I know quite a few people who have started using GPG via the Enigmail plug-in for Thunderbird lately. The length of the man page is irrelevant and they never publish their keys so are effectively invisible to the statistics. That doesn't mean that it isn't an extremely useful, valuable piece of software though.
Now more than ever we need GPG, and I bet adoption has gone up a lot in the last year.
It's not a free speech issue at all. People were using Blogger to advertise their porn sites by giving away free samples and posting spammy links. Blogger is a commercial service and not at all obliged to provide hosting for porn advertising.
In fact, I'm not sure anything has actually changed. Blogger was always for non-commercial blogs, and very few people make non-commercial porn. It seems like they are just enforcing the existing rules.
Remember when Google took payments from BP to redirect search queries to results that pointed to pro BP (PR agency) websites and religated real journalism and articles about public concern to the back pages of search results that rarely, if ever get seen?
No, because it didn't happen. BP bought some adwords, the same as anyone else can, and they were displayed in the same way as anyone else's. There was no redirection. It didn't knock news articles off the front page because adwords don't work like that. They don't alter search results, just display a clearly marked advert along side those results.
Google doesn't want porn on its blogging service. Fair enough, they don't owe you anything, run your porn site on your own dime.
Even if a ban was a good idea in principle (I am not sure it is), I don't see how it could possibly be enforced. Building a killer droid doesn't require any special technology that non-killer droids don't also use.
Enforcement doesn't have to be perfect to be worthwhile. If you look at things like land mines and cluster bombs they have become politically very difficult for developed nations to use, and seen as a sign that the user is evil. I'm sure in the future there will be more killer robots, but you probably won't see most countries creating squads of them or using them too openly.
The only other option is to create another MAD situation similar to nuclear weapons. Countries will build vast armies of killer robots but never be able to use them because no matter how many they have a few from the other side will get through and cause so much damage it will be game over for everyone. It would be nice if we could avoid that.
I think translation is becoming less important now because a lot of code is compiled from an intermediate form anyway, e.g. Java and
The other big issue used to be boot time with hardware that contained x86 code in ROM, executed by the BIOS. Apart from the security implications that meant that you needed special PCI cards for Macs which had PPC code instead of x86. With UFI ROMs it's all byte-code anyway with a light weight interpreter, and many EUFI BIOS are actually little Linux environments anyway so could do translation if they wanted to.
Europe had it even worse. You have no idea how bad European Dreamcast game boxes were... Anyway, it's interesting to look at the whole thing from the Japanese point of view. They got all the best games and Sega is still doing pretty well with its arcade business over there. They had even more hardware too, but seem more willing to spend money on it.
It made sense for Sega to become software only. Their strength was always their game development teams in Japan. It sucked for the west because a lot of the best games never came out here. By the time the Dreamcast rolled around hardware wasn't a big deal any more. By the next generation the consoles were pretty generic and the only real difference was a handful of exclusive games and who you wanted to screw you on subscriptions for online content.
And yet your card still worked, so it had a magstrip. And when I go back home to visit family (I'm canadian living in the US), my american cards work fine up there too. So someone could still clone your card, and use the copy.
Many retailers in the UK won't accept signatures any more, because it increases their liability for fraud. My banks tend to refuse signed for transactions anyway unless they are for fairly small amounts. In Japan where chip & pin isn't always the default option yet (it's probably 80% now), I sometimes have to ask to use my PIN instead of signing or it won't go through.
Phone payments are even better. One time code, can't be cloned or re-used. Arbitrary length password or PIN.
Phone payments offer more privacy and security than cards. The retailer gets a one-time code and that's it, not your card number and PIN which can then be abused.
She assumed that most of the people there were fine, until some of them started acting like the ones who are abusive.
That sounds like a fairly accurate description of modern life.
How would they ever prove it? The stolen documents will be inadmissible. Everything will be protected as a state secret. Their customers won't care of course, but the courts will.
Of course not. TFS is inaccurate, the threshold is what you are willing to tolerate to distract the little buggers for five minutes so you can have some peace. Commercial children's TV channels suggest adults will tolerate advertising to their kids if it keeps them occupied.
Let the machine do the dirty work. -- "Elements of Programming Style", Kernighan and Ritchie
