Assuming that's a normal "US" billion, and assuming it's a journal of historical data going back a few years, I don't think it's unreasonable to think there could be information in there on a couple of hundred thousand people each of whom has been track for an average of at least 6 months. So, approximately and with some guesses, that's around 55 records per prisoner per day. 1 update every 30 minutes? That sounds about right, maybe a little on the low side if anything.

What is surprising is that they were running some sort of database process that maxxed out at 2 billion records, and that it just stopped once it hit that limit rather than failing over to a backup process. But then, this is a government IT contract, so maybe it's not too surprising.

Yes, I believe you missed the part where the disease he has causes the muscles in his body to stop working. It's a fairly safe bet the muscles that work his lungs or digestive system... or pretty much any other part of his body... will stop working before this heart fails. Someone with this disease is "lucky" to make it to twenty.

There are still a lot of people that use dialup - 30 million, by one study I found (heck, my parents were still dialing into AOL until this year), and it's still a recognized symbol of "going online". That sound won't be going away for quite a while.

Someone always has access to the data, and they're going to look at it at some point. The expectation that no one will be nosey when they're bored one day is just naivety (or stupidity). In this case the motivation is a bit creepier but on other websites people will be looking through "private" data when they're bored - be it Facebook messages, Twitter DMs, GMail emails, or Slashdot private journals.

If you want it to remain secure and unread by other people, don't put it where other people might access it.

Honestly, Twitter traffic is fairly useless for anyone as the visitors tend to be one-time flybys who spend less than a few seconds on your endsite and just end up lowering your time on site and raising your bounce metrics. If you want engagement you better be using some other network to get your funnel working the way you want.

Going by my own experience I'd say that isn't unique to Twitter traffic at all. Most social network traffic tends to be interested in a single content element rather than exploring the site. It up to you as the site owner to grab their attention well enough to change what the user does. That's down to designing the site in a way that interests users within a couple of seconds, pushing relevant items, and so on. Ignoring the traffic because it's not already doing what you want seems a bit silly - the users are coming to your site, which is half the battle, so why not try to engage with them?

Nearly three and a half million years of humans using tools, and I can't even put up a shelf. If you want evidence that evolution isn't all it's cracked up to be, there it is.

"You can't expect everyone to have working technical knowledge in cryptographic systems and anonymity."

At this stage of the game, why would they have to have that knowledge? PGP was almost point-and-click easy ten years ago. With all the captchas and logins and general interface fluffery folks have to deal with these days online, how much more troublesome would it be to incorporate a key generator into the process of creating a new account somewhere?

If you want to get paid for what you do then charge for it. I don't mean money necessarily. There are lots of ways of getting paid. But charge something.

In this case the reciprocal amount of work people are demanding from Canonical is a form of payment. If you want to claim it's not "fair" that one company is doing more for a project than another you've got to set up the system to stop them, otherwise you have no grounds for your complaint. You can't set up a stall with a big sign saying "Free, please take what you want, no need to give anything back in return" and then moan when someone takes you up on your offer.

For an engineer working on the sort of massively complex computing problems that face the likes of Google he is entirely correct that the likes of Java and C++ are over-engineered and unnecessary for what he faces. That's spot on (I imagine, I'm not a Google engineer).

But most of today's computing problems aren't like that. The software industry has exploded in the past couple of decades, with close to every single business now demanding bespoke development in the form of websites, desktop apps, etc.

Those tasks are carried out by "code monkey" level people. People who need the over-engineering of a modern language because they're not really capable of writing code anywhere near the processor layer. They're puzzle solvers - people who glue together cookie-cutter libraries with the minimum of thinking. The people who use the languages Pike is decrying aren't the ones who're writing the frameworks and libraries that make it all so complicated, they're the ones who have to use libraries because they can't write code to do what the library does for them. It's hand-holding. It's necessary. Maybe not in the offices of Google, but definitely in the offices of "Joe Random Web Design Inc".

A sarcasm detector would be really useful.

What the update means is that they've relaxed the application vetting so apps that use the geolocation API aren't scrutinised as much as they used to be. Apple are telling users that apps can, and will, collect and store your location data, and that they're not going to stop them even if there's no reason for the app to be doing it. The app will still ask you if you want to share your location as it always has done.

Who tells you that might be happening if you have an Android phone? Or if you install a browser that enables the geolocation services of HTML 5 on your PC (eg http://html5demos.com/geo )? No one. They don't have to. They can't really, because there isn't a "gatekeeper" controlling it all.

I've printed all my private data on a giant sign that I've put on top of my house. If you read it you can expect a visit from the authorities. Please, while I might not have bothered to secure my data, I do expect you to respect my privacy.

Localized problem? Maybe now, long after the fact, but at the time...

"Four hundred times more radioactive material was released than had been by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. The fallout was detected over all of Europe except for the Iberian Peninsula"

-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_disaster

And as for the worst disaster ever...

"The suck-and-salvage technique was developed in desperation across the Arabian Gulf following a spill of mammoth proportions -- 700 million gallons -- that has until now gone unreported, as Saudi Arabia is a closed society, and its oil company, Saudi Aramco, remains owned by the House of Saud. But in 1993 and into '94, with four leaking tankers and two gushing wells, the royal family had an environmental disaster nearly sixty-five times the size of Exxon Valdez on its hands..."

-- http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/gulf-oil-spill-supertankers-051310

Which doesn't mean this isn't the worst disaster the Western Hemisphere has seen, which is very likely will be by the time it's done.