Not just Android phones, even iOS devices.

If iOS users open their Chrome, Gmail or Google Maps app in a store, their location can be deemed a store visit

Even the Gmail app snoops on you. Why does it need your location? Sigh.

Block it - Settings->Privacy->Location Services->Gmail - slide the slider to OFF to turn off ability for that app to use location services.

I assume Android has a similar setting (it's been around since iOS 5 or so).

You could also turn off location services globally, but that's a pain as you lose all ability to use GPS, especially maps and such.

It's not really any more disturbing then the fact that it took 2 years to find the wreckage of Air France 447 in an ocean that sees a fair amount of both water and air traffic, as opposed to the southern Indian Ocean between Australia and Antarctica.

No, it took 5 days to locate Air France 447 from the debris. It took a further two years to get as much wreckage as we could get off the oceans and to find the black boxes.

The thing is, within hours of Air France's demise, we knew approximately where to look and found wreckage nearby.

In this case, we not only haven't found the wreckage in over two weeks (with a LOT of resources being poured into searching for what happened), we also don't know anything about where it was headed and so forth.

Even worse, we have radar data. Air France was well out of radar range, and yet we had concrete information on where they were probably located.

Here, it appears a UFO appears on radar and no one investigates. In fact, no one even bothers about the plane until it's way long overdue. In Air France, the controllers suspected something might be up when they couldn't establish contact at the expected time (about two hours before arrival). At arrival time, they were calling SAR and trying to get as much information as possible to locate the wreckage.

We're still being dribbled out information. It took a week of searching the South China Sea before they released radar tracking showing a UFO heading east into the Indian Ocean.

The sheer problem is the incompetency of Malaysian Airlines and the Malaysian government. One day someone says something, it's immediately rebutted by a government statement, then later it's shown that it really was the truth.

They lost control of the message and is practically a case on showing you the sin of pride. So badly have they screwed it up that much of the search and recovery efforts have been taken over by China and the US. Plus, way too much is being put on stuff like flight simulators and "all right, good night",

Journalists (as the world's professional content creators) versus Bloggers (the world's amateur - sometimes very much so - content creators) are similar in the same way that the guy hacking together application code in his bedroom in his spare time is the same as the salaried analyst programmer employed full time to do that.

They both produce content, and the amateur may produce content which would be considered of an acceptable standard by the professional. But the average amateur produces content which is of a much lower standard than the average professional (no, I have no specific citation to prove that, other than my own experience of working with both types on projects).

How about we redefine it as journalists create original content by reporting on the news event, bloggers merely report content?

After all, a journalist would be the one who wrote the news article, while various bloggers are the ones who republish summaries and links to the original article.

If the content's merely just a link with some added summary, there's very little value added.

Yes, it also means most of what you read in traditional newspapers are "bloggers" since they just republish original articles from reuters, AP, AFP, etc (who generated the original content and are, in general, journalists).

Seems to be somewhat clearer. in the end, since most bloggers do not create original content, just merely repost it for their audience (see Slashdot).

Original content like editorials and such aren't done by journalists, but writers, pundits, etc. But not journalists as they aren't reporting on a news event, but commenting on it.

Also means when you're just reporting about some keynote speech, you're just blogging about it.

Possibly, but if the content is going to start coming from my ISPs own network, it better not be counted in my monthly usage either. This would be a nice way for it to turn out, but I'm pessimistic that it will actually work out that way.

And that's probably what Apple wants - people who use Netflix get billed on their quota, but people who use Apple's service gets it "for free" without it counting on their quota.

Because Apple doesn't want people who use their streaming service to suddenly get shocked with huge bills because they watched 1TB of movies and music that one month.

* Multiple times I have had companies explicitly tell me they can't hire me because my current employer would retaliate against them.
* A manager offered me a position, but then called me back and told me that HR told him he could not hire me because of a secret inter-company agreement, neither I nor the manager knew anything about, that prohibited him from hiring any of my employer's employees.
* I have personally seen a company to company contract which stated that neither company will hire each other company's employees.

As have I.

And the solution was...? Apply!

Yes, the anti-poaching meant the company couldn't offer me a position, but it does not prevent you from seeking a position.

The difference is the former means while you're under the employ of another company, the company won't recruit you. However, you are perfectly free to apply for an open position (i.e., apply for a job) at said company.

It's a subtle difference, but it revolves around who started the interaction - did you apply for the job, or did the company make you a job offer?

In fact, you'll find many employees who moved between the companies freely.

That's going to happen with or without Glass. Data aggregators already exist and already do this with other media (Hint: it's the credit bureaus, among other shady businesses). The only difference is the Glass user will have access to the data they record and Google's use of the data (advertising targeting) is a lot less nefarious than the credit bureaus (rating you as a person and selling that data to anyone who will pay).

And where do you think credit bureaus are also getting data from? They just pay Google some money and they'll get at the same data you find creepy that they have, but not Google.

Google Glass is a perfect opportunity to get even more information about you so they can rate you better.

You know there is an LED that flashes during recording and when taking photos, right? Did you even read TFA? This was one of the concerns addressed, and it makes the rather obvious point that if someone wanted to take pictures of you without consent there are much better ways to do it.

Except it's not a LED. It's just a lightpipe to a part of the display. Heck, there are spyware apps that take advantage of it - they do one thing but snap a photo every 10 seconds without indication. Hidden rooting works, as well.

It's no LED. It's just a clever spot on the screen that's piped out, and there are apps that simply either display black, or just not highlight the spot.

Yes, in the effort to save a buck...

The replicators from Star Trek basically "print" objects using atoms instead of plastic, so we only need to use atoms filaments instead of plastic filaments!

Actually, they don't use atoms. They use energy (since energy and mass are one and the same).

It's been used to some effect (Voyager) where unneeded items are recycled back to useful energy.

'Even though they may be active in helping, they may either not remember the material their kids are studying now, or in some cases never learned it themselves, but they're still offering advice. And that means poor quality homework.'" You mean like correcting the blatant errors in the grade school science texts?

You got modded funny, but you may be onto something here. Given the rather alarmingly large percentage of Americans who believe in creationism, seeing their textbook not make much mention of it, or even consider it as an option would count as a "basic error" and now the kid grows up thinking God did it all.

Textbooks are bad enough and parents probably see it the same way, hence needing to "correct" things like the lack of proper explanations, say, creationism.

we were all talking about larger screens with the same pixel density.

Even worse, as high pixel densities mean small thin wires in the screen. And electron mobility velocity (which is inversely proportional to cross-sectional area) is much slower in high-dpi screens. So instead of your "5ms refresh" you can easily be talking about 50ms or more (that's only 20hz refresh) Or more.

What works at 5" fails miserably once you scale up.

Plus, it's a bit of a wank to have 300dpi for a screen that's 24" away from your eyes - 300dpi is fine at 12" for a phone, but further than that, it's also pointless.

Keeping a private wallets require a degree of know how which is beyond most tech savy people, let alone regular folks,

We've hit the third evolution of malware.

First malware spammed people because spam was highly profitable. Second, malware infected people's computers because hijacking user data such as banking information was highly profitable.

Now, malware simply scans a computer for a bitcoin wallet. If it finds one, it merely empties it and moves onto the next PC. Because that's highly profitable - mining is gone, botnets are OK, but not as profitable, but stealing one or two bitcoins well, it's a jackpot.

The irony of the bitcoin situation is that governments can step in and fix the exchange problems because exchanges work under regulations. But then that raises a catch-22 because it means government gets involved in bitcoin, which a lot of people are against because it's the whole anti-government anti-snoop anonymous thing. And yeah, while it's anonymous, the government regulations can state that all transactions have verifiable information per regular banking regulations, which goes counter to the entire point.

The only way around it is to kickstart a completely bitcoin economy where everyone solely works in bitcoin, from the farmers that grow food, to the transport and logistics companies that move stuff around, to the raw materials, producers, landlors, etc., all done using bitcoin. Which is very difficult to do because it's globalized - it's way easier to kickstart if you had a small autonomous island to which everyting is done using bitcoins.

And, in any case, the fundamental assumption behind your argument -- that records were all paper-based 30 years ago -- is simply false. I know from personal experience that one significant federal employer, the Department of Defense, managed all personnel records electronically 30 years ago. And, in general the notion of any large organization not having digitized such record-keeping in 1984 stretches credulity. Even in 1954 automation wasn't rare in large organizations, though it was of the punched card variety (and the punched card processing was often mechanical, not electronic). In 1964 it would still have been unsurprising to find a large organization that did everything on paper. In 1974 it would have been surprising and a bit backward, but not shocking. In 1984? No.

The DoD is probably a special case - most fhe 'employees' it manages are probably there for under 10 years, and the number of "lifers" is relatively few. Plus, DoD gets a huge budget every year and they can afford to modernize. They probably digitized the information because they found some loose change after the war, and the ones that weren't digitized mostly cleared out through attrition.

Meanwhile, you have podunk departments who probably are staffed by people for 30, 40, 50+ years, whose budget rarely exceeds $100K, and all that, and you have to manage their information somehow. You could digitize it (it's at most 2 employees), but given it's just two people who probably know each other very well, doing it by paper is just as efficient. And they were probably there since the 70s and 80s (really, that's only 30-40 years ago) where they only time t hey saw a computer was when they bought a Commodore 64 for their kid.

Yeah, you could digitize it all, but you'd probably need a whole new department of people whose sole purpose is entering data into a computer. For information which for 99.99% of the time, will never be looked up ever.

Paper works just fine in that case - the probably is you don't know WHICH 0.01% will be needed, so you have to do it all, but you also know doing it all is pointless as the vast majority of it will just rot away on some hard drive somewhere.

And really for that 0.01% case, the cost of looking it up manually probably is lower than entering in the bulk of the data.

Especially as the problem will work itself out in the end.

It reminds me of the xkcd that shows how much time one can spend automating something versus how much time it will save. The government probably did the calculation and saw it wasn't beneficial. The records are old, seldom looked up, and the more recent stuff is in the computer already.

Making employees sign Non-Compete Agreements are illegal in California. But by preventing employees from moving around freely, that could have restricted them from getting pay rises and consequently depriving the state and federal government from getting income taxes.

The thing is, anti-poaching agreements do not cover freely applying for jobs at other companies under the agreement.

All an anti-poaching agreement says is that companies in the agreement will not actively solicit employees from companies in the agreement. It doesn't prevent said employees from voluntarily seeking a position at another company in the agreement.

So Apple and Google have an agreement. It just means Google will not approach Apple employees and make them offers. Apple employees though, are completely free to apply for jobs at Google and Google is free to extend an offer to said Apple (I didn't say EX-Apple employee).

I've been subject to that - the other company just said to me that while they can't offer me a job directly, I am free to go to their jobs site and apply by myself, as long as it can be clearly documented that I did so on my own initiative. Which they did by posting the job on their public jobs website.

Vim has loads of states. They just aren't official "modes".

You are in insert mode, nothing pressed. That's a state. You press shift-y. "Y" appears in the text.

You are in command mode. That's a state. You press "y". It does something completely different.

But wait... you're also now in a different "state"! If you press "y" again, it will do yet a third thing: copy a line of text. But if you hadn't pressed the first "y", it wouldn't do that. So pressing "y" the first time puts it in a special "state".

Vim has a boatload of special states. And they are anything but obvious or visible. That's bad.

The alternative is to have a bunch of modifier keys to do stuff. Like say, Control, Alt, Meta, Command, Option, AltGr keys that have to be held in various ways to do stuff.

If you think Emacs goes nuts with it - well, that's what happens - because you need to be in an edit mode all the time, to do anything else requires pressing a whole combination of modifier keys to tell the computer you want to do something different and not just input text.

Like to delete a line, you have to tell the computer to start highlighting text, to end highlighting text then what you want to do, i.e. delete it.

These days, we use a device called a "mouse" to do it, and for a lot of Emacs usage, a mouse and menu seem to be the best way to use it.

But that's an annoyance (Emacs was designed for the Space Cadet keyboard, which has, I believe, 7 modifier keys) once you start having to do stuff like Ctrl-Alt-Shift or Command-Option-Shift to do things. Which is why stateful editors like vim are popular. In fact, vim isn't fully stateful - it allows a lot of things to happen in insert mode - like backspacing, moving the cursor around to delete older text, etc.

In fact, some Vims are such that commands like copy and paste are also able to do be done in insert mode - Windows for example (which is why Visual Block mode is not Ctrl-V, but Ctrl-Q) because you can hit Ctrl-V and paste (in command OR insert mode) what's in the Windows clipboard.

Vim is stateful, and the reason why people do like stateful editors is well, they can navigate their document without having to go through special commands that require multiple modifiers - like using % to find matching braces/brackets/parens, etc. But Vim also highlights the match if it's visible. Or my personal favorite of navigating up and down with my fingers on home row - no moving my hand to the cursor keys, or to the mouse.

I hear you. LG's G2 is pretty much the same device as the nexus 5 but has a ~25% larger battery to accomodate the humongous display. It seems that pretty much the only companies not shooting for the highest specs possible today are Apple and Motorola, and they are both making pretty solid devices nevertheless. I also own a Nexus 4, and I'll hold out on upgrading until I see a Moto X2 or something like that. In fact, I was thinking about "upgrading" to a less powerful phone, like the Moto G, because shit, my Nexus 4 is underclocked to 1026MHz, undervolted and it still never lags, but drains my battery like mad. I love it, but only until the low battery alert pops up. Can't imagine making the switch to a device with a 1080p screen and 2.5 GHz quad-core processor.

My friend got a Nexus 5 recently. The screen is nice, but I tried to use it and found it unusably big. Because the 5" screen on it is much too large for me. I have big hands, and yeah, if I use it two-handed, it's great. But I don't. I use my phone in one hand very often.

Two-handed use if great if I'm sitting down or something. But then why would I need a mobile phone? If I'm sitting at my desk at work, I have a work phone. If I'm sitting at home, I have a home phone.

No, my phone is for when I'm out and about, and I might be looking at stuff or carrying stuff or trying to reach for stuff. And I have to be able to control my phone single-handedly - i.e., my thumb must be able to reach all four corners of the screen without repositioning the phone (because repositioning single-handedly leads to people dropping their phone. Doesn't matter if it survives or not, the less you drop it, the better). And I couldn't do it on his Nexus 5.

In this pursuit of big screens that are nice and beautiful, well, these phones seem to start lacking stuff. Like usability on the move.

It's a wonder why crime isn't up - trying to finangle a 5" screen on the streets is certainly a good opportunity for a snatch and grab - if you got to put your stuff down to do stuff on your phone, well, free stuff for passers-by.

Second this. It feels like the number race of PC's of years ago: "This one has more pixels", "This one more GHz", "This one more MBs". But nobody seem to care about more autonomy.

Did they bring in all the marketing guys from the 90s? I guess is what all those tech reviews with meaningless astroturfing performance tests have given us. "Hey this phone can decode and re encode 4k videos on the fly! while you play angry birds!" WHO CARES if it's going to get hot as hell and die in 1.5 hours?

The problem is everyone wants to be a "measurebator" - my device has X GHz more than you, Y gigs, Z megapixels, etc. (Yes, it's a combination of measure and masturbator - people who get kicks from comparing numbers).

And because all Android phones are pretty much the same as each other, it's the only way manufacturers can differentiate their phones from one another.

It's also why companies like Apple don't bother anymore with specs - because everyone gets in their measurebating ways and declares a phone is "lousy" because it's only 1.6GHz instead of 1.8GHz.

Nothing about how a phone performs, or how the UI reacts or anything. It doesn't matter if the software is optimized so a 1GHz CPU is more than adequate, while the 2.4GHz phone runs unoptimized software and is slower than molasses.

Remember the benchmark fiasco? Same thing - people are measurebating.

Except for the huge loss and waste of those sparkfun meters, which last I checked were still being destroyed.

Honestly, those things were POS anyways. Cheap meters are a safety hazard and potentially lethal. Yes. lethal.

They're constructed poorly, have little to no input protection and have unpredictable overload behavior. Use them for anything more than low voltage measurements and you're putting your life in danger.

Flukes, Agilent (err, Keysight), etc., they all construct their meters with protection. You can use the ohms scale and connect it to live mains voltage (250V+) and nothing happens. Do it on a cheap meter and you'll see explosions, maybe with shrapnel.

And yeah, maybe those cheap meters read 1000V or something - apply 1000V to them and they'll explode because they aren't rated to. Hell, the creepage and spacing of conductors probably isn't even sufficient.

If you're lucky, a cheap meter will burn out on you. If not, it'll explode in your hands.

The real waste is that someone commissioned the building of those crappy meters in the first place.

Good meters have HRC (high-rupture capacity) fuses, where even overloaded badly they'll blow without breaking, the cases seal together with a tongue-and-groove to prevent exploding components from rupturing the case, thicker plastic to withstand explosions etc. And of course, isolation slots to prevent voltages from jumping gaps.