That is a model, not the only one. Probably not even the most common. As for Facebook, their popularity was gained when they respected privacy a tiny bit more, and now they're milking their data for all it's worth. Bait-and-switch, with the social lives of millions held hostage, and no way to end your business relationship and reclaim the privacy you've lost under false assurances of confidentiality. While I use Facebook, I have to micromanage my data so carefully that I'd be glad to see Anonymous make good on their threat so people move to a better service.
So, Firefox grows increasingly complex with each release. Feature creep isn't a completely benign process, and I'd far prefer if Mozilla kept Firefox lean and added such things through plugins. Bloat is not a synonym for slow, albeit the two are strongly correlated.
The vast majority of the people in those situations didn't choose to be there, they ended up there due to circumstances outside of their control. With all the stories of people losing their homes and shit, with all the people getting laid off, are you seriously still holding to that ridiculous notion that only the dregs of society and the undeserving are desperate or on government assistance? Have you ever actually met a poor person, or do you just see them on TV and read about them in the paper?
I have met quite a few poor people in my day. The country I grew up in has the 62nd lowest per capita income, the 21st lowest median family income of all counties in the US, and 33.2% of the population is below the poverty line (and it actually compares favorably in those regards to surrounding counties). Nowadays, I'm in a decent sized city and I'll see about 10-20 people a day as part of my training, most of which are indigent or impoverished. That's me, not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but IMHO that's enough to have an opinion.
My take is that anyone can have a string of bad luck that puts them into poverty. But if you persist in that state then it's by choice. The majority simply do not want to work, and are content to live on $600/month or so. This has been their life's goal from childhood, I kid you not, ~5 of my 16 classmates stated this in elementary school (e.g. "what do you want to be when you grow up") and it has come to pass. Others cling to something that keeps them in poverty. Alcohol is a big one, living in the unaffordable area you were born (e.g. remote areas with few jobs, very low housing costs, and very high costs of living), and having more kids despite not being able to afford the ones you have is another, or the variant where one person works in the family and spreads their earnings among too many people.
There is a fundamental difference in a persistently poor person and everyone else. A poor person has habits that compromise their financial security, so any money they earn is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. The homeless panhandlers are an excellent example. First off, they're rarely 'poor', many pull in >$100k a year tax-free. They live in poverty because they're usually alcoholics, and being 'sympathetic' and giving them your change is about the cruelest thing you can do, as it enables their doomed lifestyle. It's not good to give handouts, nor to offer services that palliate the poor, nor to let poor people starve to death. It's a difficult problem, and I'm not quite arrogant enough to think that I know how to solve it.
(And before someone provides counterexamples, this is a general statement, not a mathematical theory. And it doesn't apply to the institutionalized or the growing number of ought-to-be-institutionalized-but-the-state-just-cut-already-low-mental-health-funding-in-half. One of my aforementioned classmates has an IQ of 54. I do not blame him for not being able to improve his financial situation. It's the other four with able bodies and IQs of 75 - average that I have little sympathy for.)
Pareidolia isn't necessarily related to powerful or deeply significant images. If you work with a random number you'll start noticing it everywhere (e.g. steps to your car, inside of telephone numbers, in newspaper articles). Rorschach inkblot tests were created with that assumption. While they still have their advocates, most psychologists feel they aren't terribly reliable or useful.
That said, art isn't an objective field. Poetry can be quite beautiful and utterly meaningless (intrinsically). IMHO, it's important to differentiate meaning that you've created (your reality), and objective meaning (shared reality).
I would imagine that's a prime example of the human mind finding connections between random data points. It's like seeing Jesus on burnt toast, or constellations when you look at the night sky. The poem happens to work as an allegory, despite not being designed as such. Of course, not being an objective field, it's not terribly important whether it's correlated data or just a figment of your imagination.
One should strive to create the most efficient and secure code possible for intrinsic reasons, and insulin pump control software is no exception. That said, there are far easier ways to kill a man from half a mile away. Our brains' defenses are wholly inadequate to contend with a bullet fired from a sniper rifle. This isn't a bug, it's recognizing that we live in a dangerous world. Yes, we should secure medical devices against unintentional interference, but securing them against malice is like developing body armor to specifically defend against weaponized Rube Goldberg machines. The chance of encountering a Bond villain that kills in such a convoluted way is quite remote. Also, ego aside (crux of the issue IMHO), none of us are James Bond and our enemies are unlikely to care enough to go to that amount of trouble.
It seems odd to me to arrest the spokesperson. They're fairly easily replaced, and uninvolved in the actual activities (assuming common sense). They also let the authorities know who did what, which is invaluable for intel as to exactly how many groups you're fighting. So, I assume this was a political arrest. Going after their one lead just so they have something to show for their efforts.
With all the NIMBY politics, it seems cheaper to just drop the stuff on the moon. Physical security of the site is guaranteed for the foreseeable future (and it becomes a non-issue when lunar travel becomes trivial). And the fears of exposing our descendants to radiation is also a moot point as you already need radiation protection on the moon. The worst natural disaster would be an asteroid strike, which still presents negligible risk to Earth. The worse human disaster would be a launch failure, but it's still lower than what coal power plants do. Heck, it's also retrievable when we decide that breeder reactors aren't so dangerous, or we could just build one on the moon for a colony.
Some math: the US produces 3,000 tons of high-level waste per year, and our super heavy lift rockets can generally get 50,000 kg to the moon for $1 billion. $60 billion per year would be an extra ($60 billion / 800 TWh) $0.075 per kilowatt hour. Currently, nuclear energy pays $0.001 per kilowatt hour for waste disposal. So, we'd need to get our launch prices down by one order of magnitude before this is economically feasible, which, with 60 extra launches guaranteed per year, might be doable through economy of scale. As for danger of a rocket failing to launch, that'd release about 50 tons of waste into the atmosphere, compared with Coal's 5 metric tons per gigawatt hour (2,000 TWh * 5 / GWh = 10 million tons per year in the US). (Sorry for mixing metric and imperial tons and other shortcuts, but this is paper-napkin math.)
Actually, screw that, if we were being rational we could just burn/aerosolize high-level waste and add 0.03% to the impact of coal. OTOH, since we aren't rational, by dropping it on the moon we get to improve our super heavy launch capacity by pandering to the fears of the anti-nuke zealots.
But it does create a consensus by which a third right can be rejected or over-scrutinized because it doesn't conform to it. Thankfully, scientists in most fields use double blind randomized and controlled trials to generate objective data to support their theories. Historically though, incorrect consensuses have been very difficult to break-up, because contrary data has such a high barrier to entry compared to weaker supportive data, which easily cumulates.
It's fairly unusual for me to examine a project's source code, but if you're not willing to show others what you've written, then I assume it's of very poor quality. If you're worried about code theft then that indicates you have few plans to further improve your software. These are rules of thumb, obviously, but I find them to be true more often than not. How else shall I determine which program to try first? It's nonsense to pick the program with better marketing, or to wade through pages of clueless user reviews (potentially astroturfed and rarely done by anyone knowledgeable).
While I like the idea, it doesn't seem practical to me. Orbit is different from sitting between galaxies. The ISS is still very much in Earth's gravity well, it's just got enough tangential speed that it doesn't ever hit the ground. IIRC, gravity on most of Earth is ~9.81 m/s^2, 9.78 m/s^2 on the top of Mt. Everest, and ~9.1 m/s^2 on the ISS. I'm too lazy to do the math right now, but I'd imagine that it'd cost more fuel to push the ISS into deep space than it took to put it into orbit in the first place, including air resistance.
I doubt anyone seriously uses an old DOS machine for daily web browsing anymore. So, no new computers need to be bought. OTOH, the landfill will have that old DOS machine sooner or later. The only practical difference is in storing the machine, and the extra power consumption in running it.
It sounds tautological to me, but I suppose this is a case of technical jargon with very precise meanings being used in lay-person media and interpreted with the more general definitions of common words. I've noticed that everytime I talk about evolutionary biology's "altruism", there are always pedantic or philosophic naysayers that are convinced that it frankly doesn't exist (despite mounds of experimental evidence). Something to do with their conception of the inner motivations of a bacterium. I'm not sure if it's better to go the legal route and define every term before you use it, or to use over-simplified or hyphenated monstrosities of terms.
($36,000,000 - $100,000) / 10 years = $3.59 Million per year
$3,590,000 / (365.25 * 24) = $409 per hour
So, how many people would like a job that paid $409/hour and got paid up-front? Now, surely any ill-gained assets were seized, but still, the probability of being caught is low enough for this to make perfect economic sense.
Phone power users are notorious for misunderstanding encryption. For example, to this day people talk about the Droid X's "encrypted boot loader". Obviously, encrypted bytecode isn't executable (quiet about homomorphic encryption, that's not yet practical), so the bootloader is in plaintext. It's merely that firmware upgrade images are signed.
IMHO, what needs to be stressed is that *any* form of "Remember my password" is insecure. This is by design, since the point of it is to ensure that the password can be read without user interaction.
As of late, marketers seem to be infatuated with the demographic that has enough money that they can waste several dollars per day on an overpriced drink, while simultaneously lacking the sense not to do so.
Any list one provides is more a matter of personal taste than anything. Personally, I tend to go to movies to see the special effects. I can find more entertaining stories in other media, but seeing millions of dollars worth of CGI is unique to the cinema. So what if the plot is trite and I get odd stares for chuckling 30 seconds before the punchline is delivered? Occasionally, the film isn't abysmal regarding technical accuracy and story, so I get a better deal than I bargained for.
So, the vehicle noises, oncoming wind, doppler effect, and unfamiliar voice/accent surely had no effect on what the officer heard... Someone who regularly receives death threats as part of the job...
What was disrespectful chiding from your perspective was a potential threat from the officer's. The lesson here isn't that people abuse authority (another valuable lesson for another time), it's that one shouldn't make pointless remarks that are likely to be misconstrued. Especially to someone armed and authorized to use lethal force to defend themself against a perceived threat. Obviously it didn't come to that, but it was based on the restraint of someone you had just insulted.
Don't say things without taking into account your audience's perspective. For a police officer, they constantly see unsavory folk, nobody is happy to see them, and they face a very real possibility of being killed everytime they wear their uniform. For all the officer knew, "I smell bacon" meant you were going to "fry" him via a drive-by shooting (bacon is a form of dead pig, after all), if he even heard you correctly.
Personally, I don't trust any prediction about humanity past about twenty years. Linear or exponential extrapolation is easy, predicting the future is hard. The equation size for population size given carrying capacity assumes that K (the carrying capacity) is a constant. For humans, it has been anything but. It took 66 years from the Wright Brothers' first powered flight to Neil Armstrong's stepping on the Moon. I'm inclined to believe that the next 66 years will enable us to tap the practically infinite resources of space. Assuming we don't boondoggle with unmanned probes for another 40 years, of course. =)
A) You can trim down long get requests, just take out all the tracking information and preferences and such. For example, only send the bold part of these urls, as the italicized portion is superfluous:
B) Most users use HTML in their e-mail. Have you not looked at the plain text version of an e-mail for a while? Expecting users to edit HTML directly would be a 'fault' of their e-mail program, and I doubt that many do. (Hopefully not, otherwise my e-mail is mostly sent by people with serious psych issues since their messages have "<div></div>" repeated ~50 times. All work and no play I suppose...)
C) So, you open a webpage on a desktop computer, type the URL into a text message on a mobile phone, and expect the recipient to open it on a mobile browser? That's kinda silly... Send the text message directly from the computer, and the recipient will just tap the link to open it (and amusingly enough, multi-line links are easier to tap than tiny ones). Or open the page in your mobile browser and send it that way. Either way, you shouldn't be typing URLs into text messages on your phone.
D) I assume you've never been Rickrolled (or worse, given that this is Slashdot)? And that your contacts never send you pointless links or URLs that you've been to before?
Replication of experience tends to be less useful than working on something unique. So, I think an engineer who worked for NASA for 5 years, then GE for 20 is probably more likely to invent something revolutionary than one who worked for just GE for 25 years. Thus the 'cost' is mitigated a bit.
Aside from that, e-mail is a poor identifier. It's a pain to type out, and frequently changes. My mother, as an example of a lay person, used to change her e-mail address everytime she switched ISPs, which was about every year so she could get a new promotional rate.
OTOH, spam is easy to deal with. Someone could setup a subdomain forwarding service that lets you give out a unique e-mail address to each website (e.g. amazon.com@yoursubdomain.host.net) and sends your key for any address @yoursubdomain.host.net. From there, unknown addresses get sent to a spam folder, and known addresses can be blocked on a per-address basis. Or even immediately after giving out the address, if you'd rather not receive any e-mail after the initial verification.
Actually, I basically already do this. I've got a greasemonkey script that autofills 'e-mail' form fields with the most significant part of the domain (e.g. amazon.com or bbc.co.uk) @mysubdomain.cjb.net. CJB lets me do a blanket forward and specific forwards for individual aliases and has been reliable for many years (aside from some sign-up scripts choking on 'greylisting'). Password fields cause a javascript prompt that takes my master password as a key to encipher the significant part of the domain using AES via the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library.
This apocalypse scenario is much like gray goo. Bacteria and viruses have ridiculously high population sizes (e.g. bacterial cells on/in your body outnumber your own cells 10 to 1), very short generation times (e.g. 30 minutes), reduced genome stability (so faster evolution), and have been trying to reproduce at maximal levels for over a billion years. Our continuing existence defies that goal, which is a testament to just how effective our immune system really is. Something entirely new is unlikely to even be effective in attacking us, let alone evading our defenses. Most anything we make in the lab has probably already been done at some point in nature, just through random chance (e.g. mutation and horizontal gene transfer).
Slashdot Mirror
That is a model, not the only one. Probably not even the most common. As for Facebook, their popularity was gained when they respected privacy a tiny bit more, and now they're milking their data for all it's worth. Bait-and-switch, with the social lives of millions held hostage, and no way to end your business relationship and reclaim the privacy you've lost under false assurances of confidentiality. While I use Facebook, I have to micromanage my data so carefully that I'd be glad to see Anonymous make good on their threat so people move to a better service.
Firefox's Windows Installer Sizes:
1.0: 4.7MB, 2.0: 5.5MB, 3.0: 7.2MB, 3.5: 7.7MB, 3.6: 8.2MB, 4.0: 11.9MB, 5.0: 13.1MB, 6.0 (Beta): 13.9MB
So, Firefox grows increasingly complex with each release. Feature creep isn't a completely benign process, and I'd far prefer if Mozilla kept Firefox lean and added such things through plugins. Bloat is not a synonym for slow, albeit the two are strongly correlated.
The vast majority of the people in those situations didn't choose to be there, they ended up there due to circumstances outside of their control. With all the stories of people losing their homes and shit, with all the people getting laid off, are you seriously still holding to that ridiculous notion that only the dregs of society and the undeserving are desperate or on government assistance? Have you ever actually met a poor person, or do you just see them on TV and read about them in the paper?
I have met quite a few poor people in my day. The country I grew up in has the 62nd lowest per capita income, the 21st lowest median family income of all counties in the US, and 33.2% of the population is below the poverty line (and it actually compares favorably in those regards to surrounding counties). Nowadays, I'm in a decent sized city and I'll see about 10-20 people a day as part of my training, most of which are indigent or impoverished. That's me, not an expert by any stretch of the imagination, but IMHO that's enough to have an opinion.
My take is that anyone can have a string of bad luck that puts them into poverty. But if you persist in that state then it's by choice. The majority simply do not want to work, and are content to live on $600/month or so. This has been their life's goal from childhood, I kid you not, ~5 of my 16 classmates stated this in elementary school (e.g. "what do you want to be when you grow up") and it has come to pass. Others cling to something that keeps them in poverty. Alcohol is a big one, living in the unaffordable area you were born (e.g. remote areas with few jobs, very low housing costs, and very high costs of living), and having more kids despite not being able to afford the ones you have is another, or the variant where one person works in the family and spreads their earnings among too many people.
There is a fundamental difference in a persistently poor person and everyone else. A poor person has habits that compromise their financial security, so any money they earn is like pouring water into a leaky bucket. The homeless panhandlers are an excellent example. First off, they're rarely 'poor', many pull in >$100k a year tax-free. They live in poverty because they're usually alcoholics, and being 'sympathetic' and giving them your change is about the cruelest thing you can do, as it enables their doomed lifestyle. It's not good to give handouts, nor to offer services that palliate the poor, nor to let poor people starve to death. It's a difficult problem, and I'm not quite arrogant enough to think that I know how to solve it.
(And before someone provides counterexamples, this is a general statement, not a mathematical theory. And it doesn't apply to the institutionalized or the growing number of ought-to-be-institutionalized-but-the-state-just-cut-already-low-mental-health-funding-in-half. One of my aforementioned classmates has an IQ of 54. I do not blame him for not being able to improve his financial situation. It's the other four with able bodies and IQs of 75 - average that I have little sympathy for.)
Pareidolia isn't necessarily related to powerful or deeply significant images. If you work with a random number you'll start noticing it everywhere (e.g. steps to your car, inside of telephone numbers, in newspaper articles). Rorschach inkblot tests were created with that assumption. While they still have their advocates, most psychologists feel they aren't terribly reliable or useful.
That said, art isn't an objective field. Poetry can be quite beautiful and utterly meaningless (intrinsically). IMHO, it's important to differentiate meaning that you've created (your reality), and objective meaning (shared reality).
I would imagine that's a prime example of the human mind finding connections between random data points. It's like seeing Jesus on burnt toast, or constellations when you look at the night sky. The poem happens to work as an allegory, despite not being designed as such. Of course, not being an objective field, it's not terribly important whether it's correlated data or just a figment of your imagination.
One should strive to create the most efficient and secure code possible for intrinsic reasons, and insulin pump control software is no exception. That said, there are far easier ways to kill a man from half a mile away. Our brains' defenses are wholly inadequate to contend with a bullet fired from a sniper rifle. This isn't a bug, it's recognizing that we live in a dangerous world. Yes, we should secure medical devices against unintentional interference, but securing them against malice is like developing body armor to specifically defend against weaponized Rube Goldberg machines. The chance of encountering a Bond villain that kills in such a convoluted way is quite remote. Also, ego aside (crux of the issue IMHO), none of us are James Bond and our enemies are unlikely to care enough to go to that amount of trouble.
It seems odd to me to arrest the spokesperson. They're fairly easily replaced, and uninvolved in the actual activities (assuming common sense). They also let the authorities know who did what, which is invaluable for intel as to exactly how many groups you're fighting. So, I assume this was a political arrest. Going after their one lead just so they have something to show for their efforts.
With all the NIMBY politics, it seems cheaper to just drop the stuff on the moon. Physical security of the site is guaranteed for the foreseeable future (and it becomes a non-issue when lunar travel becomes trivial). And the fears of exposing our descendants to radiation is also a moot point as you already need radiation protection on the moon. The worst natural disaster would be an asteroid strike, which still presents negligible risk to Earth. The worse human disaster would be a launch failure, but it's still lower than what coal power plants do. Heck, it's also retrievable when we decide that breeder reactors aren't so dangerous, or we could just build one on the moon for a colony.
Some math: the US produces 3,000 tons of high-level waste per year, and our super heavy lift rockets can generally get 50,000 kg to the moon for $1 billion. $60 billion per year would be an extra ($60 billion / 800 TWh) $0.075 per kilowatt hour. Currently, nuclear energy pays $0.001 per kilowatt hour for waste disposal. So, we'd need to get our launch prices down by one order of magnitude before this is economically feasible, which, with 60 extra launches guaranteed per year, might be doable through economy of scale. As for danger of a rocket failing to launch, that'd release about 50 tons of waste into the atmosphere, compared with Coal's 5 metric tons per gigawatt hour (2,000 TWh * 5 / GWh = 10 million tons per year in the US). (Sorry for mixing metric and imperial tons and other shortcuts, but this is paper-napkin math.)
Actually, screw that, if we were being rational we could just burn/aerosolize high-level waste and add 0.03% to the impact of coal. OTOH, since we aren't rational, by dropping it on the moon we get to improve our super heavy launch capacity by pandering to the fears of the anti-nuke zealots.
But it does create a consensus by which a third right can be rejected or over-scrutinized because it doesn't conform to it. Thankfully, scientists in most fields use double blind randomized and controlled trials to generate objective data to support their theories. Historically though, incorrect consensuses have been very difficult to break-up, because contrary data has such a high barrier to entry compared to weaker supportive data, which easily cumulates.
It's fairly unusual for me to examine a project's source code, but if you're not willing to show others what you've written, then I assume it's of very poor quality. If you're worried about code theft then that indicates you have few plans to further improve your software. These are rules of thumb, obviously, but I find them to be true more often than not. How else shall I determine which program to try first? It's nonsense to pick the program with better marketing, or to wade through pages of clueless user reviews (potentially astroturfed and rarely done by anyone knowledgeable).
While I like the idea, it doesn't seem practical to me. Orbit is different from sitting between galaxies. The ISS is still very much in Earth's gravity well, it's just got enough tangential speed that it doesn't ever hit the ground. IIRC, gravity on most of Earth is ~9.81 m/s^2, 9.78 m/s^2 on the top of Mt. Everest, and ~9.1 m/s^2 on the ISS. I'm too lazy to do the math right now, but I'd imagine that it'd cost more fuel to push the ISS into deep space than it took to put it into orbit in the first place, including air resistance.
I doubt anyone seriously uses an old DOS machine for daily web browsing anymore. So, no new computers need to be bought. OTOH, the landfill will have that old DOS machine sooner or later. The only practical difference is in storing the machine, and the extra power consumption in running it.
It sounds tautological to me, but I suppose this is a case of technical jargon with very precise meanings being used in lay-person media and interpreted with the more general definitions of common words. I've noticed that everytime I talk about evolutionary biology's "altruism", there are always pedantic or philosophic naysayers that are convinced that it frankly doesn't exist (despite mounds of experimental evidence). Something to do with their conception of the inner motivations of a bacterium. I'm not sure if it's better to go the legal route and define every term before you use it, or to use over-simplified or hyphenated monstrosities of terms.
($36,000,000 - $100,000) / 10 years = $3.59 Million per year
$3,590,000 / (365.25 * 24) = $409 per hour
So, how many people would like a job that paid $409/hour and got paid up-front? Now, surely any ill-gained assets were seized, but still, the probability of being caught is low enough for this to make perfect economic sense.
Phone power users are notorious for misunderstanding encryption. For example, to this day people talk about the Droid X's "encrypted boot loader". Obviously, encrypted bytecode isn't executable (quiet about homomorphic encryption, that's not yet practical), so the bootloader is in plaintext. It's merely that firmware upgrade images are signed.
IMHO, what needs to be stressed is that *any* form of "Remember my password" is insecure. This is by design, since the point of it is to ensure that the password can be read without user interaction.
As of late, marketers seem to be infatuated with the demographic that has enough money that they can waste several dollars per day on an overpriced drink, while simultaneously lacking the sense not to do so.
Any list one provides is more a matter of personal taste than anything. Personally, I tend to go to movies to see the special effects. I can find more entertaining stories in other media, but seeing millions of dollars worth of CGI is unique to the cinema. So what if the plot is trite and I get odd stares for chuckling 30 seconds before the punchline is delivered? Occasionally, the film isn't abysmal regarding technical accuracy and story, so I get a better deal than I bargained for.
So, the vehicle noises, oncoming wind, doppler effect, and unfamiliar voice/accent surely had no effect on what the officer heard... Someone who regularly receives death threats as part of the job...
What was disrespectful chiding from your perspective was a potential threat from the officer's. The lesson here isn't that people abuse authority (another valuable lesson for another time), it's that one shouldn't make pointless remarks that are likely to be misconstrued. Especially to someone armed and authorized to use lethal force to defend themself against a perceived threat. Obviously it didn't come to that, but it was based on the restraint of someone you had just insulted.
Don't say things without taking into account your audience's perspective. For a police officer, they constantly see unsavory folk, nobody is happy to see them, and they face a very real possibility of being killed everytime they wear their uniform. For all the officer knew, "I smell bacon" meant you were going to "fry" him via a drive-by shooting (bacon is a form of dead pig, after all), if he even heard you correctly.
Personally, I don't trust any prediction about humanity past about twenty years. Linear or exponential extrapolation is easy, predicting the future is hard. The equation size for population size given carrying capacity assumes that K (the carrying capacity) is a constant. For humans, it has been anything but. It took 66 years from the Wright Brothers' first powered flight to Neil Armstrong's stepping on the Moon. I'm inclined to believe that the next 66 years will enable us to tap the practically infinite resources of space. Assuming we don't boondoggle with unmanned probes for another 40 years, of course. =)
A) You can trim down long get requests, just take out all the tracking information and preferences and such. For example, only send the bold part of these urls, as the italicized portion is superfluous:
/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1310996750&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-Technology-AirStation-Wireless-WZR-HP-AG300H/dp/B004UAL5AU
http://maps.google.com/maps?saddr= 42+St+-+Port+Authority+Bus+Terminal+%40 40.757308,-73.989735&daddr=350+5th+Avenue,+New+York,+NY+10118 +(Empire+State+Building)&hl=en&ll=40.75267,-73.987169&spn=0.009899,0.016158&sll=40.752459,-73.987169&sspn=0.009899,0.016158&geocode=FTzobQIdmQGX-w%3BFUvGbQIdERKX-yFzdY-mZOGFkSlpdBGzqVnCiTEsrLWKpFygrA&mra=ls &dirflg=w &z=16
B) Most users use HTML in their e-mail. Have you not looked at the plain text version of an e-mail for a while? Expecting users to edit HTML directly would be a 'fault' of their e-mail program, and I doubt that many do. (Hopefully not, otherwise my e-mail is mostly sent by people with serious psych issues since their messages have "<div></div>" repeated ~50 times. All work and no play I suppose...)
C) So, you open a webpage on a desktop computer, type the URL into a text message on a mobile phone, and expect the recipient to open it on a mobile browser? That's kinda silly... Send the text message directly from the computer, and the recipient will just tap the link to open it (and amusingly enough, multi-line links are easier to tap than tiny ones). Or open the page in your mobile browser and send it that way. Either way, you shouldn't be typing URLs into text messages on your phone.
D) I assume you've never been Rickrolled (or worse, given that this is Slashdot)? And that your contacts never send you pointless links or URLs that you've been to before?
So, how do they tell which site you visited if there are several hosted on the same IP? Or am I delusional in thinking law-enforcement cares?
Replication of experience tends to be less useful than working on something unique. So, I think an engineer who worked for NASA for 5 years, then GE for 20 is probably more likely to invent something revolutionary than one who worked for just GE for 25 years. Thus the 'cost' is mitigated a bit.
Expressions are difficult to translate, so I must ask... What's Dutch/French for "Don't bite the hand that feeds you?"
Aside from that, e-mail is a poor identifier. It's a pain to type out, and frequently changes. My mother, as an example of a lay person, used to change her e-mail address everytime she switched ISPs, which was about every year so she could get a new promotional rate.
OTOH, spam is easy to deal with. Someone could setup a subdomain forwarding service that lets you give out a unique e-mail address to each website (e.g. amazon.com@yoursubdomain.host.net) and sends your key for any address @yoursubdomain.host.net. From there, unknown addresses get sent to a spam folder, and known addresses can be blocked on a per-address basis. Or even immediately after giving out the address, if you'd rather not receive any e-mail after the initial verification.
Actually, I basically already do this. I've got a greasemonkey script that autofills 'e-mail' form fields with the most significant part of the domain (e.g. amazon.com or bbc.co.uk) @mysubdomain.cjb.net. CJB lets me do a blanket forward and specific forwards for individual aliases and has been reliable for many years (aside from some sign-up scripts choking on 'greylisting'). Password fields cause a javascript prompt that takes my master password as a key to encipher the significant part of the domain using AES via the Stanford Javascript Crypto Library.
This apocalypse scenario is much like gray goo. Bacteria and viruses have ridiculously high population sizes (e.g. bacterial cells on/in your body outnumber your own cells 10 to 1), very short generation times (e.g. 30 minutes), reduced genome stability (so faster evolution), and have been trying to reproduce at maximal levels for over a billion years. Our continuing existence defies that goal, which is a testament to just how effective our immune system really is. Something entirely new is unlikely to even be effective in attacking us, let alone evading our defenses. Most anything we make in the lab has probably already been done at some point in nature, just through random chance (e.g. mutation and horizontal gene transfer).