I've never done drugs in my life, nor have I ever possessed any drugs.

In college, I had a pretty nice car. The local police stopped me for failing to use my blinker. When I rolled down the window, they said they smelled marijuana and used that as an excuse to tear apart my car without my consent.

Unfortunately, this experience has lead me to distrust the police, in particular when they say they smell drugs. There's no evidence or reproducible test to corroborate the cop's senses. Sure, they can swab the vehicle, but they'll tear up your seats first (and in my state, at the time at least, there aren't convictions for the residue, so there's no point in actually swabbing.)

I happen to think it would be really cool to have a secret compartment. I think they're technologically nifty, and it would be a reasonably safe place to store things that I don't want to be stolen.

It may be that the plaintiffs are Google users, but what about people who send mail to gmail users and who didn't agree to have their mail monitored? Some of those people live in two-party consent states.

Can you explain more about this service you have? Do you just mean Google Apps for Domains?

FOIA does not require that you make it easy to comply with FOIA requests. Nothing in there says you have to have globally searchable e-mail or document storage, in fact. And the costs to fulfill the request are paid by the requestor, not the agency. By using an archaic, difficult to use system, they can legitimately make the costs of fulfilling FOIA requests prohibitively high. Thus they follow the letter of the law, though not the spirit.

Chrome has always maintained a stable extension API, and have largely stuck with it (I'm not aware of any deviations, but I don't discount the possibility that they've existed.) Also, because they never exposed a version number in a prominent way, we haven't had web developers targeting versions of Chrome.

Firefox maintained a stable extension API, but then they also hosted third-party extensions which used unstable interfaces. By hosting them, they gave legitimacy to the unstable interfaces. With every Firefox version update, a handful of my extensions would break. When they first started the accelerated versioning, it was horrible. Now things have stabilized a bit, so there's that. Additionally, I spread my annoyance to both Mozilla and to Web devs when there's a "target" version of Firefox and later versions won't work with a website. For the web devs, "Dammit, write to the standard!" For Moz, why are they changing their rendering engine so much that it breaks compatibility with existing webpages?

But mostly, I think people just gripe at change. They didn't (seem) to complain that Chrome doesn't prominently display the version number, but they balk when Firefox decides to start doing that. Some of that may have been because of the issues related to versioning in the past--I don't know.

Newsblur has a mobile app for Android and iPhone. I'd rather just a good mobile site, but it's better than nothing.

Interesting. I'll admit that I just searched long enough to find the blogspot post that I originally saw.

That statement doesn't make it clear to me that they are supporting CalDAV for the future, though--just that they've worked with the developers responsible for 98% of their CalDAV traffic. This is consistent with their previous statement--that CalDAV developers can get whitelisted. It sounds like iCal probably won't be affected (surely Apple is in that 98%) but it looks like new applications will be unable to use that protocol.

Google's dropping support for CalDAV which I think was the primary supported way of syncing with iCal.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/03/a-second-spring-of-cleaning.html

The trick is that "innocents" can get caught in the blast. One of the reasons that we strive for herd immunity is because the vaccines aren't 100% effective.

Well if I understand it correctly, this will actually lead to less revenue for the U.S. Government. They are not instituting a federal Internet sales tax--they are forcing merchants to collect sales tax that is due to the individual state in which the purchaser resides. Aside from the problems this will cause for smaller businesses on the Internet, this will increase the Federal deduction that individuals can claim due to payment of state taxes. Higher federal deductions == less money for the feds (though almost certainly more for the individual states.)

I always wonder how people run across crazy sequences of button presses that trigger bugs while on live hardware. This reminds me of the various iPhone lock-screen bypasses.

With video poker, the house edge is built in to the device. The edge is that the payout schedule beats the odds of getting the hand.

In this case, the machine was defective, which generally voids all plays (this is usually written on the machines.)

The defect was that a player could trick the machine into thinking more money had been wagered than actually had been. This means that the payout schedule could be higher than the odds of getting the hand.

The guy shouldn't be charged with a crime, but the casino almost certainly has the right to demand the money back (unless they failed to post the warning about voiding plays.)

Do you blame the hacker who constructs the packet which causes the machine to operate in a way that it wasn't designed (deleting the database, giving higher level access than desired, etc?)

I don't know why it would, given that Apple devices in general are terrible at time.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/01/apple-iphone-4-alarm-problems-worldwide-clock-app-alarm-broken-3-days-in-a-row.html

But what I want from an iWatch is the ability to access Siri, control music, and receive haptic alerts (since I often don't feel my phone vibrate in my pocket.) Two of those three are available on the Metawatch or Pebble, though the music control is really not great AFAICT.

There are still hardware improvements to be made. The cameras, for example. The battery, too, though that will take an industry-wide tech improvement.