The only thing that's changed is that I've made a point of getting away from free services and moving over to for-pay services with revenue streams that I understand, since I know they won't disappear in a year or two when they fail to successfully monetize their users or decide it's not worth it any more. Plus, I know how they're monetizing me: I'm putting cash directly into their pockets, without any of the funny business involving targeted ads, opting me in to stuff against my wishes, or selling my data to other companies.

Feedbin is the RSS reader to use. I tried Feedly, but it didn't allow .opml exports of feeds, and the last thing I wanted to do was lock myself into a new service right after leaving the last one. Feedbin is snappy, regularly updated with nice enhancements, and can be accessed from a number of clients. Absolutely love it, and the price is pretty good too.

I also switched from Gmail to FastMail. Again, it's a case of knowing where the money is coming from and getting more control over how my data is being used as a result. It's been a great change so far, and I've had far less issues using it once I got it all set up.

Wish I had mod points, since AC has it right. If you check the document attached with the article, page 26 has the actual invitation itself, and it clearly says the event is in D.C., rather than in Sochi, and there's no mention at all of a VIP box or anything of the sort. This story went from "Comcast cordially invited them to an opening ceremony event at the Newseum" in the actual invitation to "Comcast invited them to an event for the Sochi opening ceremony" in the article to "Comcast invited them to a VIP box at Sochi" in the \. summary.

It's a non-story. Just regular schmoozing. Though the fact that regular schmoozing is a non-story might be a story in and of itself...

Other than the issue I mentioned with other signals commandeering CEC, DPMS has all of the same issues I already enumerated:
1) It's not consistently carried to the TV if there are devices in between.
2) It's oftentimes not obvious to the user that it exists or how to enable it.
3) It isn't available with every form of cabling.
4) Not all TVs support it.

So, yes, a solution exists, but as with the ones I mentioned, it only covers some situations, not all, and that's exactly why screensavers still exist, since they cover all situations.

Perjury is a felony in the US, carrying potentially serious jail time as a sentence. As such, it's not a civil matter that you need to be involved in; the criminal courts handle this stuff. Just let the courts or states' attorneys know that the guy is engaging in perjury, give them evidence of it, and they'll either take care of it or not. It costs you very little, but potentially costs them quite a bit.

I thought most of them got the washboard abs and whatnot because of their super powers. Consider:
1) Captain America: he was a wuss until he was given the serum that made him a super-human.
2) Spider-Man: a nerd that got pushed around until he was bitten by a weird spider.
3) Batman: used his "Has Gobs of Cash" superpower to get extensive training.

Isn't it obvious? The devices outputting screensavers can't turn off the screen in most cases, that's why. And since they're the ones controlling the content, they're the ones best-suited to tell when burn-in might become an issue. Putting up a screensaver is effectively their only means of recourse.

With HDMI cables carrying CEC commands (e.g. your TV telling your audio/video receiver to power on), it's possible this situation may change in the future. For now, however, not all devices support CEC (which, incidentally, also goes by a variety of brand names, making things confusing for consumers), and many users hook up their devices indirectly (e.g. A/V switch or AVR), so the CEC commands wouldn't reach the intended device anyway. There's also the issue that Monoprice and others sell IR-over-HDMI kits that commandeer the CEC channel in the HDMI cable in order to get IR signals from your remote control into a closet somewhere else.

Long story short, there's no way for a device like a Fire TV to turn off the actual TV itself reliably. Some of the time? Sure. But with certainty in every case? Definitely not. That's why screensavers are still used.

Seems like you answered your own question.

Besides which, the flaw may be ephemeral. Ideally, the flaw would be done in such a way that when the compiler tried to recompile itself (e.g.updating it with new features), it would re-add the flaw to its own binary, perpetuating the cycle. But the bad guys don't have to do it that way. They could just as easily leave out that code and only allow the flaw to exist in one version of the compiler. Whenever the compiler gets updated, the backdoor logic in the compiler would be gone, along with anyone's best chance for noticing something was wrong, but the software that was compiled using that tainted compiler would continue to exist for years and years. It's an attack that cleans up after itself, effectively.

The TL;DR version for folks who haven't seen it before or don't want to read it (which you really should do): just because the source is trustworthy doesn't mean the binaries are. The process to accomplish this sort of attack is fairly straightforward:
1) Modify, say, the compiler's source code so that it adds backdoors to some/all of the code it compiles.
2) Compile it, then replace the clean binary for the compiler with this new, tainted binary.
3) Revert the changes to the compiler's source code, erasing any evidence of wrongdoing.

By itself, that doesn't create a backdoor, but anything compiled using the tainted binary could potentially have a backdoor secretly added, even though the source code for both that code and the compiler would appear to be perfectly clean. The problem could be very hard to discover or pin down as well, only manifesting when a particular file is getting compiled, or even a particular line of code.

I think most of us are already familiar with this sort of attack, but it's worth repeating, since it's exactly the sort of thing that Microsoft's "Transparency Centers" don't address, and exactly the sort of thing we'd be expecting a government to be doing.

https://www.linkedin.com/pub/m...

She provides plenty of reasons for the research there. Moreover, the article says nothing about the Smithsonian paying for this research. She just happens to be a world expert on these squirrels and is working there, likely because they have a collection of preserved specimens that she is using in her studies. Given that the Smithsonian is providing their collection of preserved specimens from this species for her research, I wouldn't be surprised if what the universities and research institutions tied to this effort have to offer are the funds to engage in the expeditions. You'll be pleased to know that neither George Mason University nor the research station based in Spain are US federal government institutions.

Mind you, I'm not attempting to make any sort of political statement with this post, I'm merely seeking to point out the lack of a factual basis for most of your assertions.

Wait...82F? Did you mean 92F or 102F? 82F is a pleasant Spring day where I'm at. The A/C would probably kick on at some point, but only for a few minutes each day. I'm enjoying the fact that where I'm at now our highs are only in the 90s right now, since last year at this time we had six weeks straight of highs over 100F.

Even when I lived in the only tropical zone in the entire continental US (i.e. south Florida), it only got into the 90s during summer, and despite the high humidity, the breezes tended to be pretty nice down there, so it was never too bad. Not to mention the near-daily rain showers.

I understand why places like Houston have the highest energy bills in the nation, given the combination of insane humidity (it's known as "The Bayou City" for a reason) and high temperatures (100F is normal in summer), but if you're only dealing with 82F, you have nothing to complain about. If you allow yourself to do so, you can acclimate to temperatures like that VERY easily.

I agree, these users were blaring their stereos, but I disagree with your characterization of Google's actions. They didn't just hear what was said passively. What they were doing was actively listening to, recording, and transcribing everything that they heard. That's a night and day difference, and that's why people are offended. If I was offended every time my WiFi traffic got picked up by someone or something else, I'd be a raging inferno of umbrage, given that WiFi devices do that all the time, but simply disregard the stuff they receive that isn't intended for them, much as we might filter out other conversations when we're in public and talking with someone else.

If you go back and listen to executives from the music or film industries talk about when they started to get approached by folks from Apple, Amazon, or others from the digital era, you'll hear similar stories. There was a lot of distrust between the sides, and what was needed was someone who could bridge the gap, speak both their languages, and help each side appreciate the problems of the other. People in many other industries think that technology is magical and that anything is possible, so they won't accept excuses or explanations to the contrary. People in Silicon Valley have a tendency to think that everything else is trivial, and fail to recognize the value in doing things in a different way...kinda like physicists.

This isn't about arrogance or bad attitudes. This is simply about two companies from different worlds, trying to get on the same page, and it's no surprise that they'd have these sorts of difficulties. They'll eventually start talking to each other, it's just a matter of when and under what conditions.

Does it matter what the source is, so long as it presents a testable claim?

Besides which, their argument was mischaracterized in the summary. It's not a rebuttal of the ROI period, which is what the summary seems to suggest. Rather, they took issue with the overly-broad statement that seemed to suggest that each turbine would replace the need for traditional power sources for over 500 homes, which is, as far as I can tell, an accurate claim. Obviously, there are lulls in the wind, so while it may on average provide that much power, the lulls would mean that the traditional sources will still need to be used. What was left unsaid is that they would be used in lesser quantities.

Yes, it's a "well duh" sort of thing, but it's also accurate. And if you don't think it is, feel free to disprove them. It wasn't exactly a complicated argument, nor a particular meaningful one, but that's also a bit of a "well duh" sort of thing, given the source. ;)

You got some stuff right, but you also loaded in a load of simply untrue stuff. Where to start?

Aperture hadn't been updated since 2012. They merely announced that they won't be updating it any longer so that people know to not bother waiting around. It's been poorly supported from the start. No one was left in the dust here. Lightroom has been doing the same job better for years now.

Spaces? It's still around as a part of the bigger Mission Control feature. They even made it more powerful than it used to be, since you can now control Spaces on a per-monitor basis, though they admittedly did remove the ability to configure them in a two-dimensional virtual space.

With Pages (and other iWork apps), it auto-saves as you go along, as you said, but what you neglected to mention (or perhaps were unaware of) is that it auto-saves non-destructively. Even if you don't have Time Machine enabled, OS X keeps local backups of files that it auto-saves, allowing you to rollback to earlier versions at any time, just by clicking on the name in the title bar of the document's window. Until you actually go and explicitly save the file yourself, those auto-saves won't destroy anything, and even then, they generally won't immediately, since it'll hang onto them for awhile. Moreover, when the new versions of Pages, Keynote, and Numbers came out, Apple knew some users wouldn't like the "upgrade" (myself included), so they left the old versions installed, meaning that you can keep using those documents as you always have if that's what you want.

And yeah, Apple has never been particularly friendly towards the enterprise. That hasn't changed. Their focus is consumers, for better or worse, and that means changing their software with changing expectations from consumers, who, as we all know, are a rather fickle bunch.

Not really, since that's an orthogonal issue, though I could have phrased it better to make that distinction clearer. I was getting at the concept as a whole, that is, what rights a person even possesses, rather than how it's put into practice on the ground or in what cases it may be infringed upon lawfully. I have no expectation or belief that my rights will always be respected, even if I rightfully possess them.

To restate the line you quoted in a way that hopefully makes my point clearer:

Basically, I was trying to assert that everyone has a right to privacy, and that if anyone disagreed with that assertion, that their disagreement would disintegrate in the case that the person was actually innocent. That said, just because someone has a right to privacy doesn't mean that they're exempt from lawful searches conducted by the government. As you said, if I don't look innocent, that may be something that comes into consideration, but, once again, that's a separate issue. I was merely pointing out to the OP why it is that an innocent person may want to take steps to protect their own privacy. Obviously, if I look less-than-innocent, I should have even more reasons to do so. ;)