Brilliant.

I think you fail to understand what the term "abstract" means. My mind's conception of a circle may have a physical manifestation in my brain, but my mind's conception of that circle is not the abstract circle.

Before you start quoting Descartes, perhaps you need to revisit your Plato.

If you can't cook toast, then you probably shouldn't be bringing your phone in the shower with you, either.

I would mod you up if I could, if only because that was such an incredibly clumsily worded sentence. Still, you have an interesting point. Even during drills, we should all remain Vigilant Guardians. With all due respect, and admitting that I'm being totally pedantic (but hopefully helpful!) here, please let me illustrate how you could break down what you've said to make it easier to follow:

Do you really think a few minutes' delay will matter? After all, in the last few years these terrorists haven't managed to set off the bombs they've brought onto planes and into NYC.

> Why did we need to invent twitter, web fora, and IM when we had Listserv, USENET, and IRC?

Because corporate firewalls blocked everything except port 80. So, everything moved onto port 80.

As an aside, ten years ago I predicted to my colleague that one day we'd see DNS over HTTP, and probably even TCP over HTTP. I've recently seen *both* of those come to pass via /. stories, although I don't have the links handy atm.

I'm going to leave the rest of your comment aside (my opinion is pretty much the opposite, but we're all entitled to our own), and answer this one:

for years now I get ads and coupons in my monthly CC statement, usually targeted to stuff I buy, how is it different from what the summary mentions?

The difference is that, in the case you mention, the advertiser hands over their ad copy, along with a profile of their target demographic, and says to Visa, find the 200,000 of your customers (or whatever #) that most closely match *this* profile, and send them this ad. But, this new plan sounds more to me (although the details aren't precisely discussed in the articles) that Visa will run a service that lets advertisers sign up and repeatedly query "does this customer match this profile?"

In the first case, Visa is giving you the advertiser's info; in the second case, Visa is giving the advertiser your info.

Yes, but .... at least we've moved the conversation forward, if only by a few inches. First down in 2020.

I was going to side with you on the loyalty argument, until I read that your employer outsources (some of) their programming. What does that say about their commitment to loyalty? On the one hand, it helps to maintain a good network of industry contacts for the long-term good of your career. On the other hand, it *is* possible to maintain a good relationship with your old co-workers, while simultaneously "looking out for number one".

  Is you leaving going to be *difficult*, or will it break their entire business? That is, you can rest easy if you cause a bit of inconvenience, but just try not to screw them too badly: ask your new employer if you can have a couple of weeks before you officially start; or a "transition period" where you can remain on-call (e.g. a half-day a week when needed) to the old team.

Actually, Canonical is registered in the Isle of Man, a Crown Dependency off the British coast. It's a tax and legal haven from the civilized world, although its head of state is still the Queen of England. This has always been one of the things that's bugged me most about Shuttleworth's operation.

I don't think it's tenuous at all. Lots of projects by lots of companies use Java; this is nothing new. Sun could praise any number of them, but it just so happens that Android / Java is high profile, so they chose to praise that one particular project. That doesn't mean they were aware and sanctioned copyright infringement on any particular piece of code. Java comes with a license, and it's not unreasonable to think that Schwartz would make a public statement of support under the assumption that Google was adhering to the terms of that license.

I don't want to defend Cisco's laziness here, but there is a sort of logic to what they do - especially given all the VAR's that end up deploying these systems: the hardware / software is shipped so that it's easiest to deploy out of the box. A phone installation can go wrong in so many different places, it helps in troubleshooting and remote management to have everything open by default, and then start locking things down once it's running. This approach has obvious flaws, but the alternative would be a nightmare to deploy.

Given this situation, I think customers and VAR's need to be more conscious about security. Maybe Cisco could audit their VAR's to see how good they are at implementing the lock-down checklist. Or maybe they could provide such a checklist directly to the end customer.

Relevant, recent:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/comments/gsp7o/where_does_good_come_from_edward_o_wilson_tries/

Seriously: can someone explain wtf a "Samuel L. Jackson-esque wallet" is? I know who Mr. Jackson is, and I know what a a wallet is, but I'm clearly missing something here.

Explosion detection is pretty cool, and useful I'm sure. But I was hoping for special ops commandos.

My desktop is by no means new (dual core 1.6GHz, 3Gb ram), but running nothing but Debian stable with gnome as my desktop and Iceweasel open with a single tab containing this new homepage: I walked away for 5 min, came back and my 5 min load avg is 0.87.

I decided to do this test after my first, accidental, exposure to this new site design: I innocently opened /. in a tab and had to force quit Iceweasel and close down vmware. I guess my choice now is, I can do all the things I've grown accustomed to doing on this computer, or I can read slashdot.

Seriously, /. - WTF?