Our apps are already watching us beyond what we've authorized. How is that not malware?

Not at all.

The current paradigm is inherently flawed. You cannot expect what is asked of the users: To remember 20-30 secure passwords. Sure, some of use are rain men, but the security design is out of touch with reality. We need something common, like signed certificates.

Step 1: Create a solution. Like OpenID. Or maybe we already have a solution in OpenID.
Step 2: Mandate it.
Step 3: Make password authentication online illegal.

Seriously. That's what it's going to take. The HUGE, HUGE downside is that this will make us universally and easily traceable on the net. So there may not be a solution after all.

Yknow, a hat (or similar) with a built-in GPS and a short-range radar might in fact be a killer app(liance) for the blind. Maybe for the earplug-zombies too. It's just a matter of detecting the walking pace of the hat-wearer by the GPS lock, and then fetching the buildings from google maps. With that information, detecting anything massive enough to be dangerous and getting dangerously close would be a cakewalk.

Anyhow, you make an excellent point regarding losing an opportunity to quiet our cities. Maybe the cars can have a built-in mic that detects when to start making noise? It's simple enough: If there is noise in the area, the car needs to make some noise as well to be heard. (Up to a certain level, of course, we'd rather not have our cars engage in shouting matches)

Indeed. The worrisome bit is that the newspapers in question are not pulling their apps. That would really put Apple in a tough spot. But they are not standing up for freedom of speech. They should.

We know that CO2 traps energy. We have confirmed this information from experiments.

We know that the CO2 increase is mainly from fossil fuels. We have this information from isotope analysis.

The vast majority of the scientists who involve themselves in studies also agree that we are causing an increase of CO2. And that the CO2 increase causes the climate to become warmer on a global scale. Of course, this is additive to (and to some extent interacts with) normal cycles, but many alternative theories for the increase of CO2 and it's non-harmfulness have been tried and found false.

It's looking like we have a real problem on our hands. Unfortunately.

Hey, hey, hey, don't assign stagnated to slashdot! You mean slashdot == stagnated. (Unless you're writing Ada, then you're right)

It is assumed the artist had such a wild and crazy life that the offspring is traumatized for life, perhaps? I dunno. 30 years would be an appropriate time before releasing a work into the public domain, methinks. It will open up for a whole lot of insightful and interesting derivative works. And the artist would be a grown-up person (or old), fairly well-off and ready to see their works being mutilated and/or re-imagined into new amazing works by the combined forces of teh internets and art schools and artists. I think it sounds pretty darned nice!

Well - those statistics you cite include combatants as victims of terrorism. I'm not so sure that killing soldiers can be defined as act of terrorism, as terrorism is the act of targeting (perhaps also scaring) civilians with the intent of creating terror in the population.

So, let's discuss fatalities of the conflict as that's a less emotional and more rational term. Between 1987 and 2010, Israel has killed 7506 Palestinians of which 69% were civilians, the Palestinian side has killed 1540 people people within Israel's borders, of which 59% were civilians.

This would be interesting if it was the whole truth.

But it's not.

The packets are indeed non-material, but the infrastructure used to transport those packets is not non-material. It is very material, and it cost money to both expand and maintain that infrastructure.

Consider this:

Had we paid for our packets, having insufficient infrastructure would mean lost revenue for the ISP. Consequently, they would ensure they rarely saw a line go beyond 90-90% of capacity.

Currently, they rather put caps on the lines - since there's no profit for them to keep expanding the capacity. We pay them the same no matter how much or how little we use of their capacity.

It's pretty darned simple: We should pay for bytes not bandwidth.

Really. Max speed for everyone. Trigger emails or SMS'es whenever a configurable threshold is passed for this month, optionally throttle the connection until the end-user approves of the extra bill. Also,the ISP contacts you if they suspect you're a node in some bot-net (e.g. excessive traffic on SMTP).

The internet is infrastructure, analogous to electricity. We'd destroy the earth even quicker if power hogs paid the same price for electricity as those who are environmentally conscious and save electricity whenever they can. Indeed, the power hogs would in effect be sponsored by those who are environmentally conscious. That's pretty much what's going on right now on the internet: We have perverse rewards in place.

Disclaimer: I've never used OpenBSD.

However, there are two angles to securing the system, and that is:

1. Fixing the code so that it does only what it is supposed to do. This includes security fixes.
2. Designing the code so that you can restrict access to resources (data etc) in a reliable way.

3. 1. Both must be addressed for a system to be both secure and usable.

      As far as I understand from the links and the discussion, OpenBSD is best-in-class at point nr 1, and pretty terrible at point nr 2. A system is no more secure than point 1 dictates (what use is there in access restrictions and services if they are full of holes?!), but the system is only as useful as point 2 allows without compromising security. It's a hard problem. And it sorta seems like OpenBSD is avoiding touching point nr 2? Am I wrong here?

I agree. When we were kids, we had the time to keep perfecting. I guess they still do, judging from the multiplayer action. And keeping attempting to beat that difficult boss is actually a fundamentally different experience than lowering the difficulty level. If you invest a lot of frustration into a game (I remember 10 or 20 or more attempts to complete something), it will feel like one helluva achievement to beat the game. Not the same if you have to try two or three times before you proceed.

And I think we, the grownups, are to "blame" for this. I can take months to complete games. Obviously, I'm not a big gamer anymore - but I find it entertaining enough once in a while. I certainly play at "Please don't hurt me"-difficulty levels. And we, the grown-up low-key gamers are legion. We probably make up a very solid chunk of the market. After all, to us 50 bucks is not a whole lot of money. It's money, but not a whole lot, so we have a lower treshold to pick something up just to try it. And consequentially, if you measure hours spent in the game, we will be a much smaller demographic.

No. Each of those phenomena will have to be explained separately.

You think they're too afraid of retaliation to do something like that?

Yes. Iran is doing fairly well as a regional major power. For all the rethoric towards Israel and hatred towards jews, if Israel was obliterated and Iran was obliterated, how would Ahmadinejad be able to continue to gain influence in Iraq and Lebanon?

Keep in mind that Ahmadinejad has one Sunni nuclear power is surrounded by Sunni nuclear power, and two countries holding a serious number of US soldiers and firepower (Iraq and Afghanistan). He definitely would not want to appear weak.

Of course, he may find he has no other choice than to suffer the fate of Saddam: Pretending to be more dangerous than he really is to deter regional enemies, and then attract even more dangerous enemies. Iran is a proud country with few good options. Ideally, they'll change their priorities, but until then we cannot expect Iran to be subtle and feeble.

There's competition to keep Apple in line. Windows 7 is not that bad (this is written on an iMac running Snow Leopard). And Linux also holds potential if a vendor was to scrap most of the apps, build their own, make an app store (to attract pro developers) and tailor-make a development environment including libraries that made things a bit more standardised. It can be done. Apple did much of the same when they created OSX.

But until Apple gets its act together and produces some acceptable terms on their app store, I'm staying with Android. I want quality control, not arbitrary censorship in an app store. And since Android became mainstream, you have no doubt noticed that Apple is a bit less restrictive in their policies. Apple will not admit this, of course, but the fact remains: Whenever there is competition in their half in the playing field, Apple will adapt to the situation.