No, actually, I comment at the end that we could do this now, but that companies don't want to.

No, I'm proposing that there be industry standards. There wasn't a government regulator necessary to determine that email providers must use SMTP to transfer email. It's just the standard, and it doesn't make sense for individual companies to go against the standard because it would cut themselves off from interoperability with everyone else.

Umm... bullshit? Ok, provide me with instructions on how to have Google Docs and Gmail store all my email and files on Dropbox in a way that's supported by Google. They may have some APIs for some things, but they aren't working with Apple and Microsoft to create a vendor agnostic platform for web storage. And why are you all defensive and butthurt over Google?

I've been trying to make the point for a while now that I think we really need to rethink the design of the Internet.

Not on the level that you might be thinking. You might be thinking about how the infrastructure is laid out, or revisions to TCP or IP standards, new languages to supplant CSS or javascript, or some other technical issue. Though those might be problems, that isn't what I'm referring to. I'm referring to the vertical integration of web services that make our information extremely fragmented and impossible to track.

Just to give an anecdotal example, right now, I have at least 4 different Internet data storage accounts. Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, iCloud, and my web host's storage. That's because, if I want to share documents with someone using OfficeOnline, I need a OneDrive account. If I want to share documents with someone using Google Docs, I need a Google Drive account. If I want to use the features on my Mac and iPhone, I need an iCloud account. And then each of these services has its own authentication service, i.e. I have to create and manage separate accounts with separate passwords for each. The account names and passwords might have different requirements. The dual-factor authentication on each, if it's available, might work differently. And this is just talking about a small subset of the services that I use online.

If you asked me to list all of the websites that I've used over the years, and provide a list of what information I've had to provide to each one, I wouldn't know where to begin. A lot of these sites require security questions, which is generally a terrible idea. Each site requires that I pay for services by providing my credit card information. Lots of services online and in real life require a host of personal information to authenticate your real-life identity, but every time you provide your social security number as proof of identity (for example), you're increasing the number of people who potentially have access to that social security number, and therefore the number of people who could make unauthorized use of that number.

Without getting too deep into the solution I'd propose (hint: public-key encryption), I think we need to consolidate both the authentication and the data storage of all of these different services. Whether you use Google Docs or Microsoft Office Live or some other web-based document editor, you should be able to store and manage the documents in a consistent place, accessed through a standard API.

So why am I bringing this up here? Well, it related to the Internet of Things, also, in that all of that information should be able to be encrypted so that only you can access it, and then stored in a location of your choosing. It shouldn't matter which device or who manufactured it-- if it's your device, you should be able to control where the data is sent, store it with your own encryption key, and no one should be able to access it without your authorization.

Of course, none of this will happen, because it requires that we create a set of standards that everyone abides by. Meanwhile, Google wants to have their standards that serve their purposes and keep users in their walled gardens, Apple wants their own standards to keep users in their walled gardens, and Facebook wants their own standards for the same reasons. That's why we have all these different Messaging applications, and none of them can inter-operate, even when they're doing something as simple as passing text back and forth.

We've covered this. You're a crazy German who has somehow assumed that, because you once said something in Greek and your Greek friend didn't criticize you, the German pronunciation of any word in any dialect of any language is proper, and the only people in the world who disagree are English speakers who are somehow all dumber than you.

Once we uncovered that much information, it stopped being worth my time to compose real responses. The fact that you don't believe linguists are capable of studying languages is just the last nail in the coffin. I've read your responses up until now, but I won't read any more. It's a waste of time. I'm guessing you're probably a 12 year-old or a mental case anyway.

Well as I understood it, the argument that Snowden's leaks had helped terrorists centered around the idea that, prior to the leaks, terrorists wouldn't have known that they were being monitored, or at least wouldn't have known the manner in which they were being monitored. Now that they knew that they were being monitored, and they had additional information about how they were being monitored, they would be able to change their behavior to avoid detection.

So if we can say that these terrorist organizations have not changed their behavior, it goes a long way towards debunking that theory.

Yeah, I actually really like the quote, "well prior to Edward Snowden, online jihadists were already aware that law enforcement and intelligence agencies were attempting to monitor them."

Really? Terrorists were aware that law enforcement were attempting to track and monitor them? Next thing you know, we'll find out that the mob is aware of law enforcement attempting to locate evidence and identify potential witnesses. What a shocker.

Yeah, I don't want to put words in anyone else's mouth, but I feel like there's been some cognitive dissonance in response to the Snowden leaks.

I've had conversations with people who, on the one hand, claim that what Snowden revealed couldn't possibly be helpful or meaningful, because he leaked things that "everyone already knew anyway". Meanwhile, on the other hand, they also claim that Snowden is a horrible traitor for releasing vital national secrets that threaten our safety. I feel like you can't have it both ways.

As I see it, he took what was a conspiracy theory that few people in the USA took seriously, and turned it into fact. It would be like leaking documents that JFK was, in fact, assassinated by the CIA, and then people responded by saying, "So what? I've been hearing that rumor for years! Still, we should kill the person who leaked it because he's compromising CIA operations."

I think you're going to run into a general problem here, in that modern computers are generally not built to work off of such slow Internet connections. They're constantly getting big updates and patches.

Some people have pointed you in the direction of Chromebooks, which to my knowledge doesn't have a POP3 client available because Google assumes you'll have web access. There may be other reasons why it won't work.

I think your first instinct might be best. Install Linux. Figure out exactly what applications they need, and install only those apps. You can probably hack something together to run a script when they receive an email from you, but I think you'll be better off just having them run a script manually (tell them 'click on this button') that will collect diagnostic information and email it to you, if you want to do that.

Pick a relatively stable distro (Debian?), strip it down to the bare necessities and use a lightweight desktop environment. Set it to only download security patches. For any updates more than that, bring a disk when you visit.

I'm afraid none of this will keep them from responding to Nigerian scammers. Maybe set up their email to only accept messages from whitelisted addresses? Or maybe your parents just can't have the Internet.

Ok, so what I'm taking away from this conversation is simply that you are a highly opinionated person who doesn't know what Attic Greek is. It's a dialect of ancient Greek, and it was not pronounced the same as modern Greek. So when I'm talking about Attic Greek being pronounced in some way, it's not really a sensible argument to say that I'm wrong because modern Greeks pronounce it differently. They're different dialects separated by thousands of years. It would be like insisting that people in Renaissance England used the same pronunciation as the English do today, when we know very factually that they did not.

Your arguments, frankly, are crazy and ignorant, so I don't feel like arguing anymore.

You can, and people do. In order to study dead languages (or dialects, or accents that no longer exist), linguists can sometimes find old writings from the time and place that describe how things are supposed to be pronounced. That makes things relatively easy. Without those kinds of sources, they can do things like analyze poetry or songs from the time, and figure out how the poetry was supposed to sound. They can look at puns and figure out which words were supposed to sound similar. It may not be a perfect science, but through years of studying these kinds of things, people can get a pretty good idea of how words were pronounced.

Not in Attic Greek, it's not.

Well in the ancient Greek, IIRC, it would have been more like A-kill-e-oos (except the K sound would be a sound that we don't have in English), and Americans tend to pronouncing it as Ak-kill-ees, but that's neither here nor there. It sounds like you're maybe making the mistake of thinking that your German pronunciation is the absolute correct pronunciation, regardless of what language is being spoken or how the original language would have pronounced it.

Well you implied that you weren't American, so maybe it's your accent? Because pronouncing the "eu" like you would in "feud" makes "Zeus" pronounced like "Zoooooos".

Except for the fact that people have studied it quite a lot, and have a pretty good idea of how it was pronounced.

Under Jobs at least, that didn't seem to be the design philosophy. The design philosophy was more to make things, simple, clean, elegant, and transparent to the user. Making a product that people can't get anywhere else? That's not that hard. Making a good product is hard, and if you make a good enough product, then people won't be able to get it anywhere else.

Yeah, I guess it's not so bad if you assume that you're going to have a case, and that the case thickness will result in a flat back to the whole thing. I hadn't really thought of that.

Still, I think it's a bad choice. It seems kind of dumb to design your product with the idea that the dumb design won't be quite so dumb if you also buy a case.

I don't know how their design people allowed a protruding lens in the first place. It really runs contrary to Apple's design sensibility, but I guess we're seeing the first evidence of what happens to Apple without Jobs. The protrusion is ugly, and it mars the flat, smooth design.

And for what? Assuming that they can't make the camera any thinner, make the phone slightly fatter, and make use of the extra space. It's not as though the iPhone 5 was obscenely thick and needed to be made thinner. Hell, just fill the rest of the thing out with additional battery, and give us more battery life.