In this case what google does or doesn't do, or what google's do or do not do, is all rather arbitrary. In this case I did click through the slashdot link to the article in question, so I could get more information and especially the basis for the conclusion drawn.
What a waste of time, no numbers just percentages, no description of the types of users, in fact no real survey data at all. So Ken Doctor, 'AFFILIATE' analyst, ex-Kight Ridder news services employee, with a degree in journalism, says that people say, well, now why and for whom was the report prepared.
Seems like crazy batshit logic. If you are going to do a search for a particular news story on google, honestly what are the chances that you wont scroll click (open in new tab), not just on one article but several in the hopes of getting the best information for the news story you were specifically searching for. Although I would be curious as to how many people actually started off with http://news.google.com/, rather than just flicking over a typical search to a news specific search (start with a general search in hopes of getting an on location blogger providing lots of in depth coverage and many images or videos, much better than news versions edited to fit space and censored to suit political views).
Now was this debacle the FBI's doing or the incumbent Telecoms doing. From what I understand the telecoms had managed under the Republicans to whack in some pretty hefty and highly profitable charges for handing over customer info, hundreds of times the cost of actually doing it. So on basically the flimsiest request they handed over data because once thousands or request were flowing through the books the revenue was outstanding.
Now of the FBI's side of things, an investigating needs to be carried out not so much for infringing the US constitution but, for wasting millions of dollars of tax payer dollars on pointless hunches and wild guesses. I guess sitting in a comfy chair in an air-conditioned office reading (well pretending to read) those pointless bits of paper was a lot better than going out in the field and carrying out an actual real investigation. Political appointees without suitable qualifications or experience, a sure recipe for fat profits and zero results (D.H.S.). I'm glad people's lives weren't dependent upon this, oh wait;D.
'ER' Netscape is still around today, AOL, bought it then open sourced it and it evolved into Mozilla (see AOL is most definitely not all evil), which in tern created the known offshoots of Firefox and Chrome. So 'hmm', is Netscape. or what it became the dominant browser or not.
Open source creates all sorts of competition which people forget, lines of code compete to continue to exist, features and functions compete, modules of code struggle to survive and of course variants always vie for end user attention. It's that core level of competition that drives efficient, stable and secure code, which when added together create high quality applications.
There is a great deal of concern out there now about what other more dangerous exploits the government of China likely has ready to deploy as you can be certain, they would definitely not used the one and only zero day exploit for this breach of the peace.
Of course if acting skill is the only driver for selection as appearance will be all CGI created, it will certainly change the whole acting landscape. Ugly, pretty, young, old, black white or brindle, all of it will not make a lick of difference, me thinks a pretty but stupid skilled liar is going to really struggle in that market or at the very least make very little money.
The only real problem now is the cost of high quality CGI, but as that continues to fall and they start to develop virtual droids that can interact with a created virtual environment, the whole content landscape will change, a veritable flood of new content and the end of the celebrity era, harumph, no loss there;D.
More importantly history has demonstrated what happens to M$ partners. They are either left to wither on the vine as the core of their operations is mined out and absorbed into M$ or 'hmm', it was a pointless partnership that proved no benefit to M$ and is let go. To partner with M$ is a virtual admittance of defeat. Cool never partners with lame, unless they also want to appear as lame.
The reality is that with M$ gone apple has a far larger market to play in, a market that would be many, many multiples larger than what it current has. Google is big on search but tends to struggle else where, as for their phone, that is nothing more than a marketing momentum artifice for their OS, in fact it is quite clearly labelled as being someone else's phone http://www.htc.com/us/, so it is only a semi-branded google phone and is definitely still a HTC product http://www.htc.com/www/support/nexusone/.
The current line of marketing bull out of Redmond is nothing more than a sign of real fear and paranoia, they know in an open and competitive market they lose. The sad thing is, that failure all stems from an overly aggressive, narcissistic managerial dysfunction (tends to stifle creativity and integrity) and nothing to to with the bulk of the staffs efforts but they will be the ones to pay the price.
Of course freedom of speech gets in there as well and constitutions take precedence over criminal laws and of course criminal laws takes precedence of civil contracts. In point of fact the only real laws that apply in the civil arena, is contractual law and the most important part there is, it is strictly illegal to write a clause into a contract that infringes criminal law and that clause can and often does invalidate the entire contract. So you can't really sue someone for damages but you can avoid paying them (fire them without further payment), as you can't really infringe upon their legal right to freedom of speech (they have not sold you their rights, that is impossible they have only temporarily rented them out and they are free under law to retract them at any time they choose).
Now of course there is that whole industrial espionage angle but, the only way you can really push that angle is to claim that the device will also be sold to the military et. al. so that then you can claim leakage of information as being a breach of national security. OF course the whole thing could be a marketing stunt, the reward, the legal threats, the leak, more civil threats etc. etc. etc..
I get it. So what you are saying is that governments would be far better off manufacturing all this stuff themselves rather than contracting it out. Not only are you eliminating wasteful profits but also enormous insurance costs because the governments can readily self insure.
Now lets have a little bit of fun with the insurance lie. If insurance costs are so high, then the private medical manufacturers must really, really crap, because that is what drives high insurance premiums, lots of failures (no failures, low premiums), so get rid of the private corporations because just like insurance companies, the government should also recognise them as being high risk. The quality control systems in all medical manufacturing facilities must be so bad, that no insurance companies give any of them a discount.
I would love to see some of the warranties on medical equipment, from the sounds of the marketing trolls it must be decades but I bet a lot of that junk comes out with nothing better than 90 days (now that's a big insurance risk, ha ha). The underlying reality is that all this low manufacturing run custom equipment should be manufactured by government, because no matter how inefficient they are, it well still be way cheaper than paying for inflated profit margins at the manufacturers, oh yeah and the insurance companies. Especially the insurance companies because according the medical manufacturing trolls, the very, very expensive quality control system means absolutely no failures.
So the new news model, is as an aggregator of specialist journalists or more likely journalist teams. A group of journalists create team, so that they can provide continuous coverage, which is then feed to news aggregators. What hurts the New York Times most, is keeping the print presses running and keeping the associated staff on site, rather than just going all digital, with remote offices for everyone but the technical services team and editors.
The internet is doing to the news services what the government should do to banks, breaking it up into smaller more manageable pieces.
The digital convergence where there is no difference between, print, broadcast television, radio and cable is becoming a reality and they are no competing with each other directly. Add to that all the bloggers and journalist direct models and the writing is most definitely on the wall for the old world previous millennium mass media model, the model that basically buried itself in marketing as news bullshit.
I like most other people out there am only interested in a few artciles at a time and can no longer tolerate pages and pages of bullshit to get to a few truthful articles (the camouflage for the rest of the lies) and most certainly will not pay for all those lies.
On the, he is long since dead side, it hasn't been days, week or even months, but years since the last validated appearance, when will it finally stop, decades or even centuries into the future. Next time they want to create a terrorist master mind bogey man (straight out of your typical Hollywood movie script,hmm, the whole yarn really does stink of it), I suggest creating a CGI character, their impossible to kill and they are available for multiple simultaneous appearances and they wont get sick and die.
Fear and profits, what a disgusting combination, drive the fear so that more expensive security systems can be sold, so that more security and intelligence contractors can be hired, so that the military industrial complex can prosper, so that worthless preaching politicians can get elected, all in all so that corporate and lobbyist corruption can continue to profit regardless of the cost.
I would have thought a device like that would basically be a fiscal time bomb waiting to go off into the users face. With the download limits and extra charges on mobile broadband used in conjunction with the higher risk wireless connections, I smell a profiteering opportunity for incumbent phone companies to sell less than secure devices to a bunch of gullible unskilled users.
I expect it will not be long before we start hearing horror stories about huge mobile data bills. I consider myself fairly skilled and aware of what is going on and I would be deeply hesitant about installing a device as financially risky as that and I certainly would not recommend it to anyone.
Fortunately it is also a idiot's doomed 'FAIL', video phone calls over VOIP any one, literally millions of videos being uploaded to the internet all the time. Even if that were not the issue, how many people would need to be paid to view all those videos, each and every submission. Let me guess what also will be part of the lie, a two stream approval process. One for companies which corrupt Italian politicians have a financial interests in who get approvals free and another for the general public who must pay the full cost of getting approval and who must get on the end of the line to access the one censorship officer, don't worry waiting list will only be a few decades.
Fear of civil suit being brought by the parents against the school for the principle bearing false witness. So the typical legal counter attack, rather than admitting what is clearly their error, they will simply get the lawyers to distort reality and imply guilt on the parents part.
Not much different than the university student with a tiny circuit board and some blinking lights, being arrested and some ass hat head of police frothing at the mouth about shooting her in the head.
Out of control fear and ignorance, all being fed for political gain and that political gain being driven by nothing but greed. A society being driven out of control by corruption. The shear craziness nowadays, you can give your child a gun (in the US and other gun nut societies) but give them a chemistry or electronics set and low IQ gits with a bit of power will go nuts.
More to the point, lets see what evidence there is that the individual is still alive and not blurry videos of, well, people who just look similar. Past patterns of behaviour would indicate the leaders amongst the various terrorist factions have quite the ego and once they have developed a taste for being on camera, they do not stop. Of course you could say it is difficult to smuggle a video camera to the location of the terrorist leaders but then, well, what kind of threat would they be, can't smuggle a camera then you can't smuggle explosives, fire arms, ammo or even, oh no, Weapons of Mass Destruction or is that Deception, hard to keep track of all the abbreviations.
M$ profits and restricted access to the source code is the problem. Once you started dumping the closed source code onto essential technology infrastructure and only basically released the code to governments, especially those governments that oppose the concept of a modern democracy, well, guess what those governments would do with the bugs they find. Greed versus patriotism, let me guess which took the back seat in dealing with unstable undemocratic governments and corporate profits. Open source can have similar problems but then if you work hard to secure open source (considering it is a globally shared effort) whilst your victims stick with closed source you have got a major advantage, especially when major corporations peddling closed source proprietary code absolutely will not fixed bugs unless they have to, cost versus profit.
The most troublesome thing about this, does anyone believe that the government of China used the best back door bugs for this little operation or did they just use one they knew would be discovered and thwarted relatively quickly but not before they had got what they were after. I can see this getting rapidly out of hand, especially as countries shift to audited FOSS code, they have a limited 'window' of opportunity to exploit their zero day exploits.
I don't think you have a real appreciation of the technology. It means you don't have to look away from what you are doing and you can activate it as necessary. The catch is effective hands free and on again off again control, hand gesture interface (a thimble style ring covers the nail not the finger tip, thumb, index, middle both hands, using the relative orientation of the nails to define gestures, you can also tap the tips on a surface) and a bite able microphone attached to the headset (on off and selections). So what you are looking at, is electronic safety glasses providing you a variable focus (although apple patented it they most certainly did not come up with the idea they pilfered it) overlay over your workspace as required, not a continuous display.
Once your using it effectively in maintenance it can then be ruggedised not only for field maintenance but for more active field roles. In point of fact it can be used in any role, from doctors and nurses, to computer techs, to everyday life (cost, compactness, capability etc. are the drivers of uptake).
You really do have the wrong idea of the government of China. It is some some cohesive cabal plotting the down fall of the rest of humanity. It is an autocracy made up narcissistic and psychopathic individuals (otherwise they would be a democracy) all out to empower and enrich themselves. Their greatest enemies are each other, they all live with the constant threat of being executed for corruption, naturally enough as the majority of them are corrupt (otherwise they would be a democracy). So power plays, feeding the personal ego, eliminating threats to their power, increasing their own personal power, that is the government that has to be dealt with. Of course it makes them pretty vulnerable to divide and conquer techniques, as each of them has not the slightest qualm about betraying their partners in crime or any other Chinese citizens if it will advance their own personal cause (hmm they seem to use that same technique with US corporate executives).
Of course the active disruption of US information infrastructure is, 'hmm' , breaching the peace and as such should face some real penalties. So investigate, prosecute and punish via trade penalties. As for more active tactics, feeding the flames of their own backbiting internal divisions will keep them focused upon their own backyard.
For most people by far the majority, the conspiracy sites are nothing more than entertainment and light reading, quite a lot of fun in fact. Sure I know there a two basic types, those in it for a profit trying to inflame craziness in the hopes of selling advertising space and various other bits of junk and others well have a bit of a slippery grasp on reality. The big difference between the two is of course the for profit conspiracy sites are a lot better and of course the other one can be a little sad (their trying but they just cant seem to get a grasp on reality).
Whoops, I forgot the third type, the misinformation group, for them of course functioning conspiracy sites are the best means by which to spread, the same but different, versions of reality.
Of course a term like "cognitive infiltration: implies the use of psychological trained professional who will use their skills to, well, psychologically harm those individuals, rather than heal them, really not very nice. C'mon you professionally paranoid types there a billions of web pages, the reality is the conspiracy pages tend to disappear amongst them leaving very little real impact upon society, apart from a bit of cathartic relief from the real every days woes and worries, nothing like a major conspiracy to take you away from being unable to pay for health care, having no job security, worrying about crazy religious fundamentalists, being concerned about all the sociopath in politics and major corporations or pollution killing you slowly.
Besides they are also useful to release greatly exaggerated version of troublesome truths so that when the truth finally comes out it is nowhere near as severe as the most popular conspiracy theory version of it. The professionally paranoid really have to take a step back and look at themselves in the mirror. Yes, you took the job because you are a bit of a control freak, you daily exposure to some of the nastiest elements of human society has in reality made you truly a bit paranoid and now you have a tendency to over react in your desire to retain control so loosen up a bit and have a laugh. Oh yeah speaking of laughter, that is likely the best way to deal with some of the more egregious sites, just avoid mocking them it doesn't really work.
The infringing source is of course a composite, with thousands of contributors, rather than one. The underlying reality of that, is that it is a composite of code modules that creates the perceived infringement (only in countries with software patents) not any of the individual modules, as each module has a specific range of non infringing functions and it is only when combined, in effect compiled and the application assembled, that infringement occurs. Whilst I made not have contributed any code, does that mean lawyers will attempt to sue me for compiling, others peoples code and creating the final application (amongst the millions of others), bearing in mind that I am also free to distribute the completed applications as log as I adhere to the FOSS licences ie. make available the underlying non infringing components.
Ultimately the tricky problem is who do you actually sue with open source. Technically every person on the planet owns the code and is free to use the application that the code creates. So sue the planet, you can't really sue companies providing service and support, nor companies providing manuals, not even companies that supply you with a copy of the completed application that you technically already owned before you even approached the company.
I am trying to imagine the patent cops trying to enter every place of business and residence to ensure every infringing copy is removed and, that's world wide, even if for some insane reason they actually tried, you can;t bet it would end up having the exact opposite effect and drive up popularity.
As for M$ it's just another embarrassing management debacle, more funny than interesting but definately news worthy. Perhaps M$ can distribute copies of OpenOffice.org in the interim so that they don't leave their customers in the lurch, they are even entitled to label their version as MicroSoft OpenOffice as long as they adhere to licence requirements (oddly enough it would likely have positive marketing benefits for M$).
There really doesn't have to be anything so far wrong with facebook. Just like every social media web site before it, it will get greedier offend it's uses and before you know it, some other social media format becomes the hot site and facebook fades into memory, just like every single other social media site, first obscurity, then popularity, then market leader, then mind bogglingly arrogant, back to relatively popularity and finally obscurity.
It will absolutely happen, big question is when will it happen, at a guess the signs are, what ever you do, don't take too much risk when it goes public in the near future (no crazy lump sum buyers are left in the market). This will push a drive to increase revenues in the short term regardless of the impact on medium or long term survivability, legal pump and dump.
I enjoy watching a movie to but a full season of a good TV series is more entertaining. Those I will buy when they come out but movies, seriously there a thousands of them, tens of thousands of them and the truth id the older ones are generally better. Greater movie craft and less special effects, so at the end of the day, the bargain bin and specials are the only place worth looking.
It's weird buying a movie for five dollars on special only to see it a month latter being sold for thirty. So forget waiting a month, meh, wait a year and you can buy 6 once new releases for the price of one, let only paying what was once the rental price to buy the movie.
The reality here is the lobbyists will be trying to cut back competition and open access regulations to zero. The biggest problem for the FCC is the very same marketdroids that came up with death panels et al for public option health insurance will be attacking anything the FCC puts forward in order to maintain monopolies, duopolies or cartels.
In this case the incumbents and the lobbyists will be fighting for zero percent helped.
Don't forget the John McCain double speak Internet Freedom bill written for the incumbents by lobbyists and, to be paid for by average taxpayer. If you don't think the FCC is sweating over every possible point of attack, every conceivable distortion and defences against the most ludicrous out and out lies, you are unfortunately mistaken.
Chill fella. Here is something to cheer you up, try to think of an even more lame name than Zune for Steve (uncle fester) Ballmer to pick for the new tablet, one that his uncle (would that be grand uncle fester) is sure to buy. There ought to be a slashdot poll for the worst possible names for the new M$ tablet, I'm leaning for the 'Suppository', the tablet that so far ahead of the pack, it's at your back door already;D.
At the end of the day, it all depends on who M$ choose to send to represent them, whether they are delayers, poisoners or contributors. M$ has a well deserved bad reputation but, as always they should be given the opportunity to contribute and their activities should be measured upon their current behaviour rather than their history. Not that their history should be ignored but, they should always be given every opportunity to contribute positively, whilst every one keeps a sharp eye on them, a very sharp eye.
SVG will really open up the CAD market as well, so watch out for Autodesk, in fact they will suffer farm more harm than M$ (Visio never really went anywhere).
Slashdot Mirror
In this case what google does or doesn't do, or what google's do or do not do, is all rather arbitrary. In this case I did click through the slashdot link to the article in question, so I could get more information and especially the basis for the conclusion drawn.
What a waste of time, no numbers just percentages, no description of the types of users, in fact no real survey data at all. So Ken Doctor, 'AFFILIATE' analyst, ex-Kight Ridder news services employee, with a degree in journalism, says that people say, well, now why and for whom was the report prepared.
Seems like crazy batshit logic. If you are going to do a search for a particular news story on google, honestly what are the chances that you wont scroll click (open in new tab), not just on one article but several in the hopes of getting the best information for the news story you were specifically searching for. Although I would be curious as to how many people actually started off with http://news.google.com/, rather than just flicking over a typical search to a news specific search (start with a general search in hopes of getting an on location blogger providing lots of in depth coverage and many images or videos, much better than news versions edited to fit space and censored to suit political views).
Now was this debacle the FBI's doing or the incumbent Telecoms doing. From what I understand the telecoms had managed under the Republicans to whack in some pretty hefty and highly profitable charges for handing over customer info, hundreds of times the cost of actually doing it. So on basically the flimsiest request they handed over data because once thousands or request were flowing through the books the revenue was outstanding.
Now of the FBI's side of things, an investigating needs to be carried out not so much for infringing the US constitution but, for wasting millions of dollars of tax payer dollars on pointless hunches and wild guesses. I guess sitting in a comfy chair in an air-conditioned office reading (well pretending to read) those pointless bits of paper was a lot better than going out in the field and carrying out an actual real investigation. Political appointees without suitable qualifications or experience, a sure recipe for fat profits and zero results (D.H.S.). I'm glad people's lives weren't dependent upon this, oh wait ;D.
'ER' Netscape is still around today, AOL, bought it then open sourced it and it evolved into Mozilla (see AOL is most definitely not all evil), which in tern created the known offshoots of Firefox and Chrome. So 'hmm', is Netscape. or what it became the dominant browser or not.
Open source creates all sorts of competition which people forget, lines of code compete to continue to exist, features and functions compete, modules of code struggle to survive and of course variants always vie for end user attention. It's that core level of competition that drives efficient, stable and secure code, which when added together create high quality applications.
There is a great deal of concern out there now about what other more dangerous exploits the government of China likely has ready to deploy as you can be certain, they would definitely not used the one and only zero day exploit for this breach of the peace.
Of course if acting skill is the only driver for selection as appearance will be all CGI created, it will certainly change the whole acting landscape. Ugly, pretty, young, old, black white or brindle, all of it will not make a lick of difference, me thinks a pretty but stupid skilled liar is going to really struggle in that market or at the very least make very little money.
The only real problem now is the cost of high quality CGI, but as that continues to fall and they start to develop virtual droids that can interact with a created virtual environment, the whole content landscape will change, a veritable flood of new content and the end of the celebrity era, harumph, no loss there ;D.
More importantly history has demonstrated what happens to M$ partners. They are either left to wither on the vine as the core of their operations is mined out and absorbed into M$ or 'hmm', it was a pointless partnership that proved no benefit to M$ and is let go. To partner with M$ is a virtual admittance of defeat. Cool never partners with lame, unless they also want to appear as lame.
The reality is that with M$ gone apple has a far larger market to play in, a market that would be many, many multiples larger than what it current has. Google is big on search but tends to struggle else where, as for their phone, that is nothing more than a marketing momentum artifice for their OS, in fact it is quite clearly labelled as being someone else's phone http://www.htc.com/us/, so it is only a semi-branded google phone and is definitely still a HTC product http://www.htc.com/www/support/nexusone/.
The current line of marketing bull out of Redmond is nothing more than a sign of real fear and paranoia, they know in an open and competitive market they lose. The sad thing is, that failure all stems from an overly aggressive, narcissistic managerial dysfunction (tends to stifle creativity and integrity) and nothing to to with the bulk of the staffs efforts but they will be the ones to pay the price.
Of course freedom of speech gets in there as well and constitutions take precedence over criminal laws and of course criminal laws takes precedence of civil contracts. In point of fact the only real laws that apply in the civil arena, is contractual law and the most important part there is, it is strictly illegal to write a clause into a contract that infringes criminal law and that clause can and often does invalidate the entire contract. So you can't really sue someone for damages but you can avoid paying them (fire them without further payment), as you can't really infringe upon their legal right to freedom of speech (they have not sold you their rights, that is impossible they have only temporarily rented them out and they are free under law to retract them at any time they choose).
Now of course there is that whole industrial espionage angle but, the only way you can really push that angle is to claim that the device will also be sold to the military et. al. so that then you can claim leakage of information as being a breach of national security. OF course the whole thing could be a marketing stunt, the reward, the legal threats, the leak, more civil threats etc. etc. etc..
I get it. So what you are saying is that governments would be far better off manufacturing all this stuff themselves rather than contracting it out. Not only are you eliminating wasteful profits but also enormous insurance costs because the governments can readily self insure.
Now lets have a little bit of fun with the insurance lie. If insurance costs are so high, then the private medical manufacturers must really, really crap, because that is what drives high insurance premiums, lots of failures (no failures, low premiums), so get rid of the private corporations because just like insurance companies, the government should also recognise them as being high risk. The quality control systems in all medical manufacturing facilities must be so bad, that no insurance companies give any of them a discount.
I would love to see some of the warranties on medical equipment, from the sounds of the marketing trolls it must be decades but I bet a lot of that junk comes out with nothing better than 90 days (now that's a big insurance risk, ha ha). The underlying reality is that all this low manufacturing run custom equipment should be manufactured by government, because no matter how inefficient they are, it well still be way cheaper than paying for inflated profit margins at the manufacturers, oh yeah and the insurance companies. Especially the insurance companies because according the medical manufacturing trolls, the very, very expensive quality control system means absolutely no failures.
So the new news model, is as an aggregator of specialist journalists or more likely journalist teams. A group of journalists create team, so that they can provide continuous coverage, which is then feed to news aggregators. What hurts the New York Times most, is keeping the print presses running and keeping the associated staff on site, rather than just going all digital, with remote offices for everyone but the technical services team and editors.
The internet is doing to the news services what the government should do to banks, breaking it up into smaller more manageable pieces.
The digital convergence where there is no difference between, print, broadcast television, radio and cable is becoming a reality and they are no competing with each other directly. Add to that all the bloggers and journalist direct models and the writing is most definitely on the wall for the old world previous millennium mass media model, the model that basically buried itself in marketing as news bullshit.
I like most other people out there am only interested in a few artciles at a time and can no longer tolerate pages and pages of bullshit to get to a few truthful articles (the camouflage for the rest of the lies) and most certainly will not pay for all those lies.
On the, he is long since dead side, it hasn't been days, week or even months, but years since the last validated appearance, when will it finally stop, decades or even centuries into the future. Next time they want to create a terrorist master mind bogey man (straight out of your typical Hollywood movie script,hmm, the whole yarn really does stink of it), I suggest creating a CGI character, their impossible to kill and they are available for multiple simultaneous appearances and they wont get sick and die.
Fear and profits, what a disgusting combination, drive the fear so that more expensive security systems can be sold, so that more security and intelligence contractors can be hired, so that the military industrial complex can prosper, so that worthless preaching politicians can get elected, all in all so that corporate and lobbyist corruption can continue to profit regardless of the cost.
I would have thought a device like that would basically be a fiscal time bomb waiting to go off into the users face. With the download limits and extra charges on mobile broadband used in conjunction with the higher risk wireless connections, I smell a profiteering opportunity for incumbent phone companies to sell less than secure devices to a bunch of gullible unskilled users.
I expect it will not be long before we start hearing horror stories about huge mobile data bills. I consider myself fairly skilled and aware of what is going on and I would be deeply hesitant about installing a device as financially risky as that and I certainly would not recommend it to anyone.
Fortunately it is also a idiot's doomed 'FAIL', video phone calls over VOIP any one, literally millions of videos being uploaded to the internet all the time. Even if that were not the issue, how many people would need to be paid to view all those videos, each and every submission. Let me guess what also will be part of the lie, a two stream approval process. One for companies which corrupt Italian politicians have a financial interests in who get approvals free and another for the general public who must pay the full cost of getting approval and who must get on the end of the line to access the one censorship officer, don't worry waiting list will only be a few decades.
Fear of civil suit being brought by the parents against the school for the principle bearing false witness. So the typical legal counter attack, rather than admitting what is clearly their error, they will simply get the lawyers to distort reality and imply guilt on the parents part.
Not much different than the university student with a tiny circuit board and some blinking lights, being arrested and some ass hat head of police frothing at the mouth about shooting her in the head.
Out of control fear and ignorance, all being fed for political gain and that political gain being driven by nothing but greed. A society being driven out of control by corruption. The shear craziness nowadays, you can give your child a gun (in the US and other gun nut societies) but give them a chemistry or electronics set and low IQ gits with a bit of power will go nuts.
More to the point, lets see what evidence there is that the individual is still alive and not blurry videos of, well, people who just look similar. Past patterns of behaviour would indicate the leaders amongst the various terrorist factions have quite the ego and once they have developed a taste for being on camera, they do not stop. Of course you could say it is difficult to smuggle a video camera to the location of the terrorist leaders but then, well, what kind of threat would they be, can't smuggle a camera then you can't smuggle explosives, fire arms, ammo or even, oh no, Weapons of Mass Destruction or is that Deception, hard to keep track of all the abbreviations.
http://news.cnet.com/China-looks-into-Windows-code/2100-1016_3-5083458.html. The microtrolls are bad enough of the mods but leave the out and out lies alone it looks silly.
M$ profits and restricted access to the source code is the problem. Once you started dumping the closed source code onto essential technology infrastructure and only basically released the code to governments, especially those governments that oppose the concept of a modern democracy, well, guess what those governments would do with the bugs they find. Greed versus patriotism, let me guess which took the back seat in dealing with unstable undemocratic governments and corporate profits. Open source can have similar problems but then if you work hard to secure open source (considering it is a globally shared effort) whilst your victims stick with closed source you have got a major advantage, especially when major corporations peddling closed source proprietary code absolutely will not fixed bugs unless they have to, cost versus profit.
The most troublesome thing about this, does anyone believe that the government of China used the best back door bugs for this little operation or did they just use one they knew would be discovered and thwarted relatively quickly but not before they had got what they were after. I can see this getting rapidly out of hand, especially as countries shift to audited FOSS code, they have a limited 'window' of opportunity to exploit their zero day exploits.
I don't think you have a real appreciation of the technology. It means you don't have to look away from what you are doing and you can activate it as necessary. The catch is effective hands free and on again off again control, hand gesture interface (a thimble style ring covers the nail not the finger tip, thumb, index, middle both hands, using the relative orientation of the nails to define gestures, you can also tap the tips on a surface) and a bite able microphone attached to the headset (on off and selections). So what you are looking at, is electronic safety glasses providing you a variable focus (although apple patented it they most certainly did not come up with the idea they pilfered it) overlay over your workspace as required, not a continuous display.
Once your using it effectively in maintenance it can then be ruggedised not only for field maintenance but for more active field roles. In point of fact it can be used in any role, from doctors and nurses, to computer techs, to everyday life (cost, compactness, capability etc. are the drivers of uptake).
You really do have the wrong idea of the government of China. It is some some cohesive cabal plotting the down fall of the rest of humanity. It is an autocracy made up narcissistic and psychopathic individuals (otherwise they would be a democracy) all out to empower and enrich themselves. Their greatest enemies are each other, they all live with the constant threat of being executed for corruption, naturally enough as the majority of them are corrupt (otherwise they would be a democracy). So power plays, feeding the personal ego, eliminating threats to their power, increasing their own personal power, that is the government that has to be dealt with. Of course it makes them pretty vulnerable to divide and conquer techniques, as each of them has not the slightest qualm about betraying their partners in crime or any other Chinese citizens if it will advance their own personal cause (hmm they seem to use that same technique with US corporate executives).
Of course the active disruption of US information infrastructure is, 'hmm' , breaching the peace and as such should face some real penalties. So investigate, prosecute and punish via trade penalties. As for more active tactics, feeding the flames of their own backbiting internal divisions will keep them focused upon their own backyard.
For most people by far the majority, the conspiracy sites are nothing more than entertainment and light reading, quite a lot of fun in fact. Sure I know there a two basic types, those in it for a profit trying to inflame craziness in the hopes of selling advertising space and various other bits of junk and others well have a bit of a slippery grasp on reality. The big difference between the two is of course the for profit conspiracy sites are a lot better and of course the other one can be a little sad (their trying but they just cant seem to get a grasp on reality).
Whoops, I forgot the third type, the misinformation group, for them of course functioning conspiracy sites are the best means by which to spread, the same but different, versions of reality.
Of course a term like "cognitive infiltration: implies the use of psychological trained professional who will use their skills to, well, psychologically harm those individuals, rather than heal them, really not very nice. C'mon you professionally paranoid types there a billions of web pages, the reality is the conspiracy pages tend to disappear amongst them leaving very little real impact upon society, apart from a bit of cathartic relief from the real every days woes and worries, nothing like a major conspiracy to take you away from being unable to pay for health care, having no job security, worrying about crazy religious fundamentalists, being concerned about all the sociopath in politics and major corporations or pollution killing you slowly.
Besides they are also useful to release greatly exaggerated version of troublesome truths so that when the truth finally comes out it is nowhere near as severe as the most popular conspiracy theory version of it. The professionally paranoid really have to take a step back and look at themselves in the mirror. Yes, you took the job because you are a bit of a control freak, you daily exposure to some of the nastiest elements of human society has in reality made you truly a bit paranoid and now you have a tendency to over react in your desire to retain control so loosen up a bit and have a laugh. Oh yeah speaking of laughter, that is likely the best way to deal with some of the more egregious sites, just avoid mocking them it doesn't really work.
The infringing source is of course a composite, with thousands of contributors, rather than one. The underlying reality of that, is that it is a composite of code modules that creates the perceived infringement (only in countries with software patents) not any of the individual modules, as each module has a specific range of non infringing functions and it is only when combined, in effect compiled and the application assembled, that infringement occurs. Whilst I made not have contributed any code, does that mean lawyers will attempt to sue me for compiling, others peoples code and creating the final application (amongst the millions of others), bearing in mind that I am also free to distribute the completed applications as log as I adhere to the FOSS licences ie. make available the underlying non infringing components.
Ultimately the tricky problem is who do you actually sue with open source. Technically every person on the planet owns the code and is free to use the application that the code creates. So sue the planet, you can't really sue companies providing service and support, nor companies providing manuals, not even companies that supply you with a copy of the completed application that you technically already owned before you even approached the company.
I am trying to imagine the patent cops trying to enter every place of business and residence to ensure every infringing copy is removed and, that's world wide, even if for some insane reason they actually tried, you can;t bet it would end up having the exact opposite effect and drive up popularity.
As for M$ it's just another embarrassing management debacle, more funny than interesting but definately news worthy. Perhaps M$ can distribute copies of OpenOffice.org in the interim so that they don't leave their customers in the lurch, they are even entitled to label their version as MicroSoft OpenOffice as long as they adhere to licence requirements (oddly enough it would likely have positive marketing benefits for M$).
There really doesn't have to be anything so far wrong with facebook. Just like every social media web site before it, it will get greedier offend it's uses and before you know it, some other social media format becomes the hot site and facebook fades into memory, just like every single other social media site, first obscurity, then popularity, then market leader, then mind bogglingly arrogant, back to relatively popularity and finally obscurity.
It will absolutely happen, big question is when will it happen, at a guess the signs are, what ever you do, don't take too much risk when it goes public in the near future (no crazy lump sum buyers are left in the market). This will push a drive to increase revenues in the short term regardless of the impact on medium or long term survivability, legal pump and dump.
I enjoy watching a movie to but a full season of a good TV series is more entertaining. Those I will buy when they come out but movies, seriously there a thousands of them, tens of thousands of them and the truth id the older ones are generally better. Greater movie craft and less special effects, so at the end of the day, the bargain bin and specials are the only place worth looking.
It's weird buying a movie for five dollars on special only to see it a month latter being sold for thirty. So forget waiting a month, meh, wait a year and you can buy 6 once new releases for the price of one, let only paying what was once the rental price to buy the movie.
The reality here is the lobbyists will be trying to cut back competition and open access regulations to zero. The biggest problem for the FCC is the very same marketdroids that came up with death panels et al for public option health insurance will be attacking anything the FCC puts forward in order to maintain monopolies, duopolies or cartels.
In this case the incumbents and the lobbyists will be fighting for zero percent helped.
Don't forget the John McCain double speak Internet Freedom bill written for the incumbents by lobbyists and, to be paid for by average taxpayer. If you don't think the FCC is sweating over every possible point of attack, every conceivable distortion and defences against the most ludicrous out and out lies, you are unfortunately mistaken.
Chill fella. Here is something to cheer you up, try to think of an even more lame name than Zune for Steve (uncle fester) Ballmer to pick for the new tablet, one that his uncle (would that be grand uncle fester) is sure to buy. There ought to be a slashdot poll for the worst possible names for the new M$ tablet, I'm leaning for the 'Suppository', the tablet that so far ahead of the pack, it's at your back door already ;D.
At the end of the day, it all depends on who M$ choose to send to represent them, whether they are delayers, poisoners or contributors. M$ has a well deserved bad reputation but, as always they should be given the opportunity to contribute and their activities should be measured upon their current behaviour rather than their history. Not that their history should be ignored but, they should always be given every opportunity to contribute positively, whilst every one keeps a sharp eye on them, a very sharp eye.
SVG will really open up the CAD market as well, so watch out for Autodesk, in fact they will suffer farm more harm than M$ (Visio never really went anywhere).