I just saw it in SFO a couple weeks ago. Never knew what it was until now... I always figured it was somebody's cell phone acting as an ad-hoc access point, and maybe it didn't work because the GPRS signal was weak or something. That's really stupidly mislabeled. I can see how they would have wanted to "make networking easier" between Windows machines, but why not label it as that instead of like an advertisement or a honeypot?

That's interesting, thanks for posting, although I wonder if you have the details about LCDs right. I didn't know 3D movie glasses are circularly polarized but had wondered why they don't act like regular polarized material.

I just put on a pair of Real 3D glasses; looking at my LCD seems to change the color balance: if my head is straight it's fairly normal, if I tilt to the right it looks warmer, if I tilt to the left the blue starts to dominate more. It's not an absolute blockout of some colors, just a shift in the proportion of them, which seems to have its max effect if my head is tilted about 45 degrees.

I bet they will do a better job. Most of what they do turns out pretty good. But it's getting a little scary that we depend on Google for so many net infrastructure pieces now. This will be just one more. I can imagine a future in which something goes wrong and the gov't would have to step in because of the risk to society if some of their most critical services were allowed to fail. Or, in which Google is broken up after having monopolized too many industries.

I'd say the "best format" needs journaling absolutely, and preferably also extended attributes which work consistently between the two OS's, hardlinks and symlinks working consistently, long filenames, case sensitive, separate metadata for creation time and modification time, suitability to be used on a USB flash drive as well as a hard disk, and ability to mount it in Windows too. Haven't found any such mythical beast yet. If somebody would just finish the journaling support for Linux HFS+....

Here's a commercial $39.95 implementation of ext2/3/4 for MacOS. No idea if it's actually any good. I'd really like to hear if someone here has tried it, because I might like to use it for a shared /home between Linux and MacOS if it would work. I tried hfs+ (or it was it just hfs?) without journaling, and the dang thing needs to be fsck'd nearly every time I booted the alternate OS, which wastes a lot of time. Particularly, when shutting down Linux it's unmounted cleanly (such that Linux is happy if I just boot back into Linux again), but MacOS is still not happy and does the fsck in the background for 15 minutes or so before I can access it again. Sometimes it fails too, and has to be done manually from Disk Utility. Quite annoying.

Seems to be an oldie. Is it better than HFS? More reliable or higher performance? Still requires the occasional fsck right?

Just to name them with the date & time, I routinely use exiftool for that. I copy the files from the camera's memory card and rename them at the same time.

http://ecloud.org/index.php?title=Organizing_digital_photos#Script:_get-photos_.28cut_to_the_chase.29

However the OP seems to be asking for more than that. Of course you can use exiftool to edit any metadata tags that JPEG supports but it's not a GUI. Would be easy enough to write a GUI which uses exiftool to do the actual editing.

to protect all those jobs.

They are missing the communication with fellow humans, and the feeling of connectedness, knowing what's going on. You could do a study in which older folks try to avoid talking to anyone at all for a day, and try to also avoid any kind of information intake (newspapers, magazines, TV, etc.) and probably get similar results.

Reminds me of the hue and cry when I was a kid about how grocery stores got so dependent on barcode scanners and cash registers that they couldn't sell stuff at all if the power went out. Apparently in my parents' day they would have gotten by with a pad of paper and a pencil in that kind of situation.

Of course doing without the net once in a while might be good as a survival exercise, kindof like power outage preparedness...

Firefox and webkit and apache are extremely popular. Why not introduce a new security model, just for that combination at first, in which the browser holds the private key, encrypts the submission with it, and sends the public key to the server with which to encrypt the response, on top of using a server-side key at the same time? And augment that with a chain-of-trust model in which you can see how many of your friends (people you know personally and trust) have accepted that particular server-side cert as valid. Or any other such techniques which I don't understand because I'm not a security wonk. :-) Anyone with some clout in the community (Mozilla and/or Apache forefathers) could easily make something like this happen, since free software projects are in control of both ends. In that light I don't see why this wasn't fixed long ago.

"Just use SSH" could also be an answer for the web as well, but maybe it's better not to put all our eggs in one basket.