Stockpiles of exploits? Sounds like some reporter is out of his/her depth and can't understand the difference between physical weapon stockpiles and software vulnerabilities. Welcome to the new Yellow Journalism. FUD, FUD and more FUD.

Good point. But a quick sip isn't exactly something I depend on, right? That was the real point. If one source of marginally interesting information flow gets ruined, there are plenty of other things to do. My mental well-being doesn't depend on 'consumption' of what Comcast/TWC might control. Maybe I'll just take the kayak down to the river and paddle around for a bit, take the dog for a walk or take the bike out for a spin. Comcast/TWC can DIAF.

A better description would be that information flows around me like a river during a flood and I reach down from the bank and scoop out a little bit for a sip on a hot day. Then I turn around and take a walk in the woods. Control that, Comcast!

Yep. That's right. So why do we care about the opinion of this man? I'm not feeling it.

Why yes. Yes we did: http://features.slashdot.org/s...

Do not want.

It shows they have a sense of humor, given the effort it must have taken to make a 'better PHP'.

I'm old enough to remember all this too. And despite the picture you paint of a horrible dystopia, things were just fine. We managed to communicate with each other and the world continued turning. And if you didn't make long-distance or out-of-country calls (because you didn't need to very often), you didn't have to pay those costs, so your monthly bill was quite small. In the modern utopia, I pay a monthly fee that's ten times that of the bad old days for services I need only occasionally, if at all, because I'm given no other choice. We don't need to turn the clock back, but we might want to reexamine what we accept as normal, because the value for money doesn't seem to be nearly as favorable now.

Cool, thanks.

Thanks for that transcript. It seems to clarify some things (the questions you were asking and the answers) but raises others. Such as why the desperate push to move to an entirely new infrastructure that's apparently incompatible with the old, requires Firefox Accounts and introduces "recoverable" keys (in the hands of Mozilla) alongside the current non-recoverable keys that only the client has. The rather vague answer was the 'recoverable' keys were for some nebulous future service of benefit to the user (Mozilla can recover their data for them), but my tinfoil hat tells me it also allows Mozilla to recover user data for another party like the NSA. It smells a bit too much like a back door, because we can't have user-only encryptable and decryptable data in the cloud now, can we? They claim that it doesn't touch the data encrypted with the non-recoverable key, but that's just a claim.

I'm not optimistic about an addon to maintain current sync functionality (at the current breakneck pace Mozilla is moving it would be difficult to maintain), so perhaps they will release their new server code as open source. We'll see.

I have the same general concerns you did but am less trusting, so I set up my own sync server. Check out Run your own Sync Server at mozilla.com.

If you're technically inclined, familiar with general LAMP server management and have a personal linux server handy, it isn't that hard. There's a time investment up front, but once I got it running, it's been working flawlessly across several platforms and multiple browser profiles. I hope they deprecate the old sync behavior but keep it in place for awhile to give time to migrate to the new sync behavior. It's been working so well it's been "set it (up) and forget it" since I first got it running, so it will take a little time just to remember the details so I can migrate to the new server code (assuming there is even a viable migration pathway).

That said, the old sync that required the code to add new browser instances (ie. Firefox on another device or OS) was a little cumbersome, so making that a little simpler would be welcome. That would make it easier for other members of the household to manage their own devices without requiring me to set up and manage it for them.

Not to defend him by any means, but in this instance his statement is no more stupid than invoking 1984 or other dystopian works of fiction as the reason the Snooper's Charter is to be avoided. Fiction they may be, but these works portray possibilities that inform how things might turn out in reality given a course of action, even if the actual outcome resembles the fictional scenario only in kind, not in actual detail. The ability to gain insight into ourselves is one of the many reasons we find works of art valuable in the first place. The key is not to confuse fiction with reality which admittedly many do.

Here's another timeline that's even more interesting because it interleaves the NWS advisories with the actions of various government/municipal entities and school officials:

Winter Storm 2014 Timeline (from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

Not true. *Early* forecasts suggested that, but subsequent updates by the National Weather Service *did* call for several inches of snow, and *did* include metro Atlanta in the impacted area, well in advance of the actual storm (by early Monday morning). There was plenty of time to prepare, had officials been paying more attention to the forecasts and less to the political impact of "crying wolf".

From The Weather Channel (emphasis mine):

What did the fox say?

The concern isn't necessarily about what's in the house (though putting the pets at risk due to extreme heat/cold could result from a hack). It's the information gathered by the thermostat(s) that has value. There's the usual metadata that can be added to your "profile" for purposes of advertisement. The Nest and similar devices can also reveal information about your habits, like when you are present/absent from the house, how long, time spent in each room (the Nest has a motion sensor). That could be useful for thieves, govt or law enforcement officials interested in knowing when the house is unoccupied or where you are likely to be should they wish to find you.