I mean, it boils down to "you have collected something which is illegal and invasive to have ... why don't you give it to us and we'll, er, keep it safe."

No, it boils down to "you have told us you take photos from public places of houses, then you have to admit, that you also collect MAC-addresses and SSIDs (which you 'forgot' to mention when we talked about it) and then just two weeks later you tell us, 'whoops, we also collected some mails and some web sessions, sorry' and now we want to see, what you have collected, as we don't see any more reason to trust you".

And in case you wonder, it is possible that Google broke the privacy laws, which in Germany also apply to unencrypted communication and might be liable. Courts here have ruled, that the Apache logfile also violates privacy, as it is not legal to gather privacy related data on people without their consent and without a specific reason justified by legal provisions or necessary to do your business. You also have to delete the data when it is no longer needed.

In any case, should Google actually have broken the law, then the charge for it would 2 to 5 years, but it is not entirely clear, if the law applies, because you have to prove intent and who knows how long this could drag on.

I have an idea, if you have a small child, don't let them wonder alone in the mountains. I know, responsibility isn't really "hip" these days, but seriously it isn't hard. Cougars aren't really interested in people as food most of the time, and they REALLY aren't interested if there is a full sized adult around. Further, if you live where there are wild cats, you should make sure they have enough food. My grandparents feed the bobcats in their area so that they won't eat the house cats and dogs. They specifically keep chickens on the property for this purpose. It works great, considerably better than trapping, and it doesn't cost much to keep chickens when half your neighbors are farmers.

They hope to save in the future. As a lot of the costs are consolidating their terrible IT landscape it is not clear, what a migration to the latest MS offering would have costs, either. It is not as if it would have been free either, who knows how many of the macros would have broken down when run in a current version of Excel, who knows how many old programs might stop working on Vista (and be it due to a stupid installer). It would have been cheaper, at least probably because a lot would have still worked, but when they write that they found 21 different Windows setups with differing patch levels and security settings, I am not so sure if it really would have been cheaper.

What they probably hope is, that the next migration will be cheaper, the OSS they use won't cost them to upgrade, the costs of the upgrade in work to be done by their IT department are probably not very different when upgrading a Linux solution from a MS solution. But all the work to get their systems closer to a common base might actually make the next big roll out simpler and therefor cheaper.

Sorry, but that argument is bogus. If we assume, that the format of the container does not change mid stream, then I need one page header to configure the decoder and all following packets will only be checked to make sure we are still at the same version. The cost difference is minimal. And as long as no new format is out (like currently) you won't have any cost at all. If that cost is even of any significance, I would be surprised if it would be measurable as the time difference is tiny compared with the time it takes to decompress audio/video and all that is necessary to make it audible/visible.

You misunderstood my argument. I don't mean to have two headers, one saying "use the last version you found in the stream" and one which defines the version. Instead I mean to say, that if the bit is 0 it says it is the first version of the file format. Currently there is no other version. If another version of the format is introduced the bit is set to 1 and meaning a decoder which doesn't support the new version will know, that it is pointless to try, as it won't be able to understand the format (because if it was compatible, where was the point to change it?).

But a newer version of the decoder can see, that it is not the first version and knows, that in the new version of the format, a field with the exact version (2, 3, 4, ...) can be found in a different location. It could again only be a single bit, but that would probably be a big problem, as with every version you need to look in more places, but you could add it immediately after the first bit giving you 10 (in binary) as the version identifier. Obviously that scheme gets expensive if many versions are needed, but as time has shown until now no new version was needed, so it is something happen rarely.

But you will still get the full version info in every packet, streaming is the same as now. You won't loose anything if you use only one bit, as it only serves as marker to define, that if is the first version of the file format or a later version.

in order to write individual 1/0, after all they had a solution that worked 40-50 years ago.

Sorry, but that is simply not true. Not even with MFM you could control the exact layout of 0 and 1. A 1 is signaled by a level change, the zero just keeps the last level. There are limits on how long you can go on without a level change (the level change is used to synchronize the clock). So even that stone old technology wouldn't work in the specified way, after a certain "number" (rather length depending on the clock of the system) of one kind of magnetic domain a change has to occur. And as long as the system doesn't have an alternate system to get the clock information, you will always run into the same issue. You could perhaps use one platter as "clock platter", but if that would work with the heads, I have no clue. In the past I doubt anybody would have used something like that as it wastes a lot of space.

It is not in the header, the 8-bit version field is in every single page. As according to the post a page is mostly 64K due to a strange length encoding, you send the version very, very often. I don't see any reason, why the version would have to change in the middle of a file in any case. And honestly, would you write a decoder taking that into account, if the probability of stumbling onto such a file was currently 0 (due to there being only one version) and very, very low in the future? That means it just adds to the size of the file.

The second reason is even simpler, you only need one bit to tell the current format from the future formats. As there hopefully will be a good reason for a future version the page header will probably be different, so I can add a version field there when I at least found one reason why I need it, no? That way I need one bit now and can still have different versions later.

I wrote a story once where this was done (here. I kind of got tired of so many SF stories and movies solving traumatic injury with some sort of magical "healing tank" (maybe with effortless "nanobots") that I wondered to myself what sort of effort would really be needed to put someone together from just a bunch of pieces.

The closest similar stories I found were the beginning of "Neon", by Harlan Ellison in 1973, and an early chapter of "Count Zero" by William Gibson.

There are a number of "Press" parking spots in NYC. A large number of people get the passes for free parking and get maps detailing the locations of these spots. You are not allowed to park in these spots without either the press license plate or a placard in your window, if you do have either of those, free parking.

i never expected you to commit a crime. if i know that you expect me to commit crimes, why would i want to be involved in any way with you?

the assumption of a society made ENTIRELY of criminals is the first step to justifying fascism. nothing could be more unamerican.

When I read that they were using 299,221 gallons of water, I assumed that they lived on some giant estate. But if you look at the picture of their home, it is a smallish, modest house. Sort of a lot of lawn, but not really.

Unless they have a huge backyard, it sounds like they were pouring water onto their lawn *far* in excess of what it actually needed. (BOTE and a little guesswork yields 10gal/sqft/mo, which is a *lot* of water.)

You have one little problem, the program has to know, which instructions cancel out. So you probably have a list of pairs in there somewhere. As soon as that is known, the program can be normalized back to the "core code". The other problem is, that you would have to be very careful to remove the canceling instructions in the virus before you rescramble it or the size would quickly get prohibitively large.

The randomly chosen registry keys won't help you, you have to get the thing to be executed, so you have to write something in a fixed number of keys. That should be enough to detect it.

The "scrambled" server key is a tactic Conficker is using. It generates and queries a large number of domains, but obviously the sequence has to be in the code somewhere so a server can be setup which has the right name at the time the thing tries to connect to it. Just scrambling the address in the "client" is useless, if there is no server.

The web server says "hey, here's a cookie you can store for me, if you like, and send it back later to assist me. Do with it as you please." The user's browser either ignores it, or later sends a copy. If this isn't consent, I don't know what the hell is. So the HTTP protocol itself already ensures that all websites are compliant.

I would so like to see you argue like that before a judge. Do you honestly believe that a computer can agree to something for its user without the user knowing about it in a way the law would accept? Sorry, but I don't believe that it is possible and I have a hard time to believe that something along the way of "but the user could have changed his browser settings so he gets a chance to agree" would work either.

For international users there is also often the problem that some of the questions make no sense. I never was to anything I could compare to a high school as the system is different here. So the number of questions is even smaller. I also saw a system you had to select two questions. From two lists of 4 non overlapping questions. So even there reducing the number of possibilities.

But what really annoys me is, when one of those things only accepts characters and perhaps numbers and even limits the length (I think Yahoo Mail did that, but I am not sure, I just filled the field with random stuff and forgot it).

Wennebostel is just the name of the village. See Wedemark.