On the other hand, I have a fully updated Ubuntu 12.04 and I can Alt-Tab between Firefox and LibreOffice just fine (I just checked).

Sounds like a very annoying bug, but not a design decision. I wish I had a solution but because I can't reproduce it I don't have anything to offer. You may want to report the bug in the Unity bugtracker on Launchpad.

They haven't. The Unity desktop manager works just as it is designed to do, with a simple elegance that maxmizes screen space for your applications and a very useful Alt-` and Alt-Tab switcher. In addition, new users understand and can use the system quickly. When giving presentations to college students and other non-Linux users, the reaction has been "Oh wow, that looks great" every single time. Even my dad said "wow, they've really been polishing Ubuntu, haven't they?" the first time he saw Unity.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Good news! There's no way an astronomy app would ever use the camera to identify what you're seeing.

They use GPS to determine your location and then the on-board accelerometers to determine device orientation, and then they show you what's on the other side of the phone based on that.

It still doesn't have native BES connectivity. If it did, it might have actually sold.

Unfortunately, RIM decided they'd rather use it as a sales vehicle for their phones.

That didn't turn out so well.

The end.

http://aws.amazon.com/importexport/

http://awsimportexport.s3.amazonaws.com/aws-import-export-calculator.html

It's not rocket science. Yes, shipping drives is the cheapest, fastest option for a lot of people.

YMMV, speaking for myself, not my employer, etc. etc.

-Isaac

Cookies are not the only evidence of tracking. Even Flash LSO, HTML5 local storage, etc.

There's a surprising amount of identifying information in request headers and what's available to javascript. (see http://panopticlick.eff.org/ for a demonstration.) That means, one often needn't accept or store a cookie to be tracked.

A really comprehensive pro-privacy browser extension would munge request headers and enumeration of fonts, plugins, screen resolutions, etc. to match one of, say, the top 5 most common desktop browser fingerprints - and to change every so often (Changing per request would itself be a trivially detectable signature.)

-Isaac

The only way this makes sense is as a honeypot, intentional or not.

First, government surveillance of the internet is a solved problem - it's already comprehensive and embedded in the infrastructure of every major carrier and exchange. What good is a theoretically surveillance-free ISP if you can only talk to other customers of the same ISP? The ISP would not be surveillance-free much longer if it ever build any kind of user base.

Second, essentially everyone on the internet leaves - even if they take pains to avoid doing so - a rich data trail with private companies. Facebook, Google, Omniture, CDNs, etc. etc. Data aggregated by these entities render wiretapping at your ISP unnecessary in a lot of cases, and as a bonus may be used against you by private entities for non-criminal matters.

(It's also reasonable to assume that small, mostly-disconnected graphs - i.e. users that successfully manage to communicate only with each other - are inherently of interest from an intelligence or law enforcement perspective. Think of a set of pre-paid phones that only ever call other pre-paid phones, or IPs that only ever communicate peer-to-peer or only visit a single third-party site. Who would ever use the network that way?)

I mean, it's a neat idea and all, but the horse is already out of the barn as far as gov't surveillance goes, and does nothing to address the private data aggregators that are the more real threat to people's lives and livelihoods.

-Isaac

You do know that new studies show that mercury in tuna and other fish is non-toxic, as it is bound up into an insoluble salt with selenium, right?

Yeah, no.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Niigata+Minamata+disease

Sure, until God rats you out again. ;)

Yes, but if Washington and Oregon were to submit a proposal such as you describe, wouldn't it have gotten those same stimulus money?

Probably, but it would never go down that way.

This is the Pacific Northwest you're talking about - the plan they submitted and got federal money for (to the tune of about $780 million) is to marginally increase the speeds on the existing line, shaving 45 minutes to an hour off a 3.5 hour trip by 2023. (Not kidding, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_Northwest_Corridor)

Way to shoot for the moon, guys.

-Isaac

Something tells me that the state government of California isn't particularly interested in building a railroad for Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.

Much of the proposed funding is federal stimulus money.

This doesn't make sense. A rider arriving in LA is going to need a car when they get off the train, unless they fancy spending a lot of time waiting for on Metro (formerly known as the RTD - Rough, Tough, and Dangerous.) Total boondoggle.

It would make a hell of a lot more sense to link the Portland-Seattle-Vancouver, BC corridor with high-speed rail, since these are all cities where one can actually get around reasonably well without a car. It'd be a game-changer to have TGV-speed rail on that corridor - one hour between the downtown cores of Portland and Seattle, or Seattle and Vancouver? I've had regular, daily intracity commutes longer than that.

Oh well.

-Isaac