"Anything with altered genes must be bad for your" is not an irrational fear of some new device or technology, it is a reasonable default position when considering a potentially irreversible change to the ecosystem and gene pool. Genetic engineering is not equivalent to selective breeding, because it can instantaneously produce radical changes that would normally take centuries to achieve. In many cases, the science is empirical, like a hacker making risky changes to a large code base because he "understands" the tiny fragment of code that he's changing, even though there may be unforeseen systemic effects. And what is the urgent problem that we are solving here? You're going to solve world hunger by creating more food? Isn't there an inherent flaw in that idea?

I lug you some rocks, then I will be entitled to some kind of favor from you tomorrow. Maybe you'd give me a feast with a whole chicken. But I wasn't in the mood for a chicken that time, so I decided to put off receiving favor from you. After two years, I expect to still be entitled to that feast of whole chicken.

But if you had to choose between a chicken today, versus a chicken two years from now, you would certainly prefer to receive it today. So don't forget that the value of a chicken decreases over time, inflation or not.

Minor rearrangements of existing facts can be considered to be innovative new facts.

Consider this cool paper from Aragones et al:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=643545

Agreed, I have nothing but great stuff to say about my Brother printer. Cheap price, excellent usability, long lifetime including toner carts, really good drivers even for OS's that are newer than the printer, and a ton of advanced features that normally are only available for high end printers.

Microsoft Research has been working on this for many years and has at least two such projects:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midori_(operating_system)

The code is ahead-of-time compiled using the Bartok compiler:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartok_(compiler)

I work for one of the biggest faceless software corporations in the world. I actually spend a lot of time thinking about our customer needs and all the little details that affect the user experience. When we receive a bug report, often I am not allowed to talk directly to the customer, but I still think of them as a person and try find a solution that will make them happy and improve our product. Many of my coworkers have a similar attitude. The financial payoff for doing this is at best extremely indirect.

The fact is that humans often seek to do a good job regardless of the financial payoff. There's a whole theory about "Intrinsic Motivation" that explains this, see here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc

Actually companies like Lodsys are doing a great job of raising awareness about the weaknesses of the current system. It's great to hear that they're going after big name companies with lobbying power, rather than hurting small businesses.

In the absence of evidence to the contrary, it's reasonable to assume that C#'s performance results would be about the same as Java's.

Here's some strong evidence to the contrary:

http://reverseblade.blogspot.com/2009/02/c-versus-c-versus-java-performance.html

If the "thousands of dollars" are less than around $5000, and if Earthlink has a company office in your state, then you might be able to take this to small claims court. It doesn't require a lawyer, and the judge would typically be biased towards the individual versus the Company.

Really? Did you try Virgin America? Their planes are new, with stylish white plastic and black leather interior, with disco color lighting. They have a Linux-based entertainment system with free games and movies, seat-to-seat chat, and a shopping-cart style electronic ordering system for food/drinks. To celebrate the holiday, the internet was free for all of December. And the price is comparable to shitty airlines like Delta and US Air. Virgin America kicks ass.

Also, don't forget that DropBox is closed source, and you can't host your own server. So your private data is subject to one of those nasty "we can change the terms at any time" kind of agreements.

Compare with SparkleShare...

This isn't an interesting cipher, mathematically speaking, because the method is closed so it could be anything. All we have is some jumbled text and (presumably) a sensible answer that we're not privy to. [...] This is just a puzzle-book, and quite boring because it can actually just be gibberish and nobody would really care.

Err... so how was it possible to decode the other three sections then? Obviously it's not gibberish, it's intelligible English text encoded using familiar algorithms. And people have cared enough to invest the time to solve three of the four sections, including people from the CIA and NSA.

Being located on actual CIA grounds, this sculpture is also an artistic statement. It highlights just how much cryptography has changed since the old days when cracking codes was top secret and required expensive supercomputers.

But then, you wouldn't know anything about art, would you? You called the Kryptos sculpture a boring children's puzzle, versus your ideal of a "militarily-important" message encoded using AES. AES never would have been invented if everyone had your pragmatist view. Math is fueled by puzzles with no obligation for usefulness.

Mint.com is pretty great for connecting to whatever bank you have and it'll download your reports and also automatic categorization. I have almost 2 years of data in it, and they let you download it all CSV. It also has me in the habit of checking all of my accounts once a week, by just logging onto one website. Nice way to be on top of anything that might be fraudulent.

What about the privacy issues of a public web site that tracks a household's entire financial profile? Intuit's claim:

"We make money only when you do - We give you personalized ideas on how to save money by presenting the greatest savings from among thousands of financial products. If you decide to make a change that saves you some cash, we sometimes earn a small fee from the bank or company you switch to. You save a lot; we make a little."

And in the Privacy and Security Policy: "Simply put, we do not and will not sell or rent your personal information to anyone, for any reason, at any time."

But they DO seem to sell your information, as long as the data format can be construed as "anonymous" (before being combined with whatever other datasets the buyer might have):

"Intuit may make anonymous or aggregate personal information and disclose such data only in a non-personally identifiable manner to:

• Advertisers and other third parties for their marketing and promotional purposes, such as the number of users who applied for a credit card or how many users clicked on a particular Intuit Offer;
• Organizations approved by Intuit that conduct research into consumer spending; [...]

I'd be willing to bet they make a lot from these sales. "You save a lot; we make a little" indeed. Even if Intuit's current intentions are 100% honorable, let's not overlook the ubiquitous "we can change what you agreed to without your consent" clause in the Terms Of Service:

"Intuit may modify this Agreement from time to time. Any and all changes to this Agreement will be posted on the Mint.com site. In addition, the Agreement will always indicate the date it was last revised. You are deemed to accept and agree to be bound by any changes to the Agreement when you use the Service after those changes are posted."

This practice is where all the privacy trouble started with FaceBook. I have no idea how it's legally enforceable, but somehow it is, and in fact it's standard boilerplate for TOS contracts everywhere. :-)

Just out of curiosity -- what would happen if Google preemptively denied the UK access to its services? Maybe just for a month or two? If nobody in the UK could search using google.com? What would happen?

You assume that Google uses your private information in indirect, anonymous ways to improve advertising or predict general trends. But have you looked at Google's privacy policy?

"We restrict access to personal information to Google employees, contractors and agents who need to know that information in order to operate, develop or improve our services."
http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html

That's the extent of the promise. They can use your data to improve their "services", which obviously include every possible industry and market. The exact potential of what Google can do is difficult to foresee. They have teams of people working 24/7 on new ways to exploit every last byte of data they collect.

Here are a few ideas I came up with:

- get insider trading tips for any market by searching people's private Gmail conversations or corporate Google Docs
- detect DNS names that people are brainstorming, and then preemptively squat on these domains
- search for discussions/documents relating to inventions, then preemptively patent the idea
- search for evidence that will convict you of a crime (copying MP3's?), maybe under a police order in some jurisdiction
- use private discussions to predict locations of possible "terrorist" attacks and sell this information to the military
- predict when a limited item is going to be popular, then buy up those products and sell them at higher price
- help insurance companies identify "high risk" customers
- use your company's internal documents to directly compete with your company

My point is that privacy isn't just about you and your porno history. It's about a global economic market that's supposed to be a fair playing field, but is instead threatened by one company's growing monopoly on everyone else's data.

The solution isn't to sick the government on Google. The solution is to educate people about why they should protect their privacy, because apparently this concept has been forgotten in all the excitement of blogs and social nets.