If you have ever met a lawyer who works with cops you will have met a very frustrated lawyer. Some cops understand and can apply the rules. Many others do not have a clue and couldn't apply them anyway.

I know one lawyer who was telling about their many years of working with cops and what was interesting was that they much preferred the local cops as they knew the routines way way better. But the grander more respected police force was borderline useless when it came to i dotting and t crossing. Plus this lawyer would do their damnedest to keep the latter off the stand unless there was no alternative at all.

So I suspect that with this technology that some may have bent the rules and will get away with it. But I suspect that others didn't even know which rules shouldn't be broken and are so guilty that they are more guilty than the people they were trying to catch. Hopefully through the abuses of these people that the whole program is shut down.

I have clients who have basically thrown their money into a facebook toilet; and I also have clients who have reaped huge benefits. The key for the ones where it worked was that they knew exactly who their customers were and very carefully measured the results and could then compare the value they got from facebook as compared to all other media including billboards. Facebook was the hands down winner and was more than 100x cheaper than things like radio on a per customer generated basis. On a side note billboards were far less effective but the best of the traditional media.

But that only applied for a few narrow products. I don't think it would work very well for a high commitment product such as a car. I would not be surprised if the car companies have tried facebook and spent more in advertising per customer generated than they got back in profit per car. For instance I would recommend facebook for a TV show on tonight, and as a reminder to listen to some radio show. But it would require highly targeted advertising. So for Game of Thrones it probably isn't too hard for them to nail GOT watchers on Facebook with pinpoint accuracy and to make sure the ads were even episode specific. But for NBC to remind people to just watch NBC in general, probably a waste of money.

So basically I would dismiss anyone who makes any generalizations about social media advertising as either being good or bad. It is a very specific tool that is very good for a narrow range of jobs.

But they were saying confidential informant, not electronic spy gizmo.

Perjury anyone? Shouldn't there be a whole bus load of policemen going to jail? I am fairly certain that any of us would be going to jail if we deliberately falsified documents going to a judge for something as serious as a search warrant.

This would be an excellent exercise in eliminating a whole swath of police who don't respect our rights. I would also hope that they put them in general population so that they can encounter first hand the monsters that their injustices have created.

Quite a few of my parent's friends and my relatives were professors of this and that. I thought they were the coolest people ever. They were so much more interesting to talk to and came very close to inspiring me to an academic life (the path not chosen for me). But in all those cases they fit that classic profile of having enough money to have the Volvo, the good house, and quite a bit of travel.

But if they had been forced to live like grad students I can certainly say that I would have been far less inspired to follow in their footsteps. While I didn't take that path, how many people who would are being dissuaded now?

I have a simple view as to what the problem is. Science money has two serious political problems. One is that it takes longer than an election cycle to create result, which themselves are often not initially sexy (think of how unimpressive the initial quantum discoveries were, but how much impact they eventually had). Also science often involves giving money to groups of already employed scientists who then spend the money in a myriad of different ways. Whereas giving money to a military contractor provides a bunch of fairly blue collar jobs and loads of kickbacks from the companies.

But even worse this creates a feedback circuit. If you are a math whiz and are looking at your various options then business school should be a snap. Then you can follow in the footsteps of the Ferrari driving cool kids on Wall Street. If this actually works you will inspire another generation of whiz kids to follow you. But quite simply few nations can build greatness from banking. There needs to be something to bank.

Basically if you go to most schools (especially impoverished ones) and ask the kids what route would you recommend for becoming really successful they will first say sports star, then rapper or other entertainer, and then things like banker, doctor, or lawyer. But engineer, scientist, inventor, or even building a manufacturing business just won't be on those kids minds.

This is well emphasized when you look at the classic map of top paid collage official in various states and it is almost always a sports coach.

The crazy thing is that a few schools have managed to master that connection with turning students/professors into businessmen and they are mindbogglingly successful. Not that money should be the only motive for science at least if there is some there it will inspire generation after generation of people who will propel civilization forward.

In many communities you will find that the major dealers for a given brand are owned by the same family. So you cross town for a better price and oddly enough it is identical.

I have a bonkers fast machine with SSD, gobs of memory, CPUs on fire, etc. Yet running the android emulator is go off and make a sandwich time.

I do 100% of my testing on actual devices which is not at all how I work with iOS. With iOS I only occasionally test my code on an actual device as there are occasional differences between the simulator and the actual devices.

Also the android is all about settings, settings settings, instead of asking me if I have a keyboard, GPS, etc. What I would like is a list of the most popular phones. Then I could try out my code on those very phones. Also it would be great if someone had a problem with my app on a specific phone and I was able to quickly select that phone and try out my code.

I get a feeling that the emulator was not so much aimed at developers of apps but aimed at hardware and OS developers who need this magically perfect emulation. Whereas the iOS Simulator is quite clearly aimed at people who are developing apps. Which oddly enough would be 99.999% of the potential audience.

I don't know any of my tech friends who are breathlessly awaiting 4K monitors. If I go to staples to replace my monitors some day and see that the 4K one is $50 more than the regular one, then OK I'll happily buy one. But it if it is $200 more then, no, I'll wait.

I am not saying that 4K is a stupid idea, or that I hate 4K, if it turned out that one of my present monitors had a switch on the back that would switch it to 4K I would be delighted, but when it comes to budgeting my money there are a huge number of things that would make my workflow a whole lot better that I would rather spend my money on. 4K is nice but just not needed. I think that I speak for most people who aren't doing video editing.

But I suspect that for the next 3-5 years that I am going to be reading various tech blogs and they will breathlessly review the latest 4K monitors as they drop lower and lower in price. But again the spread between regular and 4K will have to be pretty small before I will make the jump.

A 4K TV on the other hand would be pretty cool and I think that Netflix has some programming 4K ready so I would probably make that leap long before a monitor.

Here is a good example of stupid. My natural tendency is to start later in the morning and work most of the day, stop, then work until around 3am.

Yet when I go to bed early and start work around 6am I am uber productive. Often noon rolls around and I have done at least a full day's work.

On a side note I have learned to not surf anything until the end of my work day. This would include slashdot, reddit, etc. Not only are they time burners but I think some part of my brain is then spending the rest of the incorporating what I have "learned" from these sites instead of focusing on the task at hand.

I 100% agree with what you are saying. So why aren't we using IPv6? Why does my ISP issue me with only a 32 bit address? Why does my server host only give me 32bit addresses? Plus all the little bits like the default settings in IPTables are 32bit?

To me with all this hardware and other networking bits are ready to go but there seems to be no more forward motion. Seeing that nobody has argued that IPv6 is in and of itself bad then it strikes me that some group has dropped the ball; but which group? Again as I use various major networking APIs etc they all almost have either ignored IPv6 or they don't seem to take it seriously like they know that it isn't coming.

I find it interesting that 25% of people in the poll have chosen "When we build a new internet" as the answer as to when IPv6 will arrive. I suspect some are joking but that others, like myself, have a gut feeling that the entire internet needs an overhaul. I would first look into what group of "gurus" with supposedly awesome credentials are supposed to be pushing IPv6 and I suspect that once you look under the covers that it would turn out to be OpenSSL all over again.

I am a programmer and build robots. I am 100% aware that IPv6 was bumping along with more and more links in the chain signing up. But when I spool up a new server at my server farm, they issue me a traditional IP. I think that if I dig around in my customer account I can also find some IPv6 address but I have never even tried to see if they work. My own ISP issues me a real 32 Bit IP address and there is no mention of IPv6. But I am fairly certain that at least on my end I am ready. About the only problem I would have implementing IPv6 is that nearly everything on my servers is 32 bits in implementation, IPTables (I have most of China, Russia, Boca Raton, etc blocked using 24 bit masks) my logging goes into a database where it is a 32 bit unsigned int recording the IP, and my honeypots populate the IPTables files based again on 32 bit IP addresses.

But when I look at my embedded libraries for communicating with various TCP/IP bits of hardware (for robotics) I don't see any sign of IPv6 in the API. These APIs are generally updated more than once a month and the hardware is undergoing revisions about every 6 months. So this is brand new stuff which would definitely be used in the "internet of things" and there is no sign that these guys are interested in IPv6.

So yes there is something missing in the deployment of IPv6; basically a huge percentage of the technical world doesn't seem to give a shit about IPv6, and the non technical world (as represented by my mother) couldn't give a flying..... so yes as I have learned in 30 years of product development sizzle is very important. To be blunt sizzle is usually more important than technical prowess. Apple does sizzle and they get to charge double and triple for their machines.

So I would go back to your calling the pilot too lazy and I will say that nobody has bothered to pay him. The result is the old soviet adage, you pretend to pay us and we'll pretend to work.

And you seem to think that it will happen without me? I am going to say that IPv6 is dead in the water because something has gone horribly wrong with their sales pitch and management. Here is my prediction: It will turn out the people who are supposed to be pushing IPv6 along have spend more time promoting themselves and infighting. IPv6 smells just like OpenSSL did to me years ago; where everybody respected it until they peaked under the covers. So in a short while someone else is going to sound the alarm and figure out a way to wrest control from some group of losers who have awesome credentials. Then IPv6b will be deployed with great enthusiasm and in very little time.

And here is my insult to you: do you seriously think that there are any salesmen on slashdot? Your deductive powers must be those of a two year old.

Yes my technical experience with this was watching IT people fight for Novell. There was this one IT asshole where I worked and he liked to brag that he had well over $20,000 worth of Novell certifications. So he called me with great excitement when a new very powerful server was delivered from Dell. I was admiring it as he struggled to get Novell on it. So he called the Dell uber support line and they laughed and said that none of their new machines were tested for Novell compatibility.

I should have looked on his wall to see if his framed certifications wilted a little bit that minute. But even after I quit a year or so later he was still fighting the Novell fight. I would not be surprised if he now works for some government agency maintaining some creaky old Novell system.

My guess is that they are trying to build a profile database. They can then make a nice list of your interests and those of your friends and your friends friends etc. This way if they are considering you for a judgeship and it looks like you don't like the police abusing people or have activist friends then you won't be a judge. But if it looks like all your friends are "throw away the key types" just like you, then you will pass all the security checks when considered for a judgeship.

Basically they don't get to pick who is a judge but they do get to do the background check, and with control of this information they basically get to pick who doesn't get to be a judge. After a while you end up with a judicial system that is very police friendly.

Also on more mundane issues if they thing someone is a suspect in a crime they could quickly look up to see who their friends are and any other internet activity that might be of interest.

Lastly they could search for thought crimes. So people looking up "How to bug the premier's office" could be hunted down and stopped.

Are these people looking for stagnation? I suspect that new technology will produce all kinds of horrors (think synth and drum machines in the 80s) but all kinds of interesting things will no doubt come out. The music and the technology that make the music should be an endless dance. Acapella continues to amaze and that is about as technology free as possible, yet some acapella is generated by having a single singer and playing games in the recording studio.

Some painters use amazing techniques to blend and layer very complex paints and lacquers to great result; yet Picasso apparently used a common house paint for some of his greatest works.

Often the medium is the message. For instance if a wood carver is working with wood they might allow changes in the grain of the wood to dictate what they are doing potentially resulting in beautiful art. Yet putting a block of wood into a CAM machine and allowing a 3D design to be precisely cut can generate a whole different and also pleasing result. One or the other is not necessarily wrong, just different.

So if a purist wants to be pure then they should have fun with whatever purists that want to play with them; but the moment that they tell another artist to stop what they are doing then it is no longer art but a stagnant religion.

Actually the financial math is all about amortizing those costs over the life of the product. So if Apple sold 4 iPhones they would have to allocate 500,000 man hours to each phone. The same with all those developments over time. Modern PCB technology is actually quite cool and no doubt took some serious development, but it has been amortized over a zillion PCBs. Apple would actually be paying those amortized costs as well in that any recent developments would still be including those costs when some company uses a recent development to supply them with a part.

But the key to amortizing a cost is that it eventually effectively hits zero. So the costs from Industrial Revolution developments were long ago reduced to zero. Although many times the amortization is a curve that is asymptotically zero; thus to be pedantic it is possible that some impossibly small portion of an iPhone is still paying off the development time spent 100's of years ago. From an economics point of view this is not actually impossible. There could be an area that specialized in say, fine machining, 300 years ago to a point where the same companies are in the same area still leaders in that field. Thus apple would have bought some of their manufacturing equipment from that company. Examples of this abound in Germany where there are plenty of companies that are from the Prussian Empire or before that are world leaders in their area of expertise; so good they survived Napoleon, WWI, and WWII. Krupp I believe is around 400 years old.