I already have a number of friends who's rooftop solar panels generate more electricity than they use. Once people reach that point, the biggest impact to the environment will be manufacturing --- either with poisons like mercury in CFL bulbs or with dirty semiconductor fabs and lead on circuit boards for LEDs.

Hard to beat a plain glass globe with a metal wire for clean recyclable environmentally friendly materials.

Their mice and keyboards are.

Somethings I think they missed their calling and should have focused on that strength.

It's not a matter of making the technology disappear.

It's about using appropriate technologies to keep sensitive data private.

I would hope that every foreign business in the world is now researching encrypted email, VPNs, etc for their corporate communication just to protect their industrial secrets and corporate IP.

And I would hope that US companies now assume that China and Russia are doing similar spying to the NSA -- and therefore are also researching encrypted email, VPNs, etc.

Once such companies do that (and they will - because money), the appropriate technogies will become widespread enough that reasonably encrypted email will trickle down to consumer tools like gmail/hotmal/etc.

And that's what'll re-enstate privacy for the common person.

Does that mean that Alexander's kinda a witness to Snowden's innocence in this leak?

If it goes to trial, a NSA director saying it couldn't have been Snowden who leaked this stuff is probably a pretty good alibi.

Somewhat surprisingly, they didn't (to the best of my knowledge).

That's exactly what I did, covering a reaonsably busy intersection in SF. Maybe back then people were more careful what they did online - but all I ever noticed was light casual use like bring up maps of the area.

I think that'll be my answer for the OS too -- Ubuntu+Wine is probably closer to Windows 7 than Windows 8+ are.

Back when in lived in SF, I provided free wifi to the coffee shop at the end of my block just for fun. QOS routing meant it didn't interfere with my traffic, and the only thing protecting it was a "please don't abuse this" welcome page.

Now people would be afraid to connect to it, on the grounds that even seeing if an access point welcomes the public could be seen as wiretapping.

Anyone else miss Perl 3 & 4?

Personally, I think Perl jumped the shark at Perl5.

As a better awk/sed/bash, I think I've never seen a tool as good as Perl4. But then Larry decided it had to one-up C++ in some sort of "what's the worst possible way to glom on some confusing fake-OO-wrapper around a language that's main strenght was being not-OO" contest.

Sounds more like a feature than a bug. Do device "owners" really want phones that "accept only applications approved by the company".

Suspicion?

That's been pretty obvious for a while.

There's even a word in the tech community coined from how Microsoft resorts to competing with its hardware partners: http://gigaom.com/2006/07/22/z... "Microsoft Partners, You Been Zunked".

For handheld devices, they've been doing since at least 2003: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2... .

And Surface is obviously a sign that Microsoft sees laptop vendors like HP and Dell as their direct competitors now.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...

Nothing since was as good at handling a large flat virtual desktop where your viewport could pan around to see any subset of it.

Wouldn't education be even better if Coke subsidized it and passed the savings on to me?