The article says: "Viv could provide all those services -- in exchange for a cut of the transactions that resulted."

We seriously need to rethink our economics for a world of abundance and AI and robotics before we get crazier and crazier AIs driven by the profit motive than the out-of-control corporate "AIs" already stomping all over the planet and the people who live there. See also my comment here in 2000:
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
"And, as the story "Colossus: The Forbin Project" shows, all it takes for a smart computer to run the world is control of a (nuclear) arsenal. And, as the novel "The Great Time Machine Hoax" shows, all it takes for a computer to run an industrial empire and do its own research and development is a checking account and the ability to send letters, such as: "I am prepared to transfer $200,000 dollars to your bank account if you make the following modifications to a computer at this location...". So robot manipulators are not needed for an AI to run the world to its satisfaction -- just a bank account and email. "

See also the 1950s sci-fi movie "The Invisible Boy" for a malevolent AI that provides just a few key pieces of biased advise that let it almost take over the world. Of course, we already have Fox News... Thank goodness Robby the Robot's emotions save the day in at least the movie...

You'd never get that double blind, because a bad flutist wouldn't have the depth of skill to create the detailed intonations possible with the good flute, and the professional flutist would be able to produce almost as good of sound from the cheap flute (but have to work much, much harder to do so).

My wife replaced her ~$2000 high school and college flute with a ~$25k one a few years after college, when we were both well enough off from our day jobs and she became active in the civic orchestra. She received a degree in flute performance with that $2k flute, but as she put it, a lot of her time was spent "fighting the instrument" to make things sound right; with the professional flute she could spend more time on other things like listening to the rest of the orchestra or reading ahead to be a better sightreader.

Not clear if Case is claiming Blackberry's were never of interest to hackers or are just of no interest lately.

Blackberrys were until recent years very high value targets, they were the phone of choice on Wall Street, for politicians and reporters.

It wasn't that long ago repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia were telling Blackberry to back door their phones/servers or get locked out of their market which tends to suggest they must have been pretty good at something.

There is probably something to be said for phones without a third party app market if security is job one. Android in particular is a pretty juicy target for malware.

We homeschool/unschool -- however, at great expense in terms of professional opportunity cost. As others have pointed out to echo your point, there is a big difference between "schooling" and "education". This is true even in the very "best" school districts which can be terribly oppressive places for children whose interests are not mostly academic or, in some cases, artsy and who don't plan to go to a top college and so would bring down the schools college acceptance scores. This can include hands-on practically-oriented children or wide-ranging people-oriented children or free-thinking imaginative children and so on who may not do well in settings focusing on abstraction or interactions with only-same age peers and authority figures or working on assigned tasks with arbitrary structure and with arbitrary timetables.

Your point also connects with bullying, A normal resolution to bullying by another kid might be to avoid him or her and choose different kids to associate with. However, school structure does not permit that for kids crammed together in a classroom. Izzy Kalman and "Bullies to Buddies" provides help for for unavoidable bullies though.

See also by John Taylor Gatto:
  "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
    http://www.worldtrans.org/whol...
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
            Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. [PDF: I question the previous point on material scarcity...] These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
    I should know."

More by John Taylor Gatto (1992 New York State Teacher of the year) here: https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...

Especially: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

Also: http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
    But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
    Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree."

See also links I've collected here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Good luck. Hopefully there will be more and more alternatives down the road.

Related suggestion: http://vitamincfoundation.org/...
More: https://www.google.com/search?...
And in connection with scurvy: https://www.google.com/search?...

Would be good to have better software tools to try to make sense of all this often-conflicting health information...

Not if it costs 1000x more to create the technology than it does to counter it. Nor if the money to build it was borrowed in part from that potential enemy.

You were presented with a candidate slate containing Candidate A and Candidate B. You chose to vote for Candidate A, or Candidate B, or not to vote.

In any of the three cases, you were electing a representative that voted on the embargo for you.

Not that I think one is wrong against Russia right now..

"not really, until you can 3-d print it yourself and then verify with an xray will security be verified."

What if both your 3D printer and X-Ray data analysis software are compromised? See also:
"Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson
    http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ke...
"The final step is represented in Figure 7. This simply adds a second Trojan horse to the one that already exists. The second pattern is aimed at the C compiler. The replacement code is a Stage I self-reproducing program that inserts both Trojan horses into the compiler. This requires a learning phase as in the Stage II example. First we compile the modified source with the normal C compiler to produce a bugged binary. We install this binary as the official C. We can now remove the bugs from the source of the compiler and the new binary will reinsert the bugs whenever it is compiled. Of course, the login command will remain bugged with no trace in source anywhere ... The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."

Still, the more angles you look at something from, the more likely you might detect some discrepancy... Like excess power usage, processing delays, slightly different electromagnetic signatures, etc...

In any case, the less you want, perhaps the easier it is to secure. Look into creating or using Forth chips for simplicity... The less gates you need, and the less cycles they need, the easier it would be to make your own hardware from scratch, even from discrete components if it is simple enough.
http://www.colorforth.com/
http://www.greenarraychips.com...

For software more complex than Forth that is still fairly understandable from the ground up, see also the FONC project by Alan Kay as well as Squeak on bare metal.
http://www.viewpointsresearch....
https://www.google.com/search?...

So..in other words, they advertised 1080p and are delivering 1080i, but presumably at a 1080p frame rate instead of the usual, faster 1080i rate.

I think you're trying to argue that it's still 1080, and it is, but it's still not what they advertised. No, this guy shouldn't be suing them. The FTC should be fining them for false advertising.

Also, I had no problems using the phone's data in other parts of Asia, nor did colleagues on T-Mobile (who had T-Mobile phones). They just didn't get service in Korea.

You are incorrect. I am posting from a "Verizon" iPhone which I bought, unlocked , from an Apple store, then popped in a T-Mobile SIM. It works fine.* The Verizon iPhone has all CDMA and GSM frequencies for all three networks (AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon).

I bought the Verizon version so that I could use it in Korea. T-Mobile provides free data there but you have to have a CDMA-capable phone. Also, I was new to T-Mobile and if their coverage sucked I liked the ability to move to either AT&T or Verizon.

* T-Mobile recognizes it as an "unknown smart phone" since it doesn't broadcast the correct model number. I get full LTE speed data, voice, text, with graceful downgrades to 4G, 3G, and E, but I can't use iPhone specific features like visual voice mail.

They simply disable CDMA in the AT&T/T-Mobile version. The Verizon version has both CDMA and GSM and frequencies for all three carriers.

- posted from a "Verizon" iPhone I bought new contract-free and only ever used with a T-Mobile SIM .

The Sprint version is significantly different.

If you use a 1 kHz ADC to measure a 1.1 kHz signal, what do you measure at 900 Hz?

No, you can pick up something higher than Nyquist, as long as you understand your sources of information and noise. It will alias down into the measurable range, and you can extract useful information from the alias. We have a system that operates up to 1 MHz using a 1.8 MHz ADC. When we know the signal is at 1 MHz, we extract the information at 800 kHz and use that.

What the GGP was talking about, though, was finding resonance on the bag where unique 30-Hz-width bands higher frequencies were being naturally modulated to baseband. If you had 100 points on the bag that each modulated a different frequency (30 Hz, 45 Hz, 90 Hz, ... 1500 Hz), you could extract the data from each sub-band separately and reconstruct the original signal. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... and assume the source isn't one 1500 Hz conversation but instead one hundred 15 Hz conversations. And also assume that is one amazing bag of chips.

A leader might accidentally trip and fall on the button in your scenario too. Einstein said, learning how to release atomic power changed everything except our thinking. That issue is still playing out, and motivates much of my efforts (whether towards abundance for all, better tools for civic sensemaking and education, or work towards self-replicating habitats for Earth and space). Who in the tech profession has not seen a variety of complex systems fail in unexpected ways over the years? So, speaking purely probabilistically, chances are, we will see these weapons go off sooner or later due to accident or error. They might go off because of a technical accident ("99 Red Balloons" wrongly interpreted as an attack, a massive solar flare causing a launch, bad capacitors causing a launch, etc.). Or they might be used because of a psychological or political accident (like the one your insightful story is about). As others have also pointed out, "MAD" assumes rational actors trying to act in self-preservation; if you put lunatics in charge of the button then it might get pressed for any number of crazy reasons same as many people regularly do other self-destructive things.

21st century technologies of abundance (nuclear, biological, chemical, nanotech, robotic, AI, communications, bureaucracy) create more "buttons" in more places in the hands of more people. That makes it more and more likely a button somewhere will get pressed. Worse, many (probably most) the people using these 21st technologies are still locked in a 20th century (and earlier) mindset of worrying about material scarcity. So, they ironically are willing to use nuclear energy (as bombs) to fight over oil fields, when nuclear energy could instead produce all the energy we might otherwise get from oil (not that I'm much of a conventional nuclear fan compared to renewables, energy efficiency, fusion, or LENR).

While we need to do what we can to reduce the chance that any of the buttons get pressed including by promoting a philosophy of mutual security, we should also design with the expectation they will eventually get pressed, and create an infrastructure that is resilient and distributed enough to muddle through anyway as a form on intrinsic security. The internet was supposedly designed to survive nuclear war. We need to apply some of the same thinking to agriculture, power, medicine, education, transportation, and so on. However, this strategy for intrinsic and mutual security is completely at odds with maximizing short-term economic profits by "just in time" delivery of good produced or routed through centralized hubs controlled by a few monopolistic actors.

My OSCOMAK project (and precursors) was a hope in that direction (not that I've succeeded much with it directly).
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"Why do I want to build these habitats? Most people would agree there is at least a one percent chance the human race will wipe itself out within the next century through a nuclear or biological war. The issue isn't even necessarily about our politicians making mistakes. The fallibility of the Soviet missile command computer technicians is what worries me most. Like anyone else familiar with computers, I know how easy it is to make a mistake with one. Beyond accidental warfare, expanding populations and industrial pollution threaten our lives just as much. I feel that even if there is only a one percent chance of ecological disaster over the next century, I want to do my best to ensure human survival in that case.
    Most people do not think about these issues, or if they do, rapidly dismiss the problems as too large and impossible to do anything significant about. I feel I have an alternative to apathy or despair. Some habitats in space or underwater would probably survive a nuclear war. Unlike bomb shelters, they would provide an intact technological and cultural base from which to regrow our civilization. If there is not a war, they would still serve the useful function of providing more living space for expanding populations. Being a closed environmental system, they would also make people focus on recycling industrial pollution back into raw materials, leading to safer industries and a cleaner environment."

In the USA, our lives are still completely dependent on 1970s Soviet-era technology for nuclear launching that we in the USA tried to sabotage by supplying bad computer chips and such!!! It is so easy to forget that fact which is "out of sight, out of mind". See:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...
http://archive.wired.com/polit...
"Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device--a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
    The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
    The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won't discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels--including former top officials at the State Department and White House--say they've never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. "I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that." They weren't.
    The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place."

It's a hard problem to wrestle with. See also Joanna Macy's inspiring work:
http://www.personaltransformat...
http://www.amazon.com/Despair-...

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
---
Joanna Macy is one of the world's leading sustainability educators. Macy shares her knowledge through her books, workshops, courses and talks. She explores the challenges communities globally are facing, and shares communal approaches to strengthen a life-sustaining culture. The workshops Macy teaches are Business Sustainability, Spiritual Ecology, Meditation, Responses to Climate Change, Wisdom of the Elders, and Tips for Activists. Many of Macy's books have a an accompanying website where readers can explore, take a course, or use tools to aid their training. On Macy's website for her (and Chris Johnstone's) book Active Hope, How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy, she summarizes the practice which sustains an active hope:

* Take in a clear view of reality.
* Identify our vision for what we hope will happen.
* Take active steps to help bring that vision about.

In the book, Macy and Johnstone explore what Active Hope is (and why it is already happening) in the chapter entitled The Three Stories of Our Time. This chapter is designed to inspire readers to gauge their states (variously) of acceptance, denial, confusion, flexibility, adaptability, compassion and resilience. While Macy's "three stories" are:

* Business as usual. Some examples are "people who believe that economic growth is essential for prosperity, nature is a commodity to be used for human purposes, and promoting consumption is good for the economy".
* The Great Unraveling: economic decline, resource depletion, climate change, social division, war, and mass extinctions. The second story is designed to provoke reflection, and even discomfort with the truth.
* A shift in consciousness. In this story a collective identity is found and built upon through what Macy describes as The Three Dimensions of The Great Turning, "Holding actions - for example campaigns in defense of life on Earth; life-sustaining systems and practices - for example developing new economic and social structures; and a Shift in Consciousness - for example change in our perception, thinking, and values.

The chapter is about the importance of change in society, and for the need to continuously nurture and educate for a life-sustaining culture.