Heck things had changed 15 years ago. I don't know when mjwx went to school but a broad swathe of religions have been taught in UK comprehensives for a long time.

The most important thing to remember is:

THIS IS GREAT NEWS FOR BITCOIN!!

Moreflicks lets you see what's available on multiple streaming services based on various "best of" lists (e.g. it's unlikely Netflix will ever tie in to the IMDB top 250 but Moreflicks does) and even has support for countries like the UK. It's sad to see an ecosystem like this being removed without replacement...

I don't think it has to be explained why this is a potential problem. So then, it should be explained why this is such a great idea that the problems it creates are insignificant.

The Android permissions model is a mess and has been since day one, but not in the way most Slashdot geeks are up in arms about. When was the last time you actually looked at the full list of permissions? It's ridiculous. You have to be an Android developer to understand some of them. Many are pointless in the extreme: the result of simply associating every API with a permission whether it makes sense or not. Do I really need to know that an app might use the vibrator when I install it? A few permissions aren't even written in understandable English, so god knows what they become when translated into a language like Arabic or Chinese.

What's more, others (like the internet access permission) have never worked. People think it means "you can give this app personal data and it can't upload that data to the internet", but it never did that, because for example there are OS services that let you configure them to retrieve and process data from arbitrary URLs. The media player component does that. You can ask the OS to play music from a URL without having internet access permission, and it'll do it, so just put your personal data into the URL of your "music file" and the data gets uploaded. Heck even just invoking the web browser with a long mystery URL will let your internet-less app upload small amounts of data to the net. And there's no real way to fix any of this because any app that exposes services to other apps that involve downloading from a user-provided URL would end up breaking the "can't upload" model. So now they're hiding the internet access permission entirely, and good riddance.

Conclusion: the permissions framework was badly thought out. It was designed to let you know when apps might do something nasty to the OS, as a way to defend against aggressive apps that would otherwise do what they do on Windows and reconfigure the entire computer at install time. But there were no UI guidelines about how and when to use it, so it became a dumping ground for technical nonsense hardly any users understand. Worse, over time people's expectations have changed, and now some of them want it to be some all singing all dancing privacy framework that gives you a million knobs to tweak, even though it was never meant to be that.

Perhaps in future Android will actually get an all singing, all dancing privacy framework that does what people want, but it probably won't be a part of the app permissions system, which is meant to be for security. And it's not easy. A lot of the hacks people throw around in this thread could be easily detected and apps could just refuse to run entirely if you try and fool them.

OLDUVAI GORGE, Warringah, Monday (NTN) — A new theory suggests that Tony Abbott's ancestors evolved remarkably punchable facial features, accounting for people's deep desire to do so today.

The bones most commonly broken in prehistoric Liberal Party punch-ups gained the most strength in early "conservative" evolution. They are also the bones that show most divergence between Liberals and Nationals.

The paper, in the journal Guardian Australia, argues that the reinforcements evolved amid fighting over females and resources, in which communication by kicking each other's heads drove key policy changes.

Fossil records show that Australopithecus menzieii had strikingly robust facial structures. This was long seen as an adaptation to a tough diet including nuts, seeds and Malcom Turnbull's balls. But more recent findings suggest that violent intra-party competition was the cause: the "protective buttressing hypothesis".

Interestingly, the evolutionary descendants of Australopithecus — including more left-leaning humans — have displayed less and less facial buttressing. "Human arms and upper bodies are not nearly as strong as those found in Liberal Party members," said the author, Prof David Carrier, dusting off his gloves.

Studies from Canberra emergency wards show that faces are particularly vulnerable to violent injuries, many self-inflicted from being banged against desks when Coalition policy proposals reach the news.

"The historical record goes back a short time, but anatomy holds clues as to what selection was important, what behaviours were important; and so it gives us important information about what caveman notion Mr Abbott is going to come out with next."

Photo: Tony Abbott actually getting punched in the face. What a happy-making photograph this is.

Unless your graphics driver provides a full 3D stack (userspace GL libraries down to kernel drivers) you will be using Mesa on Linux. You are probably thinking of Mesa as purely a software renderer whereas it is also used as a frontend to open source 3D drivers and uses DRI to provide access to the hardware's acceleration.

I've yet to see binary any drivers use Mesa.

And how does the phone learn when a new tower goes online? That scheme isn't going to work.

Beating Stingray devices can be done, if we assume that telco's don't approve of Stingray devices. Given that Stingrays interfere with their services, given that they bypass their own power and authority, given that all people like power and authority, given that they can charge the government for processing legal requests and court orders, and given that they were forced to spend lots of money on doing interception the "proper" way by CALEA, this isn't totally unreasonable.

If you're willing to assume that, the best way to beat Stingray's is to disable GSM support in your phone's baseband somehow. In GSM, towers authenticate the handset but handsets do not authenticate the towers, because portable cell towers did not seem like a threat that could surface within the intended lifespan of the technology. UMTS (3G) fixed this problem and now handsets do cryptographic handshakes with the tower.

I am assuming that the reason US cops are fighting so hard to stop info about Stingray's coming out is that these are tools used by little tinpot forces that can't be bothered getting real warrants, not the NSA who prefer to just directly compromise the backhaul networks. Therefore most likely they do not have the keys needed to emulate the real cell towers. If it came out that forcing a phone to 3G+ only could stop them connecting to Stingray's, that's a setting that'd suddenly appear in all kinds of aftermarket firmwares and heck probably Android upstream itself, and then some of the people they're going after would simply tick the "ignore Stingrays" box.

Is there any reason that reducing pointless barriers to trade has to occur in one giant all-or-nothing pact, instead of lots of little treaties over a period of years that don't depend on each other?

I'm all for the notion of free trade in theory, but the problem with treaties like these (and the EU in general, and the US Federal government, etc) is that their notion of "free trade" tends to simply mean "trade under the rules of whatever is biggest" rather than what the term mentally implies, i.e. people trading without lots of red tape getting in their way.

Given the absolute and total weakness of EU "leadership" when it comes to demands by the USA, I suspect any trade deal reached between the EU and USA would simply amount to adjusting EU law to match whatever Congress already came up with regardless of whether it makes sense or not. So this seems like a good incentive to not go for it, for Europeans. Unfortunately both America and EU increasingly tend to enforce their laws internationally, regardless of jurisdiction, so in the end I'm not sure it really matters much anyway: in a globalised world with lots of trade between rich countries you end up with a horrific hodge podge of conflicting laws and regulations, with companies trying to comply with all of them and ultimately putting their hope on lax enforcement to be able to remain in business. I don't see much of a way to solve this, short of a sea change in the level of government intervention in trade people tolerate.

Why? Even if you disregard the reports that have described close cooperation, and exchange of employees, between Google and NSA and other TLA agencies.

Which reports? Could you show me these reports describing close cooperation with respect to spying on people between Google and the NSA?

And the head of Google publicly stating that "you have no privacy, get over it".

I think you are grossly misquoting Eric Schmidt who said words to the effect of, people have to understand the PATRIOT Act, what powers it gives the US government and how little companies can do to fight it. They can't assume they can put stuff into Google and have it be inaccessible to the US Govt. And you know what? He was dead right, wasn't he? But he got crucified by idiots like you for unemotionally stating the facts of the law. A better example of shooting the messenger is hard to find.

What about Google's actions or solutions are so different than the other players that they have earned that trust.

Which other players do you mean? If you mean, big web companies, how about:

Being the first big webmail provider to enable SSL for everyone, all the time. Being the first to develop and then open source TLS forward secrecy code (ephemeral EC Diffie Hellman), then being first to activate it. Developing the first SSL pinning implementation, and catching Iran when they tried to use a hacked CA to monitor everyone. Being first to encrypt all internal traffic, something Yahoo is planning to catch up on maybe by the end of this year. Being first to publish transparency reports. Being first to publish statistics on SMTP TLS to help shame companies into upgrading (looking at you Apple). Being first to add and activate new ciphersuites in TLS (ChaCha20 and Curve25519) to replace the horribly broken RC4. Being first to release a new, modern PGP implementation.

If you put down the Google hate I think you'll find they've done a heck of a lot and routinely raised the bar over the past few years. No, they don't collectively march themselves to jail when served with a court order but that's a failure of our governments and indirectly the people who elect them.

Ob. disclaimer: I used to work for Google, doing security related stuff. And I think my colleagues achieved the best that can be expected of them in this arena. Certainly they went well beyond what other companies were doing (nothing).

The dude broke the law. A very real, very good (shockingly) law.

Is it good?

I don't think there's any problem with governments competing against ratings agencies: I think 2008 showed pretty conclusively that the existing private sector organisations kind of suck at protecting people from risk. But the SEC isn't just an organisation that gives a stamp of approval to well run investment schemes. They actively stamp out any that don't register with them and report to them. That makes the entire economy very vulnerable to poor decision making by a mere handful of people. It also can seriously hinder innovation: look at the glacial speed of progress towards the oh so ambitious goal of "not killing crowdfunding sites". You'd think not doing something would be easier, wouldn't you, but it's taking years and an 800+ page report.

If the SEC lost their enforcement powers and just acted as a place where reputable, respectable fundraisers wanted to go it'd be pretty unobjectionable and there'd be natural flex in the system if they started making bad decisions. They'd give Moody's a run for their money. But it's not like that. They probably stopped some scams by virtue of the threat of their enforcement actions, it's hard to know how many, but they probably also stopped a lot of legitimate and non-scam investments too. The cost/benefit ratio of securities laws is rather hard to know.

Ref counting can be extremely expensive in multi-threaded programs because refcount incs/decs must always be atomic, and they happen a lot. You really don't want to be doing a bus assert every few method calls if you care about speed.

Are there any important features in iOS8 that Android doesn't already have? On the Apple web page I see:

Cloud photos. Complete with an icon that looks identical to the current Android/G+ photos app icon. Got it.

iMessages can do voice recordings now, and share locations and videos. WhatsApp does these things for ages already (and everyone here uses WhatsApp).

Notifications can have actions now. Android had this since Jellybean, though I'm not sure if they can have edit fields. Buttons certainly. Beneficially, Android notifications do not look like ass.

The multi-tasking UI shows recent people as well as recent apps now. OK, Android doesn't have that, though switching to a chat app usually does the trick for me. I'm not sure how important this is.

The Mail app now lets you swipe to mark as read (Gmail on Android uses swipe to archive for a while now), and recognises flight notifications and lets you add them to your calendar. Google Now does this for quite some time already, but it's automatic and you don't have to manually add to your calendar.

Safari now lets you see all open tabs (?? did it not do this before?). Chrome on Android at least lets you also zoom out to see tabs in a stack.

The keyboard now suggests the next word based on a language model. Android keyboard did this for a while already. Although from the screenshots it looks like maybe Apple's implementation is smarter (is it reading the question in the dinner/movie example?). I found the Android next word suggestions to rarely be helpful.

They allow third party keyboards now. A feature Android had since v1.0

Family sharing seems pretty unique, although as my family does not consistently use iOS and I am not a father or husband this is pretty irrelevant for me.

iCloud Drive. Same as Google Drive. Integrated since Jellybean with better integration since (I think) KitKat.

Health app/kit. I guess this is for Bluetooth LE profiles. Android does not have an integrated health app, alright. However I do not own any BLE health devices and don't plan to, so also pretty unimportant for me.

Cross device sync (but only if you use Apple stuff). Well, Google apps do this for many years already. Hangouts ring my phone and laptop already, Gmail syncs drafts already, etc.

A better integrated search engine. The one I've got in Android works fine. Not sure how much of a difference there is now.

And that's it. Out of all the new features, only three are unique to iOS and none matter for me personally. People in the multitasking UI is the only one I might possibly want to use. The rest are all catching up to Android, again. It's funny ... the times when I most appreciate my Nexus 5 are Apple announcement times, because it reminds me of all the features I sort of forgot about and take for granted.

Snowden could have chosen to leak his documents anonymously through a Congressman. Amash would have loved to blame Obama for evil. Wyden is always good on these issues. And he probably could have done so anonymously, because the NSA can't piss off Congress or they all get fired

That'd be the same Wyden who already knew a lot of what Snowden revealed and felt he couldn't say anything because it was all classified? The same Congress that discovered they'd been lied to, openly, baldly and repeatedly, and did diddly squat because it was a high ranking member of the security state who did it?

Good one. Snowden did what he did because the entire US political structure has been subverted by the military to such an extent that there is nobody left who will hold them genuinely accountable. The press won't do it. Congress won't do it. The courts won't do it. The only guy left who will do it was a 30 year old former spy. That's what America is, now.

Well, you'd be naive if you believed the German's weren't spying on us in some fashion.

Given that the US Gov is collectively shitting bricks over China allegedly spying on America and is busy indicting Chinese government employees, actually you'd be naive to believe Germany is doing anything like what the NSA has been doing. Do you think if Germany had managed to tap Obama and was busy following his phone around, taping his conversations with his generals etc America would just blow it off and say "oh no problem, we knew you were doing that and we're cool with it"? Of course not.

Goddamn yanks. That's the whole problem with America summed up right there - the division of the world into only two categories, domestic and foreign, patriot and traitor. As if other countries and other people don't even exist. Then you wonder why a whopping 70% of under 30 in Europe want to give Snowden asylum i.e. they would jump at the chance to massively piss off the USA and cause a diplomatic crisis. That's what they think of America.

I'm not convinced the NSA is collecting more information about me than Google is

Then you haven't been paying attention. The NSA has been collecting everything from Google via fibre taps, and lots more in addition. So by definition they are collecting more.

How is XMPP in any way comparable to Twitter?