I seriously had to stop and read this twice. Apparently hell froze over.

Like Mozilla switching to Bing will ever end well. I can see Ballmer on the edge of the chair (he was about to throw), trying to keep a poker face and not burst out in evil laughter.

In Gerrold's Chtorr series, they used this. A lot of US military tech was in the hands of rebels, and they just deployed a kill switch. But in the book, it was expressed as a last-ditch measure. Once you use it, everyone knows about it, and you lose the advantage. Suddenly all the US allies were very, very concerned, as they began to wonder what US technology wasn't booby trapped.

I'd be really surprised we'd just hand this over to the Israelis if we had it. I'd think we would be saving this for a major military catastrophe for the US--kind of a "oh crap, we are up against the wall and this is our only hope of stopping the enemy." Because you only get to use it once with real effectiveness. Blowing it on a raid by another country (who would have taken them out anyways) seems stupid.

*shudder*

I remember reading that in High School. It freaked me out then, and it freaks me out now!

Forcing companies to standardize?!? Will no one think of the innovation? Who's protecting the innocent innovation from being preyed upon?

They sarcastically slam Boston, but then list it as one of the 10 cities where "all the IT jobs are". So make up your mind already.

And as someone living in Boston, screw you and your list :-)

A business partner did this, and a month later he had $6k of bogus charges on his credit card. So be aware that these people are probably not above reselling your info and then throwing up their hands and saying, "Oh my, how'd that happen?"

Whoa. That was seriously cool ... and a little creepy. The action on the penguins was eerie!

However, lawmakers overwhelming voted to get rid of them (117-3 in the House, 42-9 in the Senate), because "the cameras were an invasion of privacy and their constituents thought they had been unfairly ticketed."

So despite the company and local municipalities profiting from this, constituents actually made their voices heard and their representatives acted accordingly?

I am deeply confused. This is not the democracy I am used to. I'm going to have to find something else to be cynical about today.

You aren't imagining it--iPhone 2.0 brought this wonderful feature :-(

Apparently people complained about missing text messages, and Apple's solution was to give you two--with no option to opt out. Great. I just don't get how you go to two without an option to stay at one. Sigh.

I know right now they have this one connection that they send push notifications down. I'd love some way to attach my other mail servers to that channel.

I'm not expecting to see that any time (if ever), but man, that would completely and utterly rock. I could hook my work Zimbra server into that channel and get instant notification of work email. I've gotten so used to MobileMe/.Mac being that way that it sucks having work be on a 15 minute refresh.

And yes, once you get used to it, you want to know immediately for all the rest of your email. Right now, I just set my phone to silent with vibrate off when I need privacy--then the phone just leaves me be during my DND times.

Right now, it defaults to once, and if you don't unlock the phone, it does it again. I'd like to set it just to once ... period. I figure if they allow you to set it to once, why not to X with some suitable max value.

But I'd settle for once. I get a lot of texts while in meetings, and I don't need the confusing second notification in there making me think I got another. Right now, I just glance at the screen and see what's there without unlocking--it's annoying when I see it's the same text from before.

The update reverted Scalar::Util, which disabled the weak reference stuff needed by a lot of Catalyst libs. I just re-installed it and it worked again.

But on all my new machines, I just use a local lib instead of the system stuff. I don't need sudo access and then the whole lib gets backed up by Time Machine. If you just upgrade the system perl, you have to re-do it every time you restore from a Time Machine backup (it doesn't copy system stuff as near as I can tell).

Also, as some have observed, CPAN is a bad idea. I say this as someone who got screwed when Catalyst went to 5.7100 (I was at 5.7015). When I did a restore to a new machine, CPAN got all the new Catalyst libs and all my customizations blew up spectacularly.

If you are doing serious Perl development on your local Mac, use a local lib and do not rely on CPAN to automatically handle your dependencies. Install things by hand or create a (perl) script to handle the deps for you. That's what we had to do, as we needed to make sure the module version we used matched our production systems--where we do NOT use CPAN and where we upgrade manually and with careful thought.

When I moved across the US a year ago, I had a ton of older hardware and less room to move into (house to apartment). Basically, I gave everything away that I wasn't actively using.

Rather than muck about with secure erasing or degaussers, I just took the dozen drives out to the shed and beat the daylights out of them. Most of my machines were in various states of not running--so the amount of time I would have had to spend putting together a working machine, swapping around more than a dozen older drives, running secure erase on them ... well, it just seemed a lot simpler. There was no way I was giving intact hard drives to random people I did not know, especially drives that may or may not have been erased enough.

I recommend safety goggles. Some of the boards tend to shatter and send little bits flying everywhere :-)

Could some super spy possibly lift data? Maybe. But no ID theft script kiddie will. I saw it like using a paper shredder--only a lot more fun. Sure, some super spy agency might be able to re-assemble shredded documents or lift data from the mangled platters of my drives--but why should I be worried about them? They already have a current file on me, I'm sure--they don't need old drives ;-)

A friend of mine put it nicely: "There's nothing like the feeling of raw destruction you can wreak with a 10lb sledgehammer." It's right up there with using a proper chainsaw. Deconstructing stuff is *fun* :-D

If I am ever worried about super-spies, I look forward to discovering the wonderful destructive power of thermite :-)