The ~referendum that Zelaya was planning might well have been unconstitutionnal, but he didn't get to do it. Hence he did not break the constitution.
The Honduran Constitution prohibits the consideration of any amendments aimed at changing terms or eliminating term limits. In effect, by advocating and campaigning on that topic, Zelaya was violating the constitution in his capacity as president.
Not to mention that Zelaya sacked the head of the military for refusing to carry out his illegal referendum, and then tried to have his supporters carry it out on their own contrary to the declarations of Hondura's congress and supreme court, leading a mob to break in and steal the necessary ballots which he had had sent by none other than Hugo Chavez.
And now we see why he was eager to carry it out despite its illegality and his having become rather unpopular--it was always going to be cooked in his favor.
Personally, I don't see how the removal of the president by the congress and the supreme court for his illegal actions and temporary replacement by an elected official from the same party, with no alteration to plans to hold the upcoming election, can be considered a "coup." It didn't change the political landscape at all. It just kept one power hungry president from fraudulently creating a permanent throne for himself.
The ancient Persians had a passively cooled refrigerator called the yakhchal which "often contained a system of windcatchers that could easily bring temperatures inside the space down to frigid levels in summer days."
Perhaps the Google datacenter could employ some variation of their technique.
It doesn't make sense to value foreign IP unless you plan on pulling a big take from selling your domestic IP abroad. The U.S.'s position has coincided with its economic interests, not its moral opinion.
Right now China doesn't care much about copyright and patents, but you can bet in 20 years from when they have ceased trying to catch up to the superpower and effectively *are* the superpower, that they will be among those rallying for stronger enforcement.
I blame the university for undermining any sense of credibility by selling out to the highest bidder at the expense of discrimination against an arbitrary list of students - Students who paid the same tuition as every other student, yet cannot experience the same intellectual freedoms as their peers
We are talking about a project funded by DOE grant money, not student tuition, and usually the way these things work is that the university skims a whole lot off of that and effectively the DOE subsidizes the tuition of the foreign nationals by providing these projects.
But I don't think the argument holds water anyway. I mean, I pay my taxes the same as anyone else, but would you honestly say this merits my having equal access to nuclear missile silos and chemical weapons laboratories as any other citizen? Should any shareholder of Intel be able to come prancing about in the chip fabrication facility? Should the banker I mortgaged my house to be able to drop in for breakfast whenever he wants? It appears fairly intuitive to me that making an investment in something does not automatically mean you should be able to run in and grab whatever you feel is an equitable share of the benefits.
because some magic list-of-the-week says their Fearless Leader (whom in many cases they came to the US because they don't like the policies or education climate back home) pissed in our Cheerios.
Yes, and why do you think Fearless Leader was willing to let them go in the first place, hmm? Maybe he's just a real swell guy... but any realistic effort at national security requires considering other possibilities.
And I blame the government for foisting their homework onto a domain that largely considers secrecy either beneath consideration or outright contemptible. Don't want foreign students to have access to military projects? Simple - Give those projects to standard military-industrial contractors familiar with paranoid levels of obfuscation and mistrust such as Lockheed, Grumman, Boeing or the like.
That is a nice generalization about academics, but maybe the ones who voluntarily work on military projects which require secrecy don't exactly fall into your blanket description. We aren't talking about the draft here. And I think you grossly underestimate the entrenchment of academics in military research. Why don't you lookup who worked on the Manhattan project and see how many of them were "standard military-industrial contractors." Los Alamos labs (and other labs) are run by universities on the military's behalf.
I blame them for not taking care to prevent any one group from having "enough" information to do anything useful with.
Why would you give them information they couldn't do anything useful with? What would be the point of giving them information at all?
I doubt there is much I can say to dissuade you that it is not the military's fault, since hey they're the bad guys right? But there are a vast number of practical justifications for their present interactions with academics, and I assure you that no one is forcefully compelled to accept these grant-funded projections (by contrast, you generally must fight to get them). You don't have to like it, but acting like this is a case of an innocent guy getting caught up in the system is myopic at best.
Obviously I want to support the cause of having anonymity on the internet, but I am not really sure that this price of not being able to use internet properly myself is a price I am willing to pay. What can be done about this?
Well, clearly you need the IP you browse with and the IP you offer TOR relay service from to be two separate IPs. So you need to throw another machine into the equation. Any service that offers SSH can be used for SSH forwarding. You can buy space on Amazon's cloud for around 10 cents an hour and probably setup TOR there directly, or setup a proxy. You can probably buy proxy access directly, too.
That would be exploited by spammers to the extreme. Imagine clicking on a listing for disney kids fun house only to have a hidden ad for an online Viagra dispensary dominate the page.
Well, there is nothing preventing that from happening right now, either--certainly not if the ad is graphical (redirect) or a flash ad.
We are in effect a long way off from the days when it will not be a trivial exercise to trick a bot. Until then, I think being able to request alternate behavior will always be worth the advantage it affords to the common and decent folk.
Is this a good idea (to help relieve frustrations) or just sanctioned cheating?"
Yes and yes. It does help who just want to see the next level and it does let people bypass the essential struggle of the game, thereby 'diminishing' the meaning of playing it.
But, hey, you paid for the game, I say you should be able to access all of its content, regardless of your playing skill. I would never use the cheat option, but I'm not going to fret myself into a furor that elsewhere in the privacy of their own homes people are enjoying the game differently.
(I will however mercilessly mock any of my friends who are less uber than me.:p )
According to the article, there is no direct evidence for the metal currents which allegedly induce the magnetic field. They are inferred on basis of the existence of the field. Venus doesn't have a magnetic field--so we decide it doesn't have a molten iron core. The only reason the 'present theory' is so simple and explanatory is because we arbitrarily decide on the planets' internals are such that our theory is always guaranteed to fit.
Your generalization is also a bit off, as plenty (probably most) of the large celestial objects have magnetic fields but lack iron cores. The sun certainly lack an iron core. We assume Jupiter's magnetic field is supplied by metallic hydrogen, but it could just as easily support it by electrical currents.
The magnetic fields are actually quite complex and Occam's razor doesn't mean assuming everything is a perfect sphere, as the classic joke goes. If the oceanic theory successfully explains secular variation then Occam's razor may be more likely to back the ocean theory than the dynamo theory.
Either way it is stupid to have some nexus to all of your crimes. The least they could have done was to buy iTunes gift certificates and *then* buy their own songs so it's not like the victim's credit card companies are sending them a bill saying a thousand songs were purchased from such and such band.
They are also taking a big hit on their percentage.
After thinking about it for a bit, this is my idea: you sell stuff on ebay that you don't have, but when someone buys it, you use the stolen credit card to buy it from a different seller and have it sent to them. Your purchases on the stolen card will be tied only to a variety of addresses and entities which have no connection to each other or to you, and you play the international game there may be little chance of the police ever talking to the recipients. Even if you're caught they have to do detective work on every transaction made to the account to establish that it was ultimately based on a stolen credit card. (Presumably all the payments being made to you are being made legally.) But if it is at all possible to shuffle money between bank accounts in an anonymous way (I have no idea whether it really is?) it should be possible to do this without being caught.
That is quite true, but my point is not to disregard the general maintenance and service cost that each car incurs. My point is that a certain quantity of that cost exists entirely independent of the cars vs. planes argument, and therefore has no bearing on whether you should decide to take a plane instead of car.
At our present level of technology interstate roads or railroads will continue to be maintained as a strategic asset even if virtually all commercial travel moves to airplanes, so you don't get to pretend like you save on the entire road construction budget if you switch to airplanes. (Not to mention that being able to economically fly passengers to an airport is not the same as air dropping a tractor on a farm, or retrieving it again for maintenance.)
Besides that, some ground transportation infrastructure simply *cannot* be effectively replaced by air transportation, such as that which is found in the hub of major urban centers. A jumbo jet can't reasonably take you from your apartment on Maple street to your friend's house downtown (and using a helicopter squanders all of the environmental and cost efficiency improvements). So including this infrastructure cost in your cars/buses/trains vs. planes analysis is as silly as saying "beanie babies are cheaper than dialysis machines, therefore we should buy beanie babies instead."
If you can't substitute one for the other, then you also can't talk about "saving" by switching from one to the other.
I'm still not saying that the conclusion of the study is wrong. It sounds quite reasonable to me that flying should have the potential to produce less inherent pollution than driving, especially over long distances. But what I am saying is that the study is wrong if it thinks that all infrastructure cost should be included in the total cost of commercial transport when the infrastructure has certain non-commercial value as well, and it is wrong if its comparison of infrastructure is not restricted to types of infrastructure which are directly substitutable.
While this study seems a much better reflection of the total (environmental) cost of each type of transportation, it's important to remember that the marginal cost of you buying a plain ticket or driving your car is not necessarily proportional to the total cost.
For example, to drive one car across the continent may require a massive investment of infrastructure to create a suitable road, but if that road is already there, the infrastructure cost of driving a second car on the same road is essentially zero: you aren't buying any additional infrastructure because of the second car.
I honestly can't imagine ever doing away with our network of highways, regardless of any increase in the popularity of air travel, so a large portion of that infrastructure cost may have nothing to do with whether you personally choose to drive instead of fly. The innercity roads are also a permanent feature: it's not like the plane is going to drop you off at your apartment complex.
If we encounter a civilization of vastly superior technology, the idea that we would possess any capacity to negotiate is more or less absurd. Hiding doesn't work either. Assuming it's them discovering us and not vice versa, the encounter cannot possibly be far from our highly-immobile civilization, and even if we immediately turned off all the power plants and went dark, it's not like there is such an abundance of life-supporting planets nearby that earth could hope to slip through the cracks. It may not even be wise to try and be all buddy-buddy with them, as who knows what sort of culture and religion they follow. ("you dare bow to us? we will surely annihilate you for the insult of that most obscene gesture!")
The simplest and wisest thing to do is let them call all the shots. Speak when spoken to; otherwise, be silent. Look for opportunities to reciprocate any kindness. Any technology they can be convinced to offer is guaranteed to exceed the value of any riches we bring as tribute (which should have value by virtue of uniqueness even if their culture does not experience the same rarity of materials).
If our visitors are demanding and unreasonable human being will almost certainly have to postpone any major rebellion until they are in a position to acquire some of their oppressors' technological resources.
What will happen when they'll overcome those limitations?
Every one will stand up and clap and then get all misty eyed, because darnit if trying your hardest and making it across the finish line isn't more important than winning!
I own a two-bit computer. My dad gave it to me. I know it is two bits because before he gave it to me he would often remark "I hate this ******* two bit computer."
There is some confusion evidently being caused by the summary. This is not a feature being offered for Google Apps, per se, but rather Google Apps for Your Domain.
Malicious implementations is an utterly irrelevant concern. If I own a domain, I can put malicious software on there whether or not I am using Google Apps.
Personally, I think this is amazing and brilliant and the way the web should be. Why would you not want your software to be extensible? We will probably start seeing 'competitors' to gmail who use gmail for the base and add in extra features (even if google is good now do you want to be locked in and dependent on their design decisions for the rest of your life?) and I am sure companies will have plenty of use for adding scripts to their internal email service. (not that they couldn't do that before, but let's consider the basic undeniable and wonderful fact that gmail is not outlook express)
the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users
Except that
(1) There is no way to tell whether music on last.fm is from legal or illegal copies.
(2) "Listening" to music you don't own is in no way illegal. Even if the RIAA can prove you are listening to music you didn't purchase, they have presented no evidence that a crime has occurred.
(3) The tag data sent to last.fm is self-reported and unverified. Basically, there is no more evidence that you actually listened to the music than if you said you listened to it on facebook. In fact, due to incorrect tags, I'm quite sure that I have reported listening to music not in my collection on a number of occasions.
So while the RIAA may have a bit of a tip-off in looking at high-volume listeners, I don't think they could even get a warrant for more information, since they distinctly lack evidence of any kind of crime.
It is a joke.
Note how half the lettering is bleeding out? Printed on an inkjet.
Also, the suggested idea of combining flush sensors and cameras is absurd in every way.
*is thinking about putting up some similar placards at his own airport*
To be honest I'm getting bored of the whole series model. The idea these days seems to be to start off as many subplots as possible and then take care never to resolve anything so that there's always room for another season.
This is why I have started waiting for series to end before watching them, unless they have primarily episode based plots (like X-files, or Pushing Daisies).
My assumption was that it was going to be a cheesy capitalization on the Terminator franchise to drum up attention for T4. Fortunately, episodes were on Hulu (take note network execs) and it quickly became my favorite television series.
I'm sure this was a pervasive problem. The movies are mostly generic action movies (although I think T2 stands out). The best selling points of the Sarah Connor Chronicles--intricate plot, interesting and well-developed characters, emotional conflict, etc.--are exactly what you would assume to be weak-points if you watched the movies. Even though I enjoyed the movies, I was ready to skip the series, because even if they kept up with blockbuster quality shooting, I just didn't think that I'd like to see the same kind of plot stretched over a season. But now I wish the movies had been more like the series.
I loved especially how they would often shoot episodes using different styles of storytelling. It is a nice break from formula-shows (another huge surprise coming from the Terminator franchise!) and shows a true mastery of skill.
I am alright with the series ending where it did, however. They tied up all the loose ends introduced previously despite popping a few new ones, and I'd rather have a great series come to a dignified close than have it devolve into some dumbed down marketing-droid version which would force me to start hating it.
I hope like other well-done film, which was not immediately popular, that the Sarah Connor Chronicles will gradually gain wide renown and inspire emulation.
I used to fill in gibberish for the secret question answer. Now I use an alternate password, since that is *really* what I want--another way in if my account gets hijacked--not a password reminder.
Oh, and as far as hashing a standard answer goes, you could also just convert some letters to numbers (as is common with passwords), or have the answer be the real answer written once forward and backward, i.e., you can implement encoding algorithms yourself without needing to pull up the command prompt (which should work just as well for deterring guesses).
Slashdot Mirror
The ~referendum that Zelaya was planning might well have been unconstitutionnal, but he didn't get to do it. Hence he did not break the constitution.
The Honduran Constitution prohibits the consideration of any amendments aimed at changing terms or eliminating term limits. In effect, by advocating and campaigning on that topic, Zelaya was violating the constitution in his capacity as president.
Not to mention that Zelaya sacked the head of the military for refusing to carry out his illegal referendum, and then tried to have his supporters carry it out on their own contrary to the declarations of Hondura's congress and supreme court, leading a mob to break in and steal the necessary ballots which he had had sent by none other than Hugo Chavez.
And now we see why he was eager to carry it out despite its illegality and his having become rather unpopular--it was always going to be cooked in his favor.
Personally, I don't see how the removal of the president by the congress and the supreme court for his illegal actions and temporary replacement by an elected official from the same party, with no alteration to plans to hold the upcoming election, can be considered a "coup." It didn't change the political landscape at all. It just kept one power hungry president from fraudulently creating a permanent throne for himself.
The ancient Persians had a passively cooled refrigerator called the yakhchal which "often contained a system of windcatchers that could easily bring temperatures inside the space down to frigid levels in summer days."
Perhaps the Google datacenter could employ some variation of their technique.
It doesn't make sense to value foreign IP unless you plan on pulling a big take from selling your domestic IP abroad. The U.S.'s position has coincided with its economic interests, not its moral opinion.
Right now China doesn't care much about copyright and patents, but you can bet in 20 years from when they have ceased trying to catch up to the superpower and effectively *are* the superpower, that they will be among those rallying for stronger enforcement.
I blame the university for undermining any sense of credibility by selling out to the highest bidder at the expense of discrimination against an arbitrary list of students - Students who paid the same tuition as every other student, yet cannot experience the same intellectual freedoms as their peers
We are talking about a project funded by DOE grant money, not student tuition, and usually the way these things work is that the university skims a whole lot off of that and effectively the DOE subsidizes the tuition of the foreign nationals by providing these projects.
But I don't think the argument holds water anyway. I mean, I pay my taxes the same as anyone else, but would you honestly say this merits my having equal access to nuclear missile silos and chemical weapons laboratories as any other citizen? Should any shareholder of Intel be able to come prancing about in the chip fabrication facility? Should the banker I mortgaged my house to be able to drop in for breakfast whenever he wants? It appears fairly intuitive to me that making an investment in something does not automatically mean you should be able to run in and grab whatever you feel is an equitable share of the benefits.
because some magic list-of-the-week says their Fearless Leader (whom in many cases they came to the US because they don't like the policies or education climate back home) pissed in our Cheerios.
Yes, and why do you think Fearless Leader was willing to let them go in the first place, hmm? Maybe he's just a real swell guy... but any realistic effort at national security requires considering other possibilities.
And I blame the government for foisting their homework onto a domain that largely considers secrecy either beneath consideration or outright contemptible. Don't want foreign students to have access to military projects? Simple - Give those projects to standard military-industrial contractors familiar with paranoid levels of obfuscation and mistrust such as Lockheed, Grumman, Boeing or the like.
That is a nice generalization about academics, but maybe the ones who voluntarily work on military projects which require secrecy don't exactly fall into your blanket description. We aren't talking about the draft here. And I think you grossly underestimate the entrenchment of academics in military research. Why don't you lookup who worked on the Manhattan project and see how many of them were "standard military-industrial contractors." Los Alamos labs (and other labs) are run by universities on the military's behalf.
I blame them for not taking care to prevent any one group from having "enough" information to do anything useful with.
Why would you give them information they couldn't do anything useful with? What would be the point of giving them information at all?
I doubt there is much I can say to dissuade you that it is not the military's fault, since hey they're the bad guys right? But there are a vast number of practical justifications for their present interactions with academics, and I assure you that no one is forcefully compelled to accept these grant-funded projections (by contrast, you generally must fight to get them). You don't have to like it, but acting like this is a case of an innocent guy getting caught up in the system is myopic at best.
Obviously I want to support the cause of having anonymity on the internet, but I am not really sure that this price of not being able to use internet properly myself is a price I am willing to pay. What can be done about this?
Well, clearly you need the IP you browse with and the IP you offer TOR relay service from to be two separate IPs. So you need to throw another machine into the equation. Any service that offers SSH can be used for SSH forwarding. You can buy space on Amazon's cloud for around 10 cents an hour and probably setup TOR there directly, or setup a proxy. You can probably buy proxy access directly, too.
That would be exploited by spammers to the extreme. Imagine clicking on a listing for disney kids fun house only to have a hidden ad for an online Viagra dispensary dominate the page.
Well, there is nothing preventing that from happening right now, either--certainly not if the ad is graphical (redirect) or a flash ad.
We are in effect a long way off from the days when it will not be a trivial exercise to trick a bot. Until then, I think being able to request alternate behavior will always be worth the advantage it affords to the common and decent folk.
I assume if you load your obfuscation code from script.js and put script.js in robots.txt that you will be safe, although that is sort of a pain.
What would be nice is if google created a new tag in the lines of rel="nofollow" which would be an in-line way to keep the engine from seeing content.
Is this a good idea (to help relieve frustrations) or just sanctioned cheating?"
Yes and yes. It does help who just want to see the next level and it does let people bypass the essential struggle of the game, thereby 'diminishing' the meaning of playing it.
But, hey, you paid for the game, I say you should be able to access all of its content, regardless of your playing skill. I would never use the cheat option, but I'm not going to fret myself into a furor that elsewhere in the privacy of their own homes people are enjoying the game differently.
(I will however mercilessly mock any of my friends who are less uber than me. :p )
According to the article, there is no direct evidence for the metal currents which allegedly induce the magnetic field. They are inferred on basis of the existence of the field. Venus doesn't have a magnetic field--so we decide it doesn't have a molten iron core. The only reason the 'present theory' is so simple and explanatory is because we arbitrarily decide on the planets' internals are such that our theory is always guaranteed to fit.
Your generalization is also a bit off, as plenty (probably most) of the large celestial objects have magnetic fields but lack iron cores. The sun certainly lack an iron core. We assume Jupiter's magnetic field is supplied by metallic hydrogen, but it could just as easily support it by electrical currents.
The magnetic fields are actually quite complex and Occam's razor doesn't mean assuming everything is a perfect sphere, as the classic joke goes. If the oceanic theory successfully explains secular variation then Occam's razor may be more likely to back the ocean theory than the dynamo theory.
Either way it is stupid to have some nexus to all of your crimes. The least they could have done was to buy iTunes gift certificates and *then* buy their own songs so it's not like the victim's credit card companies are sending them a bill saying a thousand songs were purchased from such and such band.
They are also taking a big hit on their percentage.
After thinking about it for a bit, this is my idea: you sell stuff on ebay that you don't have, but when someone buys it, you use the stolen credit card to buy it from a different seller and have it sent to them. Your purchases on the stolen card will be tied only to a variety of addresses and entities which have no connection to each other or to you, and you play the international game there may be little chance of the police ever talking to the recipients. Even if you're caught they have to do detective work on every transaction made to the account to establish that it was ultimately based on a stolen credit card. (Presumably all the payments being made to you are being made legally.) But if it is at all possible to shuffle money between bank accounts in an anonymous way (I have no idea whether it really is?) it should be possible to do this without being caught.
It happens naturally; you can't just buy everyone pizza and sit them down and tell them to get to work.
I totally agree. We have our pride, dammit!
But, um, just between you and me... what sort of toppings are we talking about?
That is quite true, but my point is not to disregard the general maintenance and service cost that each car incurs. My point is that a certain quantity of that cost exists entirely independent of the cars vs. planes argument, and therefore has no bearing on whether you should decide to take a plane instead of car.
At our present level of technology interstate roads or railroads will continue to be maintained as a strategic asset even if virtually all commercial travel moves to airplanes, so you don't get to pretend like you save on the entire road construction budget if you switch to airplanes. (Not to mention that being able to economically fly passengers to an airport is not the same as air dropping a tractor on a farm, or retrieving it again for maintenance.)
Besides that, some ground transportation infrastructure simply *cannot* be effectively replaced by air transportation, such as that which is found in the hub of major urban centers. A jumbo jet can't reasonably take you from your apartment on Maple street to your friend's house downtown (and using a helicopter squanders all of the environmental and cost efficiency improvements). So including this infrastructure cost in your cars/buses/trains vs. planes analysis is as silly as saying "beanie babies are cheaper than dialysis machines, therefore we should buy beanie babies instead."
If you can't substitute one for the other, then you also can't talk about "saving" by switching from one to the other.
I'm still not saying that the conclusion of the study is wrong. It sounds quite reasonable to me that flying should have the potential to produce less inherent pollution than driving, especially over long distances. But what I am saying is that the study is wrong if it thinks that all infrastructure cost should be included in the total cost of commercial transport when the infrastructure has certain non-commercial value as well, and it is wrong if its comparison of infrastructure is not restricted to types of infrastructure which are directly substitutable.
While this study seems a much better reflection of the total (environmental) cost of each type of transportation, it's important to remember that the marginal cost of you buying a plain ticket or driving your car is not necessarily proportional to the total cost.
For example, to drive one car across the continent may require a massive investment of infrastructure to create a suitable road, but if that road is already there, the infrastructure cost of driving a second car on the same road is essentially zero: you aren't buying any additional infrastructure because of the second car.
I honestly can't imagine ever doing away with our network of highways, regardless of any increase in the popularity of air travel, so a large portion of that infrastructure cost may have nothing to do with whether you personally choose to drive instead of fly. The innercity roads are also a permanent feature: it's not like the plane is going to drop you off at your apartment complex.
If we encounter a civilization of vastly superior technology, the idea that we would possess any capacity to negotiate is more or less absurd. Hiding doesn't work either. Assuming it's them discovering us and not vice versa, the encounter cannot possibly be far from our highly-immobile civilization, and even if we immediately turned off all the power plants and went dark, it's not like there is such an abundance of life-supporting planets nearby that earth could hope to slip through the cracks. It may not even be wise to try and be all buddy-buddy with them, as who knows what sort of culture and religion they follow. ("you dare bow to us? we will surely annihilate you for the insult of that most obscene gesture!")
The simplest and wisest thing to do is let them call all the shots. Speak when spoken to; otherwise, be silent. Look for opportunities to reciprocate any kindness. Any technology they can be convinced to offer is guaranteed to exceed the value of any riches we bring as tribute (which should have value by virtue of uniqueness even if their culture does not experience the same rarity of materials).
If our visitors are demanding and unreasonable human being will almost certainly have to postpone any major rebellion until they are in a position to acquire some of their oppressors' technological resources.
Stab peoples' eyes out at random!
You could also have people marry their mothers?
What will happen when they'll overcome those limitations?
Every one will stand up and clap and then get all misty eyed, because darnit if trying your hardest and making it across the finish line isn't more important than winning!
Finish up with hugs all around and roll credits.
I own a two-bit computer. My dad gave it to me. I know it is two bits because before he gave it to me he would often remark "I hate this ******* two bit computer."
(Yes, it is also reproductive.)
There is some confusion evidently being caused by the summary. This is not a feature being offered for Google Apps, per se, but rather Google Apps for Your Domain.
Malicious implementations is an utterly irrelevant concern. If I own a domain, I can put malicious software on there whether or not I am using Google Apps.
Personally, I think this is amazing and brilliant and the way the web should be. Why would you not want your software to be extensible? We will probably start seeing 'competitors' to gmail who use gmail for the base and add in extra features (even if google is good now do you want to be locked in and dependent on their design decisions for the rest of your life?) and I am sure companies will have plenty of use for adding scripts to their internal email service. (not that they couldn't do that before, but let's consider the basic undeniable and wonderful fact that gmail is not outlook express)
the data could possibly be used in civil and criminal actions against those users
Except that
(1) There is no way to tell whether music on last.fm is from legal or illegal copies.
(2) "Listening" to music you don't own is in no way illegal. Even if the RIAA can prove you are listening to music you didn't purchase, they have presented no evidence that a crime has occurred.
(3) The tag data sent to last.fm is self-reported and unverified. Basically, there is no more evidence that you actually listened to the music than if you said you listened to it on facebook. In fact, due to incorrect tags, I'm quite sure that I have reported listening to music not in my collection on a number of occasions.
So while the RIAA may have a bit of a tip-off in looking at high-volume listeners, I don't think they could even get a warrant for more information, since they distinctly lack evidence of any kind of crime.
It is a joke. Note how half the lettering is bleeding out? Printed on an inkjet. Also, the suggested idea of combining flush sensors and cameras is absurd in every way. *is thinking about putting up some similar placards at his own airport*
Yeah, you're probably better off sticking with Heroes and American Idol....
To be honest I'm getting bored of the whole series model. The idea these days seems to be to start off as many subplots as possible and then take care never to resolve anything so that there's always room for another season.
This is why I have started waiting for series to end before watching them, unless they have primarily episode based plots (like X-files, or Pushing Daisies).
But I can safely vouch for the Terminator series.
My assumption was that it was going to be a cheesy capitalization on the Terminator franchise to drum up attention for T4. Fortunately, episodes were on Hulu (take note network execs) and it quickly became my favorite television series.
I'm sure this was a pervasive problem. The movies are mostly generic action movies (although I think T2 stands out). The best selling points of the Sarah Connor Chronicles--intricate plot, interesting and well-developed characters, emotional conflict, etc.--are exactly what you would assume to be weak-points if you watched the movies. Even though I enjoyed the movies, I was ready to skip the series, because even if they kept up with blockbuster quality shooting, I just didn't think that I'd like to see the same kind of plot stretched over a season. But now I wish the movies had been more like the series.
I loved especially how they would often shoot episodes using different styles of storytelling. It is a nice break from formula-shows (another huge surprise coming from the Terminator franchise!) and shows a true mastery of skill.
I am alright with the series ending where it did, however. They tied up all the loose ends introduced previously despite popping a few new ones, and I'd rather have a great series come to a dignified close than have it devolve into some dumbed down marketing-droid version which would force me to start hating it.
I hope like other well-done film, which was not immediately popular, that the Sarah Connor Chronicles will gradually gain wide renown and inspire emulation.
What's a few orders of magnitude between friends?
I used to fill in gibberish for the secret question answer. Now I use an alternate password, since that is *really* what I want--another way in if my account gets hijacked--not a password reminder.
Oh, and as far as hashing a standard answer goes, you could also just convert some letters to numbers (as is common with passwords), or have the answer be the real answer written once forward and backward, i.e., you can implement encoding algorithms yourself without needing to pull up the command prompt (which should work just as well for deterring guesses).