The last thing I need, if I'm injured in a way that disfigures my face, is a car that won't let me start it to drive to the emergency room.

That's right up there with the federal experiment, back in the '60s or so, with mandating seatbelt and seat weight sensors that interlocked with the starter, so you can't start it if all the passengers aren't belted in.

(I, and about five of my friends, were very luck my car dated from before that mandate, the time we were visiting a friend who worked in a trainyard, my car stalled across a track, a train came {slowly but inexorably} around the sharp curve, and my right-front passenger unbelted in preparation to bail if I couldn't get it going again. We didn't have enough time to all bail ...)

So apple is retiring a photo editing software product and expects their customers to switch to their cloud photo editing service. They're replacing images stored locally with images stored externally.

Ignoring Snowden and the NSA for the moment, let's look at LEGAL seizure of your pictures to be used as evidence by government agencies, in rule enforcement, investigation, and criminal prosecution.

Not only are files under your physical control y'harder to get to physically than those transmitted over the Internet and stored in a vendor's server farm, they're also on better legal ground. The Supreme Court seems bent on treating electronic files, under your control, just like paper files locked in a safe at home. Just three days ago they ruled that police can't even search information stored on a cellpone carried by an arrestee without first coming up with probable cause and obtaining a warrant.

The last I heard, though, they considered information you stored on some vendor's servers to have been disclosed - that you have "no expectation of privacy" with respect to it. The police can go fishing through it just by asking, without jepoardizing prosecutions that result from what they fiind. Even if the third party cloud service demands paperwork rather than just giving access, a company like Apple has far less interest in protecting your data from fishing expeditions than you do.

Given the rat's nest of laws in the US, the prevalance of false or mistaken prosecutions, and the deliberate use of the legal and tax systems to punish those disliked by those in power (at all levels), I'd think nio sane person would put any personal information onto a cloud service (without at least encrypting it locally first with a key unknown to the service), let alone in a form that could be manipulated on the service. Photos are a particular risk, for a number of reasons I don't think I need to enumerate.

So I'd think that, both for personal use and for professional photographers, the substitution of a cloud service for a local tool working on locally stored data, would be unacceptable.

The same way as when cable TV required a physical cable run to your home

Cable TV today does not require a physical cable run to your home?

B-)

The "when" referred to "... the days when all a cable-TV hookup carried was TV". That was when the original Community Antenna TV decisions and legislation - leading up to THIS case - took place.

In other words, you're saying they broke the law by complying with the law.

Close.

I'm saying the court majority said that. I'm with Scalia and most techies on this: It's up to the legislature to write it so it's clear, and the courts to enforce it the way it's written, "technicalities" and all. If there's any ambiguity giving wiggle room, the courts should ALWAYS use the interpretation that is most favorable to the defendant.

In Aereo, the Court ruled that Aereo was largely similar to those CATV operators - it took the broadcast signal off the air and distributed it to multiple viewers, essentially simultaneous.y.

And that receiving and carrying it separately for each customer (using a separte tiny antenna and cheap-in-quantity integrated circuit digital radio receiver) was a transparent workaround that attempted to use an interpretation of the letter of the law to violate its intent).

If it requires a login/password and a user account, how is that "publicly transmitting"?

The same way as when cable TV required a physical cable run to your home (back in the days when all a cable-TV hookup carried was TV).

Photons need to have gamma-ray energies before they can create virtual electro-positron pairs. Visible light simply does not have enough energy to do this.

No, they don't

They need those energies to create REAL, PERSISTENT electron-positron pairs, which fly away and last until they interact with something else - maybe centuries or eons later - that changes them to some other particle.

Virtual particle pairs, as long as their lifetime is less than a time that puts the product of the "error' in energy with the lifetime of the error under the uncertainty principle limit, can be created by photons that are far too small to create free particles. In fact, if the lifetime of the virtual particle pair is short enough, you don't even need the photon.

Something like this would be a nice coating for:
  - Windshields
  - glasses
  - solar panels
Unless, of course, it attracts grease...

Do you really think the problem in 1984 was the telescreens?

Telescreens are "an enabling technology". I see no reason to leave them, and thus any hypothetical government-or-other spy, enabled in my personal space.

I think most of us geeks grew up terrified of the very idea of the Orwellian Telescreen. However, it's not the technology that's evil (many of us have plenty of devices with a camera integrated with a display), but the threat of its use without consent.

My latest laptop came with a built-in, user-facing camera.

I immediately put a piece of opaque electrica tape over it - even before swapping out the hard disk for a fresh one and installing Linux.

The tape isn't coming off until I have a removable shutter to take its place.

if you bring back the passenger pigeon in some sort of wildlife preserve and they outgrow their food supply, how are you going to get the flock out of there?

You DO know that they fly, don't you?

Like in flocks of millions over continental distances?

Back in ny early days as a lab techie I was running the optical processor that did the image-making post-processing for what I believe was the first "flyby" / "rotating target" synthetic aperture radar. (No significant intellectual contributions: I was running the machinery, rather than contributing to its design. Adjusting lenses, exposing and developing film, etc.)

Back in those days the computers weren't up to the amount of crunch needed. (This technique is essentially a two-dimensional fourrier transform with tweaks.) So we used laser light and lenses for the fourier transform, and photographic film for the input modulation and output capture. The original data was captured using a one-dimensional CRT with a solid row of fiber-optic light-pipes built into the faceplate. This was in actual contact with the recording film, transferrig the light from the phosphor inside the CRT without geometric distortions from lenses and such. The film was about four inches wide, and the servo capstain that advanced it was a critical component for accurate signal processing, as was the circuitry that linearized the sweep of the beam. The input plane of the optic processor held the film in a xylene solution between two optical flats, to eliminate phase distortion from roughness of the film's surface.

The nice thing about synthetic aperture radar is that the resolution is related to the radar frequencies and the relative motion of the antenna(s) and target, and is not dependent on the beam width of the antenna. (Well, wider beam width means you illuminate the target from a larger virtual antenna, sharpening the image.) Except for deltas, distance doesn't matter, either. You get the same resolution at tens of feet or interplanetary distances. Distance only comes into the pricture in terms of keeping the oscillators from drifting during the transit time of the beam, so you don't introduce varyimg phase errors when down-converting successive returned chirps.

Yes, that worked. Switching it to 2 brought the behavior to about the same as disabling "Load images automatically" - or close enough not to matter for this purpose.

THANK you once again.

Do you mean the "Load images automatically" setting?

Yes, that's it. (I couldn't remember the exact wording and with it gone I couldn't look it up. B-) )

The preference for that seems to still be in about:config. It's called "permissions.default.image" and the values are documented as: // 1-Accept, 2-Deny, 3-dontAcceptForeign

Geez! No WONDER I couldn't spot it. Didn't they ever hear of mneomincs?

Thank you. I'll give it a try.

I'm at my Nevada vacation/retirement place for the first time since migrating my laptop from Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to 14.04 LTS. This dragged in Firefox 29.0 ("... Canonical 1.0").

The place only has dialup Internat at about 38Kbps. (Somewhat higher speeds are available at substantial cost, which doesn't make sense untlil we're here for more than a couple weeks a year.)

Web browsing was barely usable at this speed by using a few tricks. The most effective one was to configure Firefox to not load images until/unless I wanted to look at them.

When I got out here last Friday I discovered that firefox 29.0 no longer has the radio button in the preferences/configuration menus. An hour or so looking at about:config didn't turn up anything likely-looking, either.

Without this feature, "surfing" the current image-heavy web pages is essentially impossible. Even trivial pages may take a couple minutes to a half-hour to load. PER PAGE.

Did the Firefox crew restore the feature for 30.0? (Or does anyone know where it was hidden, if it still exists on 29.0 and 30.0?)

Developers breaking important features (that THEY don't use) while "improving" products is a real problem.