, I know they can work for their food....
I really love these two parent replies. They perfectly sum up the problem with the GW debate. First you have someone who takes the figures presented and says, "well, that's going to cause problems, but it's not so bad in the following ways..." Then you get someone who says, "yeah, but no one thinks that it's going to be on the low-end. Clearly the high-end of the predictions are more likely." Then you get a third person who says, "yeah, but that's not very likely. Clearly, the universe will come to an end! Florida is toast!"
Sure, you can find a doomsday scenario in any global-scale change, but right now, it really doesn't look like that's what's happening, and the consensus is that we'll see moderate warming and a change in sea level that will threaten only the most exposed of regions (New Orleans, Holland, Venice, and other places that are essentially at or below sea level).
We'll also have improved crop yields in regions that were just barely warm enough for farming before. Canada and Russia stand to benefit the most while countries that border existing large deserts MAY see a disastrous expansion (though we know so little about how deserts expand right now that that's really just a guess).
It won't be long until the zombies create individual spams for each recipient. Just scramble the catch words, add some random stuff to the gifs so they message-digest differently etc.
Back when I was in the spam hunting business, we called that 2002. Since then, techniques have become radically more sophisticated.
Sure, you can fake your IP address so you get past this filtering, because it just looks at the first packet. It won't help you though, because you can't complete a TCP 3-way handshake from a fake address, and without doing that you can't actually send spam.
Not true. When we say "fake", we don't always mean "not your valid IP address right now." For example, you might send your spam from a van that drives slowly through a large city, taking advantage of any open corporate wireless networks it finds on the way. That's one way. Another is to simply bribe your way in to a different ISP or corporate network every night (this has been done). You drive your van up to the back door at 3AM, pay the NOC guy on duty $1000 to hand you a live RJ45 jack and you pump out a few billion messages, pack up and go.
Variants of the above exist and are used all over the world. Gone are the days of a few spam-friendly ISPs. Today it's much harder to nail down the bad guys.
Not even remotely. At best this system could only be used as input to a secondary system that then uses this information along with other sources. See, e.g., SpamAssassin's scoring approach.
Math and science are related fields, but certainly not the same thing. Math seeks to explain relationships in terms of a system of logic and reasoning. This is a required precursor of the development of science, but simply demonstrating that a relationship is logically consistent is insufficient in science. It must also be demonstrated that it bears out in the real world. This is why, for example, many physicists consider string theory to be very lovely math, but math none the less.
All those rich people living in the current beach front property will lose their places and be forced to buy new places!
There actually are a lot of very interesting transformations that a warming earth could bring us, many of which are arguably positive (making much more of Canada, Russia and Scandinavia accessible to large-scale habitation; increased access to existing tundra for growing; etc.) However, this isn't actually one of the likely outcomes. Unless the IPCCC's initial estimates for sea level rise are radically off, 10-50cm of sea level rise isn't going to be forcing any but the most absurdly exposed to move inland. Even my grandfather who can jump off of his deck into the ocean (well, when he was a younger man) won't have anything to worry about unless the Greenland melt forces an acceleration of the warming, which the jury is soundly out on.
So no, beaches will get smaller (until erosion makes them larger) and ocean-facing flood-prone areas will become more so. Also, property values won't change much. I live in New England, and a good spot on the non-polluted parts of the New England coastline are already very expensive. Warming them up won't change that.
To be fair, their comments are probably being taken radically out of context, here. They likely gave a laundry-list of reasons that they think jailbreaking should not be allowed by the FCC. Now, we might disagree with their rationale (I do), but Slashdot does tend to sensationalize whatever is the most likely headline to get a geek's attention.
As others have pointed out baseband software isn't typically touched when jailbreaking an iPhone, so this argument would appear to be more of a "the path we're on" sort of thing, rather than a statement about what jailbreaking will cause directly.
As they say, any press is good press. The unwashed masses are only hearing "Apple, Apple, Apple".
For now, you're right. However, it's not the popular response that matters. What Apple is doing is eroding the good will they had from the technical consumers. They're moving over to Android and RIM phones by droves. Now, that doesn't matter to Apple immediately. For the time being, Apple will continue to chug along "business as usual," but once a critical mass of good Android phones and techies using them exists, you're going to see the "me too" vote start to cross the line. More and more people are hearing about apps first on Android and then, a few weeks or months later, there's an iPhone version... maybe (or like Lattitude, there's a sad Web-based app that doesn't quite cut it because Apple won't let the native app onto their platform).
How long are end-users going to put up with this? As long as their technically inclined friends keep telling them that the iPhone is probably the best option... I know I stopped saying that to my friends about 6 months ago, and at this point my only hesitation in recommending something else is that there are so many really nice offerings that are "real soon now", and it seems like exactly the wrong time to buy a new smart phone of any sort.
Sure, but how many people finish reading a physical book and then hand it off to someone else?
I don't mean to be rude, but how is this a response to what I said? Transferability is an entirely separate aspect of the conversation which I don't think advances the existing topic other than as a completely different attack on the viability of DRM.
Slashdot Mirror
My favorite press release was the one from Paramount that introduced Seven of Nine. The release itself is mildly amusing in retrospect, but the best part was the MST3K filk of it that was posted use Usenet.
The fact that you listed a lot of upcoming 2009 movies, but not Avatar, and listed some already-out movies but not Moon, makes me think that there's a problem, here.
That excuse was invalid when it was first asserted, and is equally invalid today. The claim is that at 1million articles, Wikipedia was at the bursting point, and deletion was necessary to keep spam and abuse at bay. Now the claim is that at 3mil, WP is at the bursting point, and deletion is necessary to keep spam and abuse at bay. Guess what, neither was true.
Wikipedia could allow articles about everything anyone ever cared about in a reasonable way, without any loss of quality overall if it started from the premise that every possible string of letters on length n or less (where n is the maximum allowed length in MediaWiki) is a valid article. It just requires a tiered system of article management. I don't think that an article about Simpson characters' nose lengths should show up in initial search results. However, I don't understand the seemingly "natural" desire to exclude such an article from an online database of the collected knowledge of mankind. How is a censored list of articles ever to be exhaustive? Is it somehow more comprehensive because it's censored based on popular consensus rather than societal taboos? I don't think so.
No, he's about the 10 millionth. The other 7 million were deleted because they weren't considered "notable," but were actually better known and more readily written about than Beate Ericksen.
I agree completely. I generally tell people that it's far, far, far better to have a strong password which you write down than a weak one which you can remember.
PasswordSafe is the happy medium. You don't write it down, you write it on disk, encrypted with a single password that's the only one you have to remember (aside, perhaps, from the one you use to log in to the machine that has PasswordSafe installed).
I've been using PasswordSafe now for about a year, and there's no turning back. All of my passwords are insanely cryptic things that are much longer than I could remember, and they're all encrypted with a single password that I do remember.
Available on Windows, Linux and just about everywhere else as a Java app.
"Yes, new APIs are a serious problem... Sorry, what?!"
Think of it like the legal system. Too many fucking laws nobody can be bothered to remember them all.
Too many fucking APIs nobody can be bothered to settle on one implementation
You've gone off the rails. Google's APIs are many and various, but I'm actually not aware of any API that they have that's redundant.
What two APIs are you having to choose between, exactly? The only example I can think of is very much required: Blogger has a full-featured API, but it also offers feed-oriented access through RSS/Atom. A blogging site that didn't offer RSS/Atom wouldn't have many users, so there's nothing they can do there. However, it's not possible to provide a full API within the context of either of those standards, so a full-featured API was created and deployed. It's very much the same API that Google uses for Calendar and App Engine and so on. They're very consistent across their tools and sites.
Quantum computing is a whole new world of computing; because it's based on the principles of quantum physics. This means that a quantum computer does not resemble the computers of today at all. In a quantum computer, information is stored in "qubits", which is 0, 1 or "undetermined / both".
Yeah, I'm still not buying it. Quantum computing has yet to do anything that lives up to even its basic promise. If it's possible to harness these states, we should have been able to demonstrate, at the very least, the capacity for computation on the scale of, say, the average pocket calculator. And yet, we've still gotten nowhere. Why? Well, there are many possible reasons, but I tend to favor the simplest: quantum mechanics is a field that is built on some very nice math and as many intersections with reality as we've been able to test, but fundamentally we don't really understand what's going on at the level of the atom, much less at the level of its constituent parts. As we gain that understanding, our math is likely to be revised and refined several times.
Put simply: we're like Aristarchus of Samos measuring the relative sizes and distances of the sun and moon. He was more accurate than any before him, and his understanding drove countless others' discoveries, but if he'd tried to put a man on the moon using that math, he would have failed.
We're doing roughly that: trying to put a man on the moon at quantum scale, and while the discoveries of Plank and Dirac and all of their successors to the current day have enlightened us as to the nature of the quantum world, we're still not so much farther along than Aristarchus. I expect there to be at least one more wave of truly physics-shattering discoveries on par with the uncertainty principle before we even start to be able to perform real computation at the quantum scale. Even then, it's entirely possible that those discoveries will invalidate the entire idea of using superposition for computation.
Then again, I could be completely wrong, and quantum computing could be workable tomorrow. Just don't go betting the farm on it.
Except that, ever since the 1984 debacle, Amazon's trustworthiness, especially in regards to the Kindle, has been slowly eroding away. I'm definitely waiting to see what Amazon does. If they do hand it over, deleting all of the personal data in my account may be worth considering.
Amazon's trustworthiness is not and has never been an issue. Their willingness to champion consumers in intellectual property disputes is not a matter of trustworthiness, and would never have any bearing on my expectation of privacy. If they ever violated that, I'd cancel my Prime subscription in a heartbeat.
But amazon does know who the WSJ/Kindle subscribers are. The article summary is painting Murdoch as a dinosaur who just doesn't understand how things work these days: "In yet another move to display how antiquated and completely ignorant of digital culture he is, Rupert Murdoch has started demanding that Amazon hand over user info for all Kindle users"
Yes, notice the word "culture". Of course Amazon COULD turn over the goods on their users (likely they'd have to change their privacy policy, but that's doable). The question is SHOULD they, and would they suffer backlash and a loss of faith and face as a result.
I'm pretty sure the answer is "yes." I don't want my name and various demographics going to Rupert Murdoch, even if I do subscribe to his rag (which, sadly, used to be an excellent paper).
Here's a clue for all of you that posted so far: The abstract of a patent is not the patent
In general, I agree with you, and have made this point, here, before. However, in this case it's moot. The target of the suit is Twitter. Twitter itself does nothing even remotely new. Zephyr did everything Twitter is doing 20 years before. Read that again: TWENTY YEARS. So, it really doesn't matter what it is that this patent covers. Unless it was granted prior to 1990 (by which time Zephyr had, I believe, all of the features of Twitter other than being HTML-based), there's nothing that this patent can claim AND Twitter is infringing that isn't covered by prior art.
As a developer, I can say that Google's product suite is unsettlingly dynamic. There's a new API every week or so,
Yes, new APIs are a serious problem... Sorry, what?!
and no asssurance of futures.
This is different from... what? If Google goes away or (more likely) drops a project, the APIs aren't going to be worth much, but if [company X] goes away or drops a project the same is true. Was there a point in that?
For example, I was all excited about using Google's JS extensions (with the ability to load/save data locally)
That's a standard HTML5 feature now. Bad choice.
but I've yet to see this working anywhere but Windows.
Firefox 3.5.x on all platforms. I believe IE has committed to this or possibly even shipped, but for now you can use gears under IE. Latest Safari also supports HTML5, which is why the Latitude app on the iPhone can get your location.
Chrome is nice but Windows only, there's now (finally!) a Linux version, but it's so buggy that it often crashes X windows.
OK, seriously are you just trolling?! I've run Chrome under X and never seen this happen. Are you using an experimental X server?
And now they have their own O/S!? Two?! But which one should I use?
Ah, you are trolling. OK, sorry, nevermind.
PS: For the readers who are confused: Google has one released OS and it's currently supported on phone handsets only (Android). Google Chrome OS has not been released and there's no indication of exactly what niche it will fill once it is, so there's no sense in getting worked up over "choices" that don't exist.
No matter how ironclad the agreement or how draconian the penalties your data will still be public. Sue Google into non existence and well your data is still public.
As the grandparent suggested, "Google" is a red herring here. We've had this debate before, and it's over. Every industry that handles sensitive data has been working for the last 10+ years to determine how to contract with third parties to manage that data. It's been a long and difficult road, and some kinks are yet to be worked out, but to suggest that it's not possible to do right seems to be contradicted by the thousands upon thousands of hospitals, government contractors, law firms, courts, government agencies and so on that have been doing it very well for some time now.
In fact, the exact same argument can be applied to your personal release of this information to a third party (e.g. the firm in question) in the first place, and we've long since come to understand that our personal data needs to be shared with those who provide us valuable services. We, as a society have come to terms with this and developed models for how that should work. These rules are ingrained in our laws and even the fundamental rules upon which our laws operate (e.g. Common Law). While it will likely take another 100 years to work out exactly how technology and the web of corporate interaction will fit into that framework, to stick your head in the sand and pretend that it's not a part of our world is rather silly.
IANAL ... once you voluntarily hand information off to an uninvolved third party, the veil of privilege is breached and it can be discovered
I don't buy this. you might be right, but I think it's worth suggesting that an actual lawyer who has handled such cases should be consulted on this point.
Sure, if you hand your records to someone else causally (e.g. you CC the wrong person on an email thread) or you use a public mailbox for business communications, then there's no expectation of privilege. However, when another company is handling your internal email, I don't buy this at all. To say that that can be discovered is like saying that your leased office space can be searched because it's not owned by the law firm. Just not buying that at all, and legally it would be a very, very hard point to make.
It doesn't take a "computer security expert" to know that you're unnecessarily risking your clients' confidentiality by sending your communications wholesale to a 3rd party.
And yet, it does take a computer security expert (or so it would seem) to realize that this is how modern businesses operate. Law firms, doctors, insurance companies and thousands of other companies have backup services; outsourced printing services for sealed cases and hundreds of other reasons to have to contract with third parties for the handling of sensitive data. Heck, your hospital probably goes through a dozen other companies just to run your bloodwork and store/backup the records.
You're coming very late to this party by suggesting that outsourcing sensitive data is a problem. See Slashdot posts from 5 years ago for many examples of companies figuring out (painfully) how to do this right.
Google is as good a choice for outsourced data as any. Apps is kept (painfully, from my point of view as a non-business user) separate from the rest of the Google infrastructure and has totally separate guarantees in terms of uptime (that is to say, any), service and confidentiality. They even have services for SOx compliance (through a third party) and long term archival policies.
The whole concept of the "debt to society" is hosed. Was Bruce Perlowin's debt paid? The so-called "King of Pot" is an unrepentant smuggler of marijuana who has now gone legit, and is the head of a successful public company that's helping to promote the medical use of the plant. It's not a debt, it's an agreement. We have an agreement that we want to live in a certain kind of world. If you don't agree, we'll lock you up and smack you around for a while. If you still don't agree, we'll do it again until we just decide to stop letting you roam the streets. If you play ball, you get a house and 2.5 kids. That's the American Dream.
What's problematic, here, is that we have a class of "disagreement" that we won't let go, so no matter how reformed you are, we won't shake hands and make nice. In essence, we're violating the agreement.
IMHO, there's a place for laws like this. I do think that someone who has committed violent acts in the past should be monitored for some period of time after they're released. If those violent acts are against children, I can see parents wanting to know if they're moving into an area where someone who hasn't yet been cleared lives. Problem is a) we don't classify crimes in a way that maps to future risk and b) we don't have any way that someone can clear their name by demonstrating an ability to abide by the agreement over time.
If we solved those two problems, then this iPhone app would only be a concern in so far as people tend to take the law into their own hands. Because of that, I do think that the information should be anonymized for the public (knowing that there's someone living on this block is one thing... knowing their address and name is asking for problems).
What it is is a way to permanently marginalize an increasingly large segment of society. In Miami, I think it is, there's now a community that sex offenders have to live in. "Community" is a nice way of saying, "a bridge they have to live under." This is because the city won't let them live within a certain radius of any school, day-care or other facility that has children. So... what you get is a rapidly growing, very disenfranchised group of people, essentially randomly selected from society (of course, if you had enough money to hire a really good lawyer, you won't be there). How long before they out-number other neighborhoods? Who knows, but then we'll have to build a wall, right? I mean, think of the children.
Of course, at some point, the wall will seem insufficient. We'll have to move them all forcibly out to less populated areas. But they won't have any way to support themselves... hey, I know they can work for their food....
I really love these two parent replies. They perfectly sum up the problem with the GW debate. First you have someone who takes the figures presented and says, "well, that's going to cause problems, but it's not so bad in the following ways..." Then you get someone who says, "yeah, but no one thinks that it's going to be on the low-end. Clearly the high-end of the predictions are more likely." Then you get a third person who says, "yeah, but that's not very likely. Clearly, the universe will come to an end! Florida is toast!"
Sure, you can find a doomsday scenario in any global-scale change, but right now, it really doesn't look like that's what's happening, and the consensus is that we'll see moderate warming and a change in sea level that will threaten only the most exposed of regions (New Orleans, Holland, Venice, and other places that are essentially at or below sea level).
We'll also have improved crop yields in regions that were just barely warm enough for farming before. Canada and Russia stand to benefit the most while countries that border existing large deserts MAY see a disastrous expansion (though we know so little about how deserts expand right now that that's really just a guess).
It won't be long until the zombies create individual spams for each recipient. Just scramble the catch words, add some random stuff to the gifs so they message-digest differently etc.
Back when I was in the spam hunting business, we called that 2002. Since then, techniques have become radically more sophisticated.
IP addresses, he notes, are easy to fake.
Sure, you can fake your IP address so you get past this filtering, because it just looks at the first packet. It won't help you though, because you can't complete a TCP 3-way handshake from a fake address, and without doing that you can't actually send spam.
Not true. When we say "fake", we don't always mean "not your valid IP address right now." For example, you might send your spam from a van that drives slowly through a large city, taking advantage of any open corporate wireless networks it finds on the way. That's one way. Another is to simply bribe your way in to a different ISP or corporate network every night (this has been done). You drive your van up to the back door at 3AM, pay the NOC guy on duty $1000 to hand you a live RJ45 jack and you pump out a few billion messages, pack up and go.
Variants of the above exist and are used all over the world. Gone are the days of a few spam-friendly ISPs. Today it's much harder to nail down the bad guys.
Not even remotely. At best this system could only be used as input to a secondary system that then uses this information along with other sources. See, e.g., SpamAssassin's scoring approach.
Mathematics is science. CS is mathematics.
No and yes, respectively.
Math and science are related fields, but certainly not the same thing. Math seeks to explain relationships in terms of a system of logic and reasoning. This is a required precursor of the development of science, but simply demonstrating that a relationship is logically consistent is insufficient in science. It must also be demonstrated that it bears out in the real world. This is why, for example, many physicists consider string theory to be very lovely math, but math none the less.
All those rich people living in the current beach front property will lose their places and be forced to buy new places!
There actually are a lot of very interesting transformations that a warming earth could bring us, many of which are arguably positive (making much more of Canada, Russia and Scandinavia accessible to large-scale habitation; increased access to existing tundra for growing; etc.) However, this isn't actually one of the likely outcomes. Unless the IPCCC's initial estimates for sea level rise are radically off, 10-50cm of sea level rise isn't going to be forcing any but the most absurdly exposed to move inland. Even my grandfather who can jump off of his deck into the ocean (well, when he was a younger man) won't have anything to worry about unless the Greenland melt forces an acceleration of the warming, which the jury is soundly out on.
So no, beaches will get smaller (until erosion makes them larger) and ocean-facing flood-prone areas will become more so. Also, property values won't change much. I live in New England, and a good spot on the non-polluted parts of the New England coastline are already very expensive. Warming them up won't change that.
To be fair, their comments are probably being taken radically out of context, here. They likely gave a laundry-list of reasons that they think jailbreaking should not be allowed by the FCC. Now, we might disagree with their rationale (I do), but Slashdot does tend to sensationalize whatever is the most likely headline to get a geek's attention.
As others have pointed out baseband software isn't typically touched when jailbreaking an iPhone, so this argument would appear to be more of a "the path we're on" sort of thing, rather than a statement about what jailbreaking will cause directly.
As they say, any press is good press. The unwashed masses are only hearing "Apple, Apple, Apple".
For now, you're right. However, it's not the popular response that matters. What Apple is doing is eroding the good will they had from the technical consumers. They're moving over to Android and RIM phones by droves. Now, that doesn't matter to Apple immediately. For the time being, Apple will continue to chug along "business as usual," but once a critical mass of good Android phones and techies using them exists, you're going to see the "me too" vote start to cross the line. More and more people are hearing about apps first on Android and then, a few weeks or months later, there's an iPhone version... maybe (or like Lattitude, there's a sad Web-based app that doesn't quite cut it because Apple won't let the native app onto their platform).
How long are end-users going to put up with this? As long as their technically inclined friends keep telling them that the iPhone is probably the best option... I know I stopped saying that to my friends about 6 months ago, and at this point my only hesitation in recommending something else is that there are so many really nice offerings that are "real soon now", and it seems like exactly the wrong time to buy a new smart phone of any sort.
Sure, but how many people finish reading a physical book and then hand it off to someone else?
I don't mean to be rude, but how is this a response to what I said? Transferability is an entirely separate aspect of the conversation which I don't think advances the existing topic other than as a completely different attack on the viability of DRM.