"I don't want cast aspersions unnecessarily on Abu Dubai — but they're not Canada," said Adams

I think you're okay... They'll both assume you must be talking about the other one.

I don't know what it is, but slashdot editors just LOVE the hell out of cell phone tracking. I mean, there has probably been a story or two on the subject before now:

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/05/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/06/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/07/0...

http://slashdot.org/story/12/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/06/1...

http://slashdot.org/story/02/1...

Everyone go out and find all the cell phone tracking stories you can, and submit every one to /. They love it when you do that!

What are the odds your family isn't all on a single cellular carrier, making you unable to take advantage of such redundancy?

Verizon and Sprint are compatible, while AT&T and T-Mobile are compatible. And with them all switching to LTE, it's likely they will all be mutually compatible in a few more years, when manufacturers start selling multi-band LTE phones.

Most every post-paid cellular plan includes voice roaming. Even if you're not paying for roaming normally, when you dial 911, all restrictions are dropped, and your cell will connect to any available tower from any provider that it can.

This seems like circular logic. First one has to define what a "Neanderthal" is before answering that question.

Yep. A lot of taxonomy is like that.

In the process of classifying things they're trying to find or define sharp boundaries on a subject matter that is actually a continuum.

I recall, in my first encounters with the subject, trying to get a coherent definition of the distinctions between species, genus, family etc.. The instructor was utterly uanble to provide one. (Of course this WAS at the junior-high level.)

DNA technology is also substantially revamping the whole field. Previously they had to infer what genes various organisms had by observing their expressions in morphology - which makes it hard to track genes that are there but "turned off". Now that they can actually sequence the DNA (or the expressed protiens when the sample is too old for DNA and RNA to survive) a lot of the classifications are getting rearranged.

Was Neanderthal a species, or something more akin to a colorform? What constitutes extinction when a branch that once interbred with another dies out, but leaves behind a substantial amount of its DNA? Did the two branches actually "speciate", i.e. separate to the point where the COULDN'T interbreed, or at least couldn't produce viable crossbreed offspring that could produce offspring of their own in turn? Or was it just that they mostly DIDN'T interbreed? Were they like the races of the current human species (clusters of different traits but one big gene pool), like horses and donkeys (where crossbreeds are easy but mostly infertile), or like fully-speciated organisms that might try but just can't produce offspring? Did they go extinct, or did most of their traits just gradually (or suddenly, as in a near-extinction event where all the copies of a gene were in the places where everybody died off) get lost from the geneome of the one big human family?

Seems to me it's mostly a matter of definition and partly a subject for more research.

Don't ask me for an authoritative definition. I'm just another observer, not a taxonimist. B-)

Diaspora failed partly because it presents itself in such a confusing way. See Join Diaspora.: "JoinDiaspora.com Registrations are closed But don't worry! There are lots of other pods you can register at. You can also choose to set up your own pod if you'd like. There's no "Join" button, but two "Donate" buttons. Take a look at a few "pods". You can't see anything without signing up, and many sound like they're run by wierdos.

The latter is the real problem. A system where anyone can join anonymously and can have as many identities as they want will be overrun by spammers and jerks. Facebook has some pushback in that area, which helps. Facebook also started by getting people from big-name schools, so they didn't start with a loser-heavy population.

A social network needs some cost to creating an identity. The cost can be money, or reputation, or even a proof of work, like Bitcoin. Otherwise, the network is overrun with fake accounts. A distributed social network needs good anti-forgery mechanisms, to prevent one node from spoofing another. That's hard without central control.

I'm sorry, did you say something?

I just said everything that was actually important.

It's no wonder you can't even understand the real issues when you can't read for two minutes. Perhaps medication can help your ADD? But sadly they don't make medication for the real disease you have.

There are probably security cameras watching the line already. Use them to count the people. Software for this is available from several suppliers.

Cameras at intersections already do this, as part of traffic signal control. The best systems report things like "3 cars waiting at signal, then a big gap, then more approaching cars". The controller can then let three cars through, then turn the light for that intersection face red and let the other direction go.

In fact that was my first thought -- they didn't discover a temple; they discovered Ugg's Rib Joint.

Or possibly a communal kitchen, which wasn't so uncommon way back when.

See also Digging the Weans, by Robert Nathan.

http://www.joshpachter.com/pag...

The problem is, social networks invariable involve sharing data with your friends. With most of the current models, that means that you need to trust the server that your friends are using. Even for email and XMPP that's a problem: if half of your friends are using GMail for both then there's a good chance that Google can get a big chunk of our email and your social graph. Privacy preserving protocols are an ongoing research area, but I've not yet seen anyone trying to integrate them into a well-defined standard with a good reference implementation.

The news here is that you're willing to spend an entire day touching PHP for only $100.

This is why I think government's revenue should be limited to export tariffs. That way it's directly dependent on people doing well, and having the wherewithal to generate a surplus. Which is what our own gov't depended on for a century and change, and was thereby kept in check. The income tax and property taxes changed everything, because gross income is always greater than net surplus.

If they had a federated model and I could easily migrate away from storing stuff on their servers, then I might be tempted to pay them so that I didn't have to go to the trouble of running the server and keeping it patched. The last time I paid to be in a walled garden, it was CompuServe, and I learned my lesson.

Sounds like you're using Facebook for exactly it's intended purpose: to allow someone to build a big database of things that you do to target advertising. You're not just telling a website something, you're telling Facebook what other sites you visit and care enough about to log in to and what your identity on those sites is.

What if the "pointless content" it gets rid of is YOUR content??

Don't assume the people in charge will always be on your side.

Indeed.

To further muddy the waters, DropBox supports (under Windows, at least) what it calls "LAN sync," with the goal of having data traverse LAN-WAN only once, no matter how many LAN clients want that data.

I do not know if it is default behavior. But I've seen it work just fine.