I have my music (ripped from CDs that I still have and even some cassette tapes - all legal) on Google Music for easy access from work computers, my phone, etc. But I can easily imagine at some time in the future where those songs "disappear" from Google due to some sort of automated "take down" because they don't have "any record" of me purchasing those albums in the 80's and 90's (with cash). The cloud providers will be pressured more and more by the cartels that are in charge of most commercial content creation and distribution (yeah, the MPAA, RIAA and their non-US partner organizations). We definitely have not made it to a place where we - as "consumers" have clear ownership of much of anything. I guess I do own the plastic that makes up the CDs and DVDs I bought years ago. But the content is definitely covered by some sort of license as well as copyright and changing laws and rules may well make your data disappear from cloud sources. The Woz has a good point. Go ahead and use the cloud - but keep copies locally too. There probably will be rights conflicts. There will be outages. There will be meltdowns (whether due to finances or government overreaches like with MegaUpload). Just be careful; that's always good advice.
Is it true that if a company does not reserve the right to sell my details to every advertiser it can, they will be in trouble?
Well that would only be true in a limited sense. For example, with a company like Facebook now that it is public - yes, this could be partially true. A company whose business model is collecting data and selling advertisements based on that data would not make their shareholders happy if they decided not to fully utilize that data. However, if a company had a business model of "we provide secure cloud services" (oh say like Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure or something like that, or even like say Dropbox) their shareholders would not like it if the company jeopardized their entire business by not keeping the stored data as confidential as possible. Only as the company started to fail on its own (like dropbox could now that Google Drive and Microsoft Skydrive are attacking their turf) would the shareholders then want to extract all the possible value from the data that they have. They still wouldn't want to do it illegally though as the lawsuits could eat up the shareholder value before they can cash out.
The main risk to data is that it can be subpoenaed by the Government fairly easily. That's really the data risk you have in the US.
I was going to mod you up, but I think I'll comment instead. You are absolutely correct. I know how much we all hate anecdotes and decry how they "aren't data" - but when you add all of them up, they actually do come out to be data. My example: I got a Motorola Droid 1 when they first came out. That was a really nice phone at the time. It was one of the first with Android 2.0 and it got updates to 2.0.1, 2.1, 2.2. Each release made it better. At the time, I would show my wife a new feature that came in with a release (one example was voice recognition for sending texts, etc.) and she would exclaim how my awesome phone was getting better all the time. It was a "Google Experience" phone - which meant that the carrier and manufacturer weren't allowed to screw it all up with bloatware and skins. When it got older, I moved to a Motorola Droid 3. That is a terrible phone. Not enough RAM, a stupid 'Blur' skin that brings bugs with it that don't exist in AOSP, an incredible amount of manufacturer and carrier bloat and crapware. It runs extremely slowly, the camera takes 8 seconds to start and usually crashes taking the first photo. It sucks. It has barely gotten ANY updates. It took over 8 months to get one Blur bug I reported with the dialer fixed. I've only had it since the day it came out - 1 year now - and I want to throw the thing out. I'll tell you - the next one I get will be a Nexus model without any carrier shit or manufacturer shit. No skins, and quick updates.
The carriers haven't figured out that we want these phones to evolve and do more things as the software ecosystem grows. The junk they and the manufacturers put on the phones makes it prohibitive for them put out updates in a timely fashion; they want the phones to be stagnant and always look and run like the day they were purchased. That isn't what a good chunk of us out here want. It will be a Nexus for me - probably when the new ones come out in November. I hate my current phone enough that I will be willing to spend the money to break out of contract early at that point.
Sorry for the rambling anecdote. I am in total agreement that any fragmentation is caused by the vendors lack of ability / agility / desire to get out updates.
Why try to use it as a Facebook replacement? It isn't designed to directly compete. Facebook has a "two way" model (where two people have to agree to be 'friends'). This fosters a community of people who "post to each other"; sort of a friends keeping in touch type of model. Google+ is a one way thing. You put a person in your circles. Then, if they post to public, you get their content in your feed. (Google+ also has the concept of private posts where you can post just to your circles instead of public). However, just circling someone gets you their public content. So Google+ is a great place to get content from content producers, interesting people, etc. For example circle Mike Elgin, Wil Wheaton, Robert Scoble, etc. and you'll get lots of content (I can't vouch for whether you'll like said content). Circle LifeHacker, ArsTechnica, etc. and you get notified of their posts - and can engage with people on Google+ about them without registering accounts on Gawker, Ars, etc. It really is a different model and a different target. I don't view it as a replacement at all.
Oh, and Google Instant (where photos you take automatically upload to a private area) is the killer feature there - just that alone can be so helpful even if you don't circle anyone or use the other features.
Actually it has a lot to do with the isolation model. Both Chrome and IE have a process per tab. Firefox has one process for the whole set of tabs. This means that Firefox is much more likely to go completely non-responsive when - for example - flash is in the middle of crashing (which it is lief to do). In fact, I see Firefox do this fairly often. Chrome and IE on the other hand, use a process per tab which allows them to have better isolation of one tab from another and also allows other tabs to remain responsive when Flash does it thing or some script doesn't run very quickly. (Note that they can't always be 100% responsive when one tab goes south as they do need a process coordinating all the others - but in general they do better than FF does at remaining responsive). Although the memory cost for loading the same DLL, over and over is negligible (simply another handle object), there are resources that can not be shared between processes (due to either OS design, browser protection / isolation scheme, etc.). So the browsers that start a process per tab gain some small security benefit, responsiveness benefit, etc. But they also lose out on the "small memory footprint" since they have to have a copy per process (tab) of the non-shareable resources. Knowing the design, you should absolutely expect there to be a threshold of number of tabs where FF will have less memory use than IE or Chrome.
With something like this, he owns the land, not the island. That may sound stupid, but the island itself is part of Hawaii. For example - if the governor or legislature decides to build a highway across the island, they simply declare eminent domain and seize the land they need (paying for it at some "going rate"). However if he really owned the island, the government couldn't legally do that. So he is like any other landowner. The only difference is that he owns 98% of the land. All of the normal laws about land use still apply. If they have zoning there, it still applies. If they have laws like California does about maintaining free access to certain parts of beaches and waterways, those still apply. That's a far cry from what most people think of when they say someone owns an island. They generally think of it as the person being basically the sovereign there. And that is not true in this case. Larry isn't the king.
But then again, maybe they will steal it - or license it. Can you just imagine a cable ad sales rep talking to a marketing person who is looking to place advertising? We can give you the standard service for $x. But, customers can skip those - and our studies show that your target market mostly skips them. For $2x, we can give you an unskippable ad that your target market will be forced to show. No skipping on those premium ads.
It is interesting how, with complex software, everyone ends up with a different usage pattern. I use the start menu all the time, but as a search and execute. Press the Windows Key (or if your keyboard is one of those "defective" ones that doesn't have a Windows Key press ctrl-esc), and just type. To start Word, Windows Key, w, o, r, d, enter. We've tried to train literally thousands of our users to do it that way. But we do still see some folks slowly clicking their way through the start menu the old slow way.
Well, in the enterprise space you have a huge catch-22. I deal with this at work all the time. Since Oracle / Sun Java doesn't actually do patches (they just do full versions that introduce new features, break existing code, and deprecate other features), you can't deploy it. You have this trade off of known security vulnerabilities vs. enterprise software that won't work with the new versions. You have banks that require you to run Java versions that are a year old in order to move money. You have vendors whose code won't work with the current version of Java - ever (since they take longer to get their code working on new versions that it takes Oracle to release the next new version). We try as hard as we can to get app owners to test - but every last time we ship a new Java versions apps come out of the woodwork with emergency requests to "stop the push". You can't win. Bust people's critical apps and you lose. Allow machines to get owned by insecure versions of Java? Yeah, you lose there too. Oracle needs to figure out how to do security patches that just fix the vulnerabilities and don't introduce (and remove) features. Until they can do that - yes, it is their fault.
I don't have any way of knowing. Apparently the standard is copyrighted and you have to purchase a copy from the site (or have a subscription). Crazy that things that are supposed to be standards can't be viewed (legally) for free.
When they choose to do business with sweatshops to build their products, they are essentially telling us they don't care enough to dirty their hands with that manufacturing business. They don't want to think about the labor relations aspects. They just don't care that much.
Well, to be fair they do care. They care a lot about their PR - the same as any other company. And it is a lot easier to say, "we audit these external contract companies twice a year and have given them x months to make changes" than it is to say, "oh, yeah, we treat our employees in China and Brazil like crap. You caught us.". It is much better PR to work with these contract companies than to have your own sweatshops.
It also seems to import some from Internet Explorer. I use Chrome, Firefox, and IE. At work, we have IE by default (and I need it for SharePoint), but I use Firefox for most stuff and Chrome once in awhile. At home, I use Chrome for most stuff, Firefox once in awhile, and I had to use IE to do my taxes (for some reason some add-in in Chrome blocked Turbo Tax from working so I used IE). Since I have Chrome sync my settings - it has imported search engines in my list that are internal to my work network. They can't be used at all at home - but there are three of them in my list on this Windows 8 beta machine (as I type this in Chrome). So it definitely brings them along from machine to machine. I've never used them in Chrome at work - so it had to grab them from IE.
One solution would be to use Google Voice and allow the call to be recorded on Google's system. Then you can access the recording from your phone, your computer, etc. I got my GV number well before you could "port" a number to GV, so I got a new number. I know that is a deal breaker for some folks so look into porting your existing number to GV. It definitely lets you record calls with no problem at all.
I guess I should point out that the service is still mostly USA only.
The "What's Hot" was initially annoying but once they added the "volume sliders" to it so that you could just drop the volume to 0 (which says "Show nothing from What's hot in your stream") the problem went away. They do still have a fairly rapid rate of change on G+.
If you haven't already set that slider, click the "What's Hot" link on the left panel of G+ below the "Stream" section. It will show a volume slider in the center area near the top. Slide that all the way to the left, then click back to your stream. Problem solved!
It turns out that a certain amount of regulation can help correct for that government granted monopoly on frequencies. We probably need more regulation in the mobile market since we aren't going to have a true free market there in the foreseeable future. For example, if we required phones to work on all of the available networks, required contract (subsidized) plans to clearly separate the subsidy from the price of service and sell plans to "bring your own phone" folks at that price of service so that people could jump to whatever carrier they wanted in the US - we would see competition start to actually work as it should.
Yes, most of us use it with VPN. However consider this:
1) Someone with possibly a bit less skill at finding vulnerabilities takes this code and merges it with a social engineering attack. 2) The social engineering attack promises the user some silly thing (maybe extra smiley faces or dancing cats). 3) The user runs the program inside the corporate firewall. 4) All the company's servers begin blue screening as the user's machine spews these malformed RDP packets.
Honestly, that's not too far fetched and some type of blended exploit like this will probably happen. That's why it is important to patch machines for this and not think that a border firewall is going to protect you for long.
It's all well and good to trust the individual. But do you also trust that the individual is a phone security expert? Do you trust that he hasn't inadvertently installed something on that phone that included malware? How many untrusted people are you also giving your card data to by letting it get into that phone?
How about this instead - the seller can trust ME. He can enter his account information (perhaps an account that is setup in such a way that it only accepts deposits and cannot have remote debits) on MY phone and I will transfer the payment into it. He won't trust me with that? Then why would I trust his phone with my card data?
I came here to say exactly that. I've never seen where a teacher in elementary or secondary schools has been able to select a book. The school itself doesn't generally get to select them either. The books are selected by the school board or their designees (often, in practice, by a group of folks in the school district office). From what I've read here (http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/12/182223/texas-textbooks-battle-is-actually-an-american-war) and on other sites, the books selected by the Texas board of education become a de facto standard for many places. I doubt there are many places - at least in the US - where an individual teacher has much voice at all in selecting a textbook for primary education.
As an owner of a Kindle Fire (coming up on one month) who went into it eyes open knowing it wasn't a fully fledged Android tablet and was more of an in-between product between a e-reader and a full tablet, I don't know that I want a larger form factor. I've also got a Samsung slate (one of the devices MS gave out at their Build event, although I didn't get it from that event). I find the larger tablet is not conducive to using it very long. You want to hold it so that you don't get neck strain from looking down at it (like you would have to do if it was sitting flat on your lap). But it gets tiresome holding the larger devices. So you prop your legs up on an angle and place it on your lap. That gets tiresome too. I actually find now that I have the Fire I don't use the Samsung anymore at all. For light web browsing the Kindle Fire does fine and its form factor is much easier to deal with ergonomically. I went into it thinking that I would probably be happier with the 7' form factor (after using the Samsung device for a few months) and I now know I was right - the Fire is a lot better to hold and use.
Now, what would I want in a next generation device from Amazon? I know it would cost more - and I am fine with that - but add more storage, a front facing camera (I don't need a rear facing one in a device of this size), the Google apps and the Google Market, a GPS - boom, the perfect slate form factor table. Oh, and don't lock it. Provide updates quickly and for 2 years - unlike Motorola, HTC, etc. who don't seem to want to support their phones for more than 6 months.
Well, it is certainly trust based and open for abuse (people can certainly lie in the header). However, what Google should be doing is not providing a P3P header at all. It is only someone who is openly abusing the trust system who would create a P3P header that doesn't contain any P3P information. It is fairly clear that it was done on purpose - to abuse the trust system. Is that system a crap design? Yes. Yes, it is. Should major companies be out there abusing it if they want us to trust them? No. No, they should not. It is pretty clear from this that:
1) We need to call out companies that do this type of thing. Not just with P3P but anytime they abuse the system or game it. They need to be made to understand that a very vocal set of folks will make it known what they are doing and that it is bad for their business to be found gaming trust systems. 2) We need better systems that don't just trust whatever a company says about their intentions with our data.
I've always thought that going with a higher level thinking would be harder to break. Instead of copying letters from an image you have to identify a set of images that is easy for a person but more difficult for a computer. Think children's picture book type deal. Can a computer reliably tell a dog from a cat from a cow?
I think that's a pretty good thought. I'd extend it with perhaps one of those, "which of these things doesn't belong" type of setups (which may have been what you meant). It could then show pictures of a banana, an apple, an orange, some grapes, and a baseball hat. I don't know, perhaps there is a way to solve these easily by computer. But I know the stupid text CAPTCHAs that I had to go through yesterday to sign up for one site were so "obfuscated" that I couldn't read them either and I had to click the button for "show another" about 6 times before I could get one I could actually answer correctly. I'm pretty sure if we were asked to do something like you mention that was higher level we would be able to answer it without having to ask for "show another" over and over hoping to get one that is legible.
If you need to block Chrome installs in your locked down environment you can: http://support.google.com/installer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146164. At one point early in Chrome's life (before the policies existed) we had a desire to block Chrome as it was playing havoc with our authenticated proxy servers (it would just hammer them with failed authentication requests). It plays nice with proxies now, so we don't do anything to either enable or disable Chrome.
You may not be able to put much thrust on one of these objects. Many of them are "rubble piles" so the chemical rocket would just go right through. Others are indeed bound together, but without a high gravity to really cause heating, melting, etc. you still don't have an object that can take much delta-v. Perhaps instead a giant net with a solar sail? I don't know - smarter people than me will need to come up with the answer.
For Chrome users, the LinkPeelr extension works well to pre-decode links for you in a little tooltip window. I've been using it for quite some time and it seems to work pretty well. Saves your from many a rickrolling or goase link. Although I guess when people bounce them through several layers of link shortener it doesn't work for that.
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I have my music (ripped from CDs that I still have and even some cassette tapes - all legal) on Google Music for easy access from work computers, my phone, etc. But I can easily imagine at some time in the future where those songs "disappear" from Google due to some sort of automated "take down" because they don't have "any record" of me purchasing those albums in the 80's and 90's (with cash). The cloud providers will be pressured more and more by the cartels that are in charge of most commercial content creation and distribution (yeah, the MPAA, RIAA and their non-US partner organizations). We definitely have not made it to a place where we - as "consumers" have clear ownership of much of anything. I guess I do own the plastic that makes up the CDs and DVDs I bought years ago. But the content is definitely covered by some sort of license as well as copyright and changing laws and rules may well make your data disappear from cloud sources. The Woz has a good point. Go ahead and use the cloud - but keep copies locally too. There probably will be rights conflicts. There will be outages. There will be meltdowns (whether due to finances or government overreaches like with MegaUpload). Just be careful; that's always good advice.
Is it true that if a company does not reserve the right to sell my details to every advertiser it can, they will be in trouble?
Well that would only be true in a limited sense. For example, with a company like Facebook now that it is public - yes, this could be partially true. A company whose business model is collecting data and selling advertisements based on that data would not make their shareholders happy if they decided not to fully utilize that data. However, if a company had a business model of "we provide secure cloud services" (oh say like Amazon EC2 or Microsoft Azure or something like that, or even like say Dropbox) their shareholders would not like it if the company jeopardized their entire business by not keeping the stored data as confidential as possible. Only as the company started to fail on its own (like dropbox could now that Google Drive and Microsoft Skydrive are attacking their turf) would the shareholders then want to extract all the possible value from the data that they have. They still wouldn't want to do it illegally though as the lawsuits could eat up the shareholder value before they can cash out.
The main risk to data is that it can be subpoenaed by the Government fairly easily. That's really the data risk you have in the US.
I was going to mod you up, but I think I'll comment instead. You are absolutely correct. I know how much we all hate anecdotes and decry how they "aren't data" - but when you add all of them up, they actually do come out to be data. My example: I got a Motorola Droid 1 when they first came out. That was a really nice phone at the time. It was one of the first with Android 2.0 and it got updates to 2.0.1, 2.1, 2.2. Each release made it better. At the time, I would show my wife a new feature that came in with a release (one example was voice recognition for sending texts, etc.) and she would exclaim how my awesome phone was getting better all the time. It was a "Google Experience" phone - which meant that the carrier and manufacturer weren't allowed to screw it all up with bloatware and skins. When it got older, I moved to a Motorola Droid 3. That is a terrible phone. Not enough RAM, a stupid 'Blur' skin that brings bugs with it that don't exist in AOSP, an incredible amount of manufacturer and carrier bloat and crapware. It runs extremely slowly, the camera takes 8 seconds to start and usually crashes taking the first photo. It sucks. It has barely gotten ANY updates. It took over 8 months to get one Blur bug I reported with the dialer fixed. I've only had it since the day it came out - 1 year now - and I want to throw the thing out. I'll tell you - the next one I get will be a Nexus model without any carrier shit or manufacturer shit. No skins, and quick updates.
The carriers haven't figured out that we want these phones to evolve and do more things as the software ecosystem grows. The junk they and the manufacturers put on the phones makes it prohibitive for them put out updates in a timely fashion; they want the phones to be stagnant and always look and run like the day they were purchased. That isn't what a good chunk of us out here want. It will be a Nexus for me - probably when the new ones come out in November. I hate my current phone enough that I will be willing to spend the money to break out of contract early at that point.
Sorry for the rambling anecdote. I am in total agreement that any fragmentation is caused by the vendors lack of ability / agility / desire to get out updates.
Why try to use it as a Facebook replacement? It isn't designed to directly compete. Facebook has a "two way" model (where two people have to agree to be 'friends'). This fosters a community of people who "post to each other"; sort of a friends keeping in touch type of model. Google+ is a one way thing. You put a person in your circles. Then, if they post to public, you get their content in your feed. (Google+ also has the concept of private posts where you can post just to your circles instead of public). However, just circling someone gets you their public content. So Google+ is a great place to get content from content producers, interesting people, etc. For example circle Mike Elgin, Wil Wheaton, Robert Scoble, etc. and you'll get lots of content (I can't vouch for whether you'll like said content). Circle LifeHacker, ArsTechnica, etc. and you get notified of their posts - and can engage with people on Google+ about them without registering accounts on Gawker, Ars, etc. It really is a different model and a different target. I don't view it as a replacement at all.
Oh, and Google Instant (where photos you take automatically upload to a private area) is the killer feature there - just that alone can be so helpful even if you don't circle anyone or use the other features.
Actually it has a lot to do with the isolation model. Both Chrome and IE have a process per tab. Firefox has one process for the whole set of tabs. This means that Firefox is much more likely to go completely non-responsive when - for example - flash is in the middle of crashing (which it is lief to do). In fact, I see Firefox do this fairly often. Chrome and IE on the other hand, use a process per tab which allows them to have better isolation of one tab from another and also allows other tabs to remain responsive when Flash does it thing or some script doesn't run very quickly. (Note that they can't always be 100% responsive when one tab goes south as they do need a process coordinating all the others - but in general they do better than FF does at remaining responsive). Although the memory cost for loading the same DLL, over and over is negligible (simply another handle object), there are resources that can not be shared between processes (due to either OS design, browser protection / isolation scheme, etc.). So the browsers that start a process per tab gain some small security benefit, responsiveness benefit, etc. But they also lose out on the "small memory footprint" since they have to have a copy per process (tab) of the non-shareable resources. Knowing the design, you should absolutely expect there to be a threshold of number of tabs where FF will have less memory use than IE or Chrome.
With something like this, he owns the land, not the island. That may sound stupid, but the island itself is part of Hawaii. For example - if the governor or legislature decides to build a highway across the island, they simply declare eminent domain and seize the land they need (paying for it at some "going rate"). However if he really owned the island, the government couldn't legally do that. So he is like any other landowner. The only difference is that he owns 98% of the land. All of the normal laws about land use still apply. If they have zoning there, it still applies. If they have laws like California does about maintaining free access to certain parts of beaches and waterways, those still apply. That's a far cry from what most people think of when they say someone owns an island. They generally think of it as the person being basically the sovereign there. And that is not true in this case. Larry isn't the king.
But then again, maybe they will steal it - or license it. Can you just imagine a cable ad sales rep talking to a marketing person who is looking to place advertising? We can give you the standard service for $x. But, customers can skip those - and our studies show that your target market mostly skips them. For $2x, we can give you an unskippable ad that your target market will be forced to show. No skipping on those premium ads.
It is interesting how, with complex software, everyone ends up with a different usage pattern. I use the start menu all the time, but as a search and execute. Press the Windows Key (or if your keyboard is one of those "defective" ones that doesn't have a Windows Key press ctrl-esc), and just type. To start Word, Windows Key, w, o, r, d, enter. We've tried to train literally thousands of our users to do it that way. But we do still see some folks slowly clicking their way through the start menu the old slow way.
Well, in the enterprise space you have a huge catch-22. I deal with this at work all the time. Since Oracle / Sun Java doesn't actually do patches (they just do full versions that introduce new features, break existing code, and deprecate other features), you can't deploy it. You have this trade off of known security vulnerabilities vs. enterprise software that won't work with the new versions. You have banks that require you to run Java versions that are a year old in order to move money. You have vendors whose code won't work with the current version of Java - ever (since they take longer to get their code working on new versions that it takes Oracle to release the next new version). We try as hard as we can to get app owners to test - but every last time we ship a new Java versions apps come out of the woodwork with emergency requests to "stop the push". You can't win. Bust people's critical apps and you lose. Allow machines to get owned by insecure versions of Java? Yeah, you lose there too. Oracle needs to figure out how to do security patches that just fix the vulnerabilities and don't introduce (and remove) features. Until they can do that - yes, it is their fault.
I don't have any way of knowing. Apparently the standard is copyrighted and you have to purchase a copy from the site (or have a subscription). Crazy that things that are supposed to be standards can't be viewed (legally) for free.
Well, to be fair they do care. They care a lot about their PR - the same as any other company. And it is a lot easier to say, "we audit these external contract companies twice a year and have given them x months to make changes" than it is to say, "oh, yeah, we treat our employees in China and Brazil like crap. You caught us.". It is much better PR to work with these contract companies than to have your own sweatshops.
It also seems to import some from Internet Explorer. I use Chrome, Firefox, and IE. At work, we have IE by default (and I need it for SharePoint), but I use Firefox for most stuff and Chrome once in awhile. At home, I use Chrome for most stuff, Firefox once in awhile, and I had to use IE to do my taxes (for some reason some add-in in Chrome blocked Turbo Tax from working so I used IE). Since I have Chrome sync my settings - it has imported search engines in my list that are internal to my work network. They can't be used at all at home - but there are three of them in my list on this Windows 8 beta machine (as I type this in Chrome). So it definitely brings them along from machine to machine. I've never used them in Chrome at work - so it had to grab them from IE.
One solution would be to use Google Voice and allow the call to be recorded on Google's system. Then you can access the recording from your phone, your computer, etc. I got my GV number well before you could "port" a number to GV, so I got a new number. I know that is a deal breaker for some folks so look into porting your existing number to GV. It definitely lets you record calls with no problem at all.
I guess I should point out that the service is still mostly USA only.
The "What's Hot" was initially annoying but once they added the "volume sliders" to it so that you could just drop the volume to 0 (which says "Show nothing from What's hot in your stream") the problem went away. They do still have a fairly rapid rate of change on G+.
If you haven't already set that slider, click the "What's Hot" link on the left panel of G+ below the "Stream" section. It will show a volume slider in the center area near the top. Slide that all the way to the left, then click back to your stream. Problem solved!
It turns out that a certain amount of regulation can help correct for that government granted monopoly on frequencies. We probably need more regulation in the mobile market since we aren't going to have a true free market there in the foreseeable future. For example, if we required phones to work on all of the available networks, required contract (subsidized) plans to clearly separate the subsidy from the price of service and sell plans to "bring your own phone" folks at that price of service so that people could jump to whatever carrier they wanted in the US - we would see competition start to actually work as it should.
Yes, most of us use it with VPN. However consider this:
1) Someone with possibly a bit less skill at finding vulnerabilities takes this code and merges it with a social engineering attack.
2) The social engineering attack promises the user some silly thing (maybe extra smiley faces or dancing cats).
3) The user runs the program inside the corporate firewall.
4) All the company's servers begin blue screening as the user's machine spews these malformed RDP packets.
Honestly, that's not too far fetched and some type of blended exploit like this will probably happen. That's why it is important to patch machines for this and not think that a border firewall is going to protect you for long.
It's all well and good to trust the individual. But do you also trust that the individual is a phone security expert? Do you trust that he hasn't inadvertently installed something on that phone that included malware? How many untrusted people are you also giving your card data to by letting it get into that phone?
How about this instead - the seller can trust ME. He can enter his account information (perhaps an account that is setup in such a way that it only accepts deposits and cannot have remote debits) on MY phone and I will transfer the payment into it. He won't trust me with that? Then why would I trust his phone with my card data?
Right, but if you have a cylinder with radius z and height a, its volume is Pizza. Who needs pie when we can have wonderful, tasty, Pizza?
I came here to say exactly that. I've never seen where a teacher in elementary or secondary schools has been able to select a book. The school itself doesn't generally get to select them either. The books are selected by the school board or their designees (often, in practice, by a group of folks in the school district office). From what I've read here (http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/12/182223/texas-textbooks-battle-is-actually-an-american-war) and on other sites, the books selected by the Texas board of education become a de facto standard for many places. I doubt there are many places - at least in the US - where an individual teacher has much voice at all in selecting a textbook for primary education.
As an owner of a Kindle Fire (coming up on one month) who went into it eyes open knowing it wasn't a fully fledged Android tablet and was more of an in-between product between a e-reader and a full tablet, I don't know that I want a larger form factor. I've also got a Samsung slate (one of the devices MS gave out at their Build event, although I didn't get it from that event). I find the larger tablet is not conducive to using it very long. You want to hold it so that you don't get neck strain from looking down at it (like you would have to do if it was sitting flat on your lap). But it gets tiresome holding the larger devices. So you prop your legs up on an angle and place it on your lap. That gets tiresome too. I actually find now that I have the Fire I don't use the Samsung anymore at all. For light web browsing the Kindle Fire does fine and its form factor is much easier to deal with ergonomically. I went into it thinking that I would probably be happier with the 7' form factor (after using the Samsung device for a few months) and I now know I was right - the Fire is a lot better to hold and use.
Now, what would I want in a next generation device from Amazon? I know it would cost more - and I am fine with that - but add more storage, a front facing camera (I don't need a rear facing one in a device of this size), the Google apps and the Google Market, a GPS - boom, the perfect slate form factor table. Oh, and don't lock it. Provide updates quickly and for 2 years - unlike Motorola, HTC, etc. who don't seem to want to support their phones for more than 6 months.
Well, it is certainly trust based and open for abuse (people can certainly lie in the header). However, what Google should be doing is not providing a P3P header at all. It is only someone who is openly abusing the trust system who would create a P3P header that doesn't contain any P3P information. It is fairly clear that it was done on purpose - to abuse the trust system. Is that system a crap design? Yes. Yes, it is. Should major companies be out there abusing it if they want us to trust them? No. No, they should not. It is pretty clear from this that:
1) We need to call out companies that do this type of thing. Not just with P3P but anytime they abuse the system or game it. They need to be made to understand that a very vocal set of folks will make it known what they are doing and that it is bad for their business to be found gaming trust systems.
2) We need better systems that don't just trust whatever a company says about their intentions with our data.
I've always thought that going with a higher level thinking would be harder to break. Instead of copying letters from an image you have to identify a set of images that is easy for a person but more difficult for a computer. Think children's picture book type deal. Can a computer reliably tell a dog from a cat from a cow?
I think that's a pretty good thought. I'd extend it with perhaps one of those, "which of these things doesn't belong" type of setups (which may have been what you meant). It could then show pictures of a banana, an apple, an orange, some grapes, and a baseball hat. I don't know, perhaps there is a way to solve these easily by computer. But I know the stupid text CAPTCHAs that I had to go through yesterday to sign up for one site were so "obfuscated" that I couldn't read them either and I had to click the button for "show another" about 6 times before I could get one I could actually answer correctly. I'm pretty sure if we were asked to do something like you mention that was higher level we would be able to answer it without having to ask for "show another" over and over hoping to get one that is legible.
If you need to block Chrome installs in your locked down environment you can: http://support.google.com/installer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146164. At one point early in Chrome's life (before the policies existed) we had a desire to block Chrome as it was playing havoc with our authenticated proxy servers (it would just hammer them with failed authentication requests). It plays nice with proxies now, so we don't do anything to either enable or disable Chrome.
You may not be able to put much thrust on one of these objects. Many of them are "rubble piles" so the chemical rocket would just go right through. Others are indeed bound together, but without a high gravity to really cause heating, melting, etc. you still don't have an object that can take much delta-v. Perhaps instead a giant net with a solar sail? I don't know - smarter people than me will need to come up with the answer.
For Chrome users, the LinkPeelr extension works well to pre-decode links for you in a little tooltip window. I've been using it for quite some time and it seems to work pretty well. Saves your from many a rickrolling or goase link. Although I guess when people bounce them through several layers of link shortener it doesn't work for that.