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Comment Re:Why does password strength matter? (Score 2, Insightful) 499

Do you really think that the FBI is your greatest enemy online?
IT IS NOT.
It is nice to think that you are enemy of the state nr 1 and that everybody cares about your secrets, but that's not the case. You should worry about phishers and other criminals, not about law enforcement. And they don't use search warrants. They need to crack passwords

Comment Why would you want to keep the telephone number? (Score 5, Interesting) 239

(I posted this earlier on Ars Technica)

Why would you want to keep the telephone number?

The telephone number is a good example of a situation where the technical factor prevailed over the human factor. Numbers are abstract and difficult to remember for most people. And since its invention we have needed to use lists to associate these numbers to things we actually can remember, such as names.

I think it will go completely the other way, and that in 50 years people will never have heard of phone numbers. The identifier will be the email address, and if I want to call someone I select that address and press "call", and a VOIP connection will be made. If I want to IM or mail, I press other buttons.

The email address is easy to remember, it has build-in identification of the purpose you want to use it for (private, business, ...), can already be used for several types of communication (mail, jabber) and is completely transparent to location

Comment Re:Law of thermodynamics violation? (Score 4, Informative) 820

Because an animal spends a lot of time doing energy inefficient things like walking around, keeping itself warm, growing bones and brains and other useless parts. Only the fact that you can focus on the good parts will already give a profit. Btw, this technology is hardly new. I read about it years ago in our university newspaper (I am a student of the Eindhoven University of Technology). And at that time they also promised that there would be sausages in a couple of years. It sounds a bit like nuclear fusion

Comment Re:Home server +ssh (Score 1) 123

Why doesn't google start with offering localized hosting? A 19" server with a webserver, the apps software and enough disk space for 100 users wouldn't be very difficult or expensive to make. And since it's only function is hosting those apps through a webserver, it probably is quite easy to secure. Add in some API's to backup stuff to a second location, and you have your in house, unaffected by internet failure office suite, usable from a thin client with a browser.

Comment Re:Missing the point. (Score 2, Insightful) 509

I once went to "Living Tomorrow", which a house demonstrating possible future technology in the Netherlands. They had a washing machine which could select the washing programming based on the RFID tagged clothes you put in it, and which could warn you if you tried to put incompatible stuff in there.

Other applications would be sending an email to your fridge to ask how much milk you have got left when you are in the supermarket, etc.

RFID has some really cool applications, as well as some really scary ones

Comment Re:Pricing Rational? (Score 1) 842

The idea is to make multiple versions, so you can sell the cheap version to people who can't or won't afford the normal version, and the normal version to people who can. If they had only the normal version, the "cheap" people would buy nothing. If they make the normal version cheaper, everyone will buy it, including the people who where willing to pay more. This way they can maximize profit. See http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html for a very good explanation of this principle

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