I should hope the scout leader doesn't need the phone to play Angry Birds during the camping trip. If it is for the sole reason stated - emergencies - then having contact with the rest of the world is a very important safety precaution. Just because it didn't exist before doesn't mean it should be foregone. Emergency communication can save your life in situations where before cell phones the rescue teams would find corpses by the time they knew to look.

Of course rehabilitation is not the goal. The person is talking about life sentences. The person is talking about punishment, about vengeance. It's natural for some people to seek vengeance against people who have done truly unspeakable things, but it's not constructive. What would be more constructive is to remove them from society, figure out why they did what they did, and try to keep it from happening again.

The concern I'd like to address is purely economic: is it right to spend more money just to make the criminal's life more miserable? Because then everyone paying taxes is paying the price. What if the most painful torture was liquid gold injections (and it had to be gold)? If you're already determined to use torture, would it really be worth the extra expense over, say, pulling fingernails? Developing new, inventive ways to make people suffer is the realm of six-fingered villains from The Princess Bride. This has no place in our society.

You don't need to always use UTC to get the benefits you describe. Just always give times in UTC when communicating across time zones. The only disadvantage is that the receiver might not know how to convert from UTC to local time. This is basically the same problem as converting people to UTC, however. At least this way the receivers know they need to look up the conversion, rather than thinking they know but getting it wrong due to DST or whatever.

In every situation where the time zone is not obvious, it should be included in every statement of time. Obvious would be communicating with someone in the same time zone where we both will be in the same time zone at that time. Non-obvious would be communicating with unknown parties that might be elsewhere, especially over the internet, but even a physical bulletin board would count if it was near a time zone boundary.

You're certainly right about the AAC/256 part (at least if it's properly encoded). But there are a lot of other things mentioned that cause the sound "at the mixing board" to be superior. In fact, most of them are the mixing itself. Perhaps in the quest to make "the best mix we can to translate to whatever sorrowful playback medium of the average customer" you have actually mixed a brick wall soulless mockery of what you were listening to.

But I understand there's no going back now. It's probably for the best if recording studios start releasing lossless 24/192 audiophile versions, because they might actually be better mixes. I'd buy that for the mix and immediately down-sample to 16/44 so I can have 4.5x as much music.

Read that, or at least accept for a moment that 24/192 is pointless and that a well-encoded MP3 is audibly indistinguishable from a lossless recording in double blind tests.

The whole "confirmation bias" thing is actually terrible for music. It's what makes audiophiles. Somebody tells you music is better with X audiophile feature, and plays it for you. It sounds better. Probably because it's your friend, or the equipment is obviously really nice, or you're used to listening to 128kbps muzak on your earbuds. Once you start believing, there's no limit to the set-ups that can be ruined by not having X feature. Can you ever listen to music again without a $20,000 system?

Audiophilia is like Scientology. The more you believe in it, the more money you have to spend just to be happy again. Demand scientific proof.

A vinyl rip. That's just great. Why not just download a 320kbps MP3 and resample it to 256kbps? Then resample it again a few times? Maybe convert it to FLAC at the end so it's "lossless"? Not to belittle the gain you get from a superior mix. It's just that you shouldn't have to do that.

But what if you want to use your 128gb music player as your actual portable music library? Something that you can hook up to a much larger and more expensive system in an otherwise quiet environment?

I think my fix highlights several things about computer security. One, the consequences are financial loss at the worst, not bodily harm. Two, you can be easily victimized for common behaviors. Three, installing anti-virus (bars over your windows) will not do anything to save you from bad password security (key under the welcome mat), no matter what the "helpful" bloatware on your new PC tells you.

You know it probably costs more than building another 20TB RAID when the web site says "Contact Sales Assistance on +1-888-672-2534 to quote or purchase this product".

Let me guess, the writer was uneducated and using a very outdated term? Because the only people calling cyber criminals "hackers" are the under educated media and luddites that have not been paying attention to what has been happening in the world.

So what you're saying is that the author was writing to the 95% of normal people rather than to the 5% of people who have "been paying attention to what has been happening in the [technology] world". If everyone would rather read Slashdot than the sports section, there would be no sports section.

Disclaimer: I didn't RTFA, and while I agree with the headline and summary, it's not for the same reasons and I actually have a lot of respect for real hacking.

I agree that it's time to stop glorifying hackers. Not real hackers that find SSL vulnerabilities, or who hack the mainframe, or who embed assembly in their compiled programs. No, those people deserve all the glory they get (which is very, very little). No, I'm talking about the "hackers" that are always stealing peoples' passwords.

A figurative 99% of security breaches happen because a password got stolen. That is not hacking. That is stealing a password. It requires no more technical competence than the average user possesses. If you write your password down and throw it away, the garbage man can find it and log into your email. Does that make him a hacker? No, it makes him an unethical, opportunistic garbage man.

Password security is not equal to computer security. Real hackers compromise computer security, possibly resulting in a stolen password, or possibly resulting in access that renders the stolen password irrelevant. And if someone steals a banker's password and uses it to do things the banker is allowed to do, then there wasn't anything wrong with the computer security.

That's not to say the user is automatically at fault for the password security. I mean, sure, the user could have handled the password better, but if that user understood that in the first place then there never would have been a problem. Password security is a policy detail. That's probably why it's usually the weakest link. Only the geeks understand enough to design an effective policy, but the geeks don't usually design good policies for non-geeks.

Fixed that for you.

Scammer no scamming! Scammer no scamming!

Aw, man.

And how do those different parties build on each other? By having access to the device. If I came and showed you a working flying saucer, and said, "You too can travel by this exclusive method," how would you be able to duplicate it? All that you now know is that it is possible. Even assuming that every major technology involved is out in the open (which, again, would be theoretically in jeopardy in an unpatentable world), as they say, the devil is in the details. I've probably worked for years on picking components, integrating, miniaturizing, debugging, and iterating over this process until I had something that was commercially viable. In the worst case, it would take somebody else equally as inventive equally as long to bring a competing product to market, and even then that person (who may not exist for some time) may simply set up a competing service instead of selling it directly. And it's not worth thinking about the best case because human beings, especially very inventive ones, tend to be easily taken in by our ideas about how long we can keep a secret. Why would we even have all this patent troll/perpetual copyright bullshit if people didn't think they were entitled to exclusivity for the rest of their lives?

Many inventions are actually much more profitable when the device can be sold, legally protected from reverse engineering, than if the details of how it works had to be protected as trade secrets. Can you imagine a world where cars were only sold to people willing to protect their secrecy? Not only would cars have not developed and improved as quickly as they did, but manufacturers would sell several orders of magnitude fewer cars. Instead of every person in a town of a million owning a car, you'd have maybe an elite group of chauffeurs serving the top .5% of that population, or about 500 people. It's ultimately more profitable for the device to be patent protected and sold than to be protected solely as a trade secret.