We call it a rhubarb.

I think the most important piece of news of this story is that Wikipedia is no better than Google or Facebook, and exploits/sells search data too.

They made the assumption that if a disease is spreading somewhere, there people start looking for information about the disease on wikipedia

Imagine the potential: if a lot of search logs contain "EBOL-AAAARGH", they'll know a particularly fast-acting variant of the virus has emerged.

Seems Mozilla has sold out. Which makes their choice of DuckDuckGo as default search engine interesting: have they sold out too?

The thing with DDG is, I'd be happy to believe their no-tracking pitch, but I can't quite understand how they're gonna make money out of a free search engine without it...

As a counter example, a woman once told me that she thought my foul mouth was awesome.

"Awww, fuck off, you asshole."

Blew her clothes right off her body. She was super smart and had the body of a 22-year-old stripper.

Here's the deal.

It's expensive to stay on high alert all the time. All those extra guards, guns, maintenance, etc. That costs money. Up here, after 9/11, we maintained high alert at the bases for a couple of years, then decided to go back to more-or-less before. Not quite; back in 2000 I could walk onto the base only flashing my ID, and once I did show a post-it that said PASS on it. As it stands now, I do require an actual valid pass to get onto the base. However, the security on the base itself is lower than that of my local YMCA. (The base passes are easy to forge and don't get scanned or recorded; the gym requires an active membership and records your entry times.)

What I'm getting at here is that when you're on guard duty at the War Memorial, you're there to be a meet-and-greet kind of soldier. The only shooting you're expecting is some selfies with the kilted guy (meaning you) and maybe a couple of shots at the bar after work. You're not guarding anything. It's a public sculpture that's maybe 50 feet per side. There's literally nothing there to defend. (I've been there a few times; years ago for work I stayed at the Lord Elgin and worked in the next-door building, housing some PW stuff.)

Now, here's the other thing. Bullets. You have to track the shit out of them. If you gave the guards at the War Memorial live ammo, it would be a complete clusterfuck. If you're giving someone ammo, you're expecting them to get shot at, right? Which really means they should be wearing armour as well, not the ceremonial dress uniform (which only offers protection against thrown bullets) So you've got to get them armour, bullets, and a real gun, plus track all that stuff from day to day. What if the gun got dropped and discharged? What if you stopped for a picture and someone took your gun or cut themselves on the bayonet? What if the magazine fell out and the ammo sprayed all over the ground? Now the person guarding is presenting the image of a drunkard scrambling around for their car keys in the dark.

Weird scenarios, but all significantly more likely than a schizophrenic walking up to you and shooting you in the back in cold blood on a boring Hump Day morning.

And hey, the US drones don't have a problem with stairs. They just level the building.

Choice #1: my smartphone isn't encrypted, the FBI "protects" my safety

Choice #2: my smartphone is encrypted, the FBI can't get to my data.

I choose #2 thank you very much.

Huh, I missed a meeting. What's the new tech?

+1, Funny

No modpoints today.

I'm imagining this conversation as the same guy talking to himself, since both are AC...

So what does that make Saint's Row IV?

the next giant leap in ubiquitous mass surveillance.

I just can't wait for all the devices that surround me to snitch on me and report all my life habits to their corporate or state masters 24/7...

A surprising number of sites use CloudFlare. The trouble with CloudFlare is, if you want to stay anonymous on the internet using Tor, you're SOL, as they serve you captchas every 3 pages when they see a connection coming from a Tor exit node.

So essentially, if you're a Tor user, CloudFlare:

- Renders a sizeable portion of the internet unusuable for you
- Makes money on your back by making you solve captcha, and turning you into a human OCR.

CloudFlare and Google (which also serve captchas to Tor users, only fewer exit nodes are concerned) are quickly making Tor unusable, which must make the NSA wet their pants.

I've had Defender cases for my HTC Desire and my S3. The silicone part were fine on the HTC case but the rubber on the S3 case absorbs moisture too quickly and swells.

I got a new case on warranty. When that got too flabby, I bought 2 noname replacement skins from China. One of those skins have swelled too much. So, I'm into the last skin and the last belt clip holder. Forgot to turn in the holder when replacing on warranty and I made a special car holder for Otterbox belt clip holders. When one of them breaks/swells the Otterbox is history