I actually heard some good things about it. Not 'This is the End' good, but not far off. I think the problem is that it would entirely disrupt the narrative the poster or writer is trying to convey if The Interview is anything but awful tripe. I doubt it will be winning any Oscars, but I've heard nothing from people who've actually see that suggests that its worse than decent, and it might even be pretty good.

I was a conference, GeoWeb I think it was, in 2008. It was for web-based GIS (Geographic Information Systems), basically cartography & the web. This was maybe a year or two after Google bought out Keyhole, and Michael Jones (I think it was him) from Google was there. Also, Google had just released Chrome so there was a lot of discussion about it. I wanted to pick Jones' brain about some KML eccentricities because I had just written a KML reader & writer. I had to wait behind about five other people who just wanted to talk to him because he was from Google.

One conversation though sticks out. Some guy (who seemed somewhat sycophantic for some reason) was going on & on about how Chrome was going to change the world because it was from Google, and they'd make sure it was awesome and because they could use their influence to make sure everyone used it. I remember that Jones cut him off there (sounding more than a little annoyed) and he told the guy (paraphrasing): "Google can't make anyone use anything we write. The search engine lets us put anything we create in front of their eyes at least once -- that's it. If they try it, it has to live or die on its own merits, we can't force people to try or use it."

I'm going to have to disagree with you as well :)

My brother started taking photography seriously when he was living in Japan for a year. Within a year he went from being general capable (I can take a picture and that's it) to being fairly expert. Enough that he considered briefly making a living doing photography. He credits a lot of that rapid growth to getting instant feedback. Yes, people just taking pictures willy nilly and & looking at the results by itself does not make for fast skill building. But I would suggest that for someone who is interested in the craft, it is impossible to not see that immediate feedback -- even if you still need to fire the picture up in a power editor to be 100% sure -- versus taking pictures in a black hole and not seeing the results for hours at a minimum is an incredibly faster iterative cycle.

If the same people who grew up fascinated with cameras & photography thirty years ago had the digital cameras of today when they started out, there is no doubt at all that they would have become the experts they eventually became much, much, MUCH faster.

But obviously it has to be something a person cares about and invests the time to learn. Learning about composition, aperture, exposure & white balance are all important things, but they're things you can learn about a hell of a lot faster when you can do it in the field and see theory put into practice before your very eyes.

Isn't that what Seacrest's Typo (currently in litigation with BlackBerry) keyboard/case is for?

Doesn't Google already have this? The Android Device Manager lets you remotely locate, lock or find your device. Is there something more to this 'kill switch'? Does it permanently disable the phone?

The family sharing thing would be very nice to have as a recently married man. I have a large music library (though probably tiny to a lot of people, big to me!) that she'd like to access and it seems silly that we can't just both be able to play from it. Ditto books, movies, etc.

That said, I fully expect that over time this kind of thing will come to everyone on every platform. Microsoft kind of dipped their feet into this during the X-Box One debacle, though what they were talking about is now irrelevant given they dropped that whole aspect of their platform. Apple adding it will speed things along, and it doesn't surprise me that they're first; I imagine this will require some licensing hoop jumping and whatever else I think of Apple, they do seem to have a lot more muscle in that department.

Well, fortunately iOS 8 adds a bunch of things that Android has had forever, so that will help the problem!

I'm sure that's how it will start, but they'll lose patience eventually, and probably not all that far down the road. Our Objective-C guy here is already reading up on SWIFT despite our large Objective-C codebase, not because he thinks it'll let him improve anything but because he'll need to know it when they deep six Objective-C in a couple of years. To be fair, anyone who writes Apple software should be used to that at this point, so Apple probably knows that any of their developers with an ounce of common sense will start coming up with a plan on how to move all their stuff to SWIFT over the next few years.

The Montreal Gazette article covers that. They asked a computer security consultant and he said the 24-hour delay was pretty reasonable given the impact taking down the site would have on people given the timing (tax season); not so much that they waited before doing it so much as it was a reasonable time to discuss it and come to a decision. So my guess is that no one will get burned over that.

The real questions are fairly simple: when did the breach occur, and how did they know? Also, how did they know 900 SIN numbers were taken and how do they know more weren't? None of these are necessarily conspiracy-esque questions, but they're relevant. Though it sounds like the CRA may not be at liberty to say anything about some (or any) of that, having been asked by the RCMP not to while they firm up charges.

I agree with you, but I think we really need something other than first-past-the-post to make it really work right. It's great that we have these parties bubbling around as you say, but it'd better if the composition of parliament looked a little more like what popular support says it should. It's a bit weird to have parties with, say, 25% popular support have less than 10% of the house, for example. Still, everytime I get annoyed with our system, I watch the Daily Show or Colbert Report and get reminded how good we actually have it.

I think you're right that perception is a big problem. It would be really, really helpful if there was some objective way to measure how rarely a news source gets stuff wrong. Kind of like a Golden Glove for news. If news organizations could compete for that instead of their version of "First post!", it could only be better.

I completely agree, but you missed my follow-up point. They were already doing that more or less before the Internet era sprung on them (and to be fair, the 24-hour news channel didn't help). The problem is that those that kept doing that start losing ground to those that put the horse before the cart, as you put it. And that happened because we all tuned into the "Latest breaking something-we'll-check-later" News. I'm not saying they're blameless, but we definitely have a huge heaping share of the responsibility.

And I also agree about the obvious party affiliations, but I think a lot of that falls into "Tell people what they want to hear and they'll tune in." That isn't hurting their viewership unfortunately, it's helping. Again, that's largely on us. We should probably be tuning into news sources that offer differing opinions rather than the one we agree with, because when those guys look at the numbers, we're voting with our eyeballs that we *want* political affiliation. It's a case of "we want what isn't actually good for us."

Actually, I disagree. Compliance with the law is the heart of the problem, the question is: whose law?

While I'm no fan Turkey's repressive laws, I do wonder how what Turkey is mad about differs all that much from the US or whomever complaining about pirated content being posted in countries where that's not illegal.

If country A does something we don't agree with, it's okay for technology to circumvent that. If country B does something we don't agree with, it's not okay for technology to circumvent that. The bottom line here seems to be less about technology and more: in a globally interconnected world, how do we decide what laws get applied where? So far it largely seems to be decided by the US leaning on anyone they don't agree with. You can bet if the positions were reversed, Turkey would be leaning on the US government to discipline Twitter. This works great if its something you agree with, and less so when its something you don't (maybe copyright laws). I could say we're fortunate that its the US with the Big Stick and not someone else, but maybe we only think that because we're in the West so we tend to align with our own values? And even if this works great, what happens when someone else takes possession of the Big Stick (China maybe?). Perhaps this won't be so appealing then?

I've often thought about what differentiates a blogger from a journalist. To suggest that there is no difference is demeaning to journalists -- and yes, I know there are lots of those are hardly worthy of the name, but to just flatly equate the two is unjust to the professional, fact-checking variety that is supposed to be the standard.

Before the rise of the internet, there was no platform for any old person to put their opinion in print (digital or otherwise) and reach a broad audience. Sure, you could print up pamphlets and hand them out on street corners, but wide distribution was gated by publishers. We've removed a lot of middlemen between content producers and content consumers, and a lot of that is probably good. But one of the benefits (and problems in some cases) was that some of those middlemen provided filtering. It's great that we no longer have that filtering in one aspect; it's allowed a lot of things that the 'powers that be' judged uninteresting and turned out not to be so. But it also means that a lot of pure noise that was filtered out is now crowding out the signal in some cases.

Part of the problem journalism faces is that in order to compete on speed, they're skipping steps. There was a time when a juicy story was held back while they triple-checked it. That happens less & less because time-to-print (or broadcast, etc.) has become the defining metric. When you're competing with someone who doesn't check anything they put up, you start to look pretty follow-the-leaders when you post after fact-checking.

So while some of this is definitely a problem for journalists, namely how to stay relevant in a world of instant publication, a lot of this is our fault too. If we were willing to wait a bit, preferring immediately accuracy instead of immediate attention grabbing, it would give those who want to do things right the breathing room to verify. So long as we're all grabbing click bait the second its available, we're screaming loud and clear to the conglomerates that run our news media that its far more important to be first than accurate.

I think Sparkfun is out either way from what I understand. They're planning on giving the Fluke ones away to educational institutions, but they seem much happier about this than just flat out losing the $30k worth of meters.