This sounds just like security cameras designed to thwart terrorists being used to catch stop sign violators instead. Or federal agents looking for illegal immigrants busting people for possession of small quantities of pot instead.

Lame.

I predict this plan will fail like the V-chip...

... is our obsession with our obsession with Facebook. Are the media writing too many articles about how they're writing too many articles about facebook? Are we being too public about our desire for privacy, or too private about our attention-whoring publicity?

Thanks for the info.

Any idea when this will become available for existing GV users? I have a Sprint Android phone, and use GV heavily, but no options have yet appeared for me to combine the two. I'm wondering if the hold-up has anything to do with the fact that I ported my number from Verizon to Sprint several years ago.

Heck, I'm an early adopter of GV and a Sprint customer as well... and I'm very happy for this change.

Benefits of "built-in" GV integration for people like me and the grandparent poster, who already have Google Voice and fancy smartphones:

• The Android GV app uses background data, which eats battery. If GV texts are transmitted at the CDMA level, they'll use less battery.
• Android requires a data connection for GV texts and calls, so they're less reliable in marginal coverage areas, and you can't get texts during calls. A low-level text message can get through almost everywhere, and during a call.
• We'll be able to block spam calls to our private Sprint numbers using the Google Voice interface.

The longer-term benefit of this change, I hope, is that it will show other wireless companies that they should concentrate on building good and flexible networks, and let others provide useful services on top of them, rather than pursuing rent-seeking, walled-garden approaches (like charging for over-the-air downloads and crippling Bluetooth file exchange).

I use ConnectBot on my Samsung Moment. Has a physical keyboard and works great, can do pubkey authentication, all the bells and whistles. Big thumbs up... ConnectBot is an extremely well-designed and open-source app.

I have the Moment as well. The stock ROM is awful, unfortunately. The Sprint-branded apps (NFL, NASCAR, TV, Navigation) and other crapware (Moxier Mail) are buggy and use a lot of memory and battery life and can't easily be disabled. The worst part is that the Moment randomly locks up when you transfer too much data (e.g. http://forum.sdx-developers.com/android-2-1-questions/dj07-connection-dropped-even-*more*-often/) and a number of OTA baseband updates have failed to fix this.

Fortunately, rooted and with custom ROMs (many of which do little more than remove the Sprint crapware) the Moment is a pleasure to use. With patched EV-DO libraries (why the heck Samsung/Sprint haven't fixed this, I have no idea...), the Moment is very reliable for data usage. Really nice hardware at a low price, and a genuine pleasure to use.

So, basically, I agree with your point. Many of the phones, pretty much everything except the flagship products, are rushed to market with tons of bugs and tons of carrier-added crap... then abandoned by the carriers and manufacturers. If you are willing and able to install custom, community-supported firmware on you Android phone, it will be awesome... but the handset manufacturers and carriers have really dropped the ball.

... where do I sign up?

Rush Limbaugh tried something similar in 2008 (encouraging Republicans to vote for Hillary in Obama-leaning states), and it just made him look like a bigger d-bag than he already was.

I think it's dangerous and unethical to vote for a candidate other than because you genuinely want them to win. Dangerous because it can backfire, and unethical because it subverts trust in the democratic process and its outcome--however flawed they may already be.

I know that some states allow voters to vote in primary elections of parties with which they're not affiliated. I think this is just fine if those voters pick candidates who they genuinely want to see succeed. For example, had I been eligible to vote in Republican primaries in 2008, I probably would have voted for John McCain. In the general election, I preferred Obama, but I also genuinely felt that McCain was the most competent, intelligent, and deserving Republican candidate, and I wanted to see him succeed and make the general election campaign competitive and thoughtful.

If nothing else, Democratic voters should understand that they're doing their party no favors by setting them up with a weak opponent. Politicians without credible, thoughtful opposition tend to act like ordinary politicians... which is to say that they become corrupt, authoritarian, lazy, and devoid of ideas. Many American leaders have been most productive when they've faced smart opponents... and won. I'm thinking about Bill Clinton vs. Newt Gingrich and Ronald Reagan vs. Mikhail Gorbachev, in particular.

Oh, wait.

Do the copyright mafias really have no shame?

Diigo looks like the best replacement I've found. The interface is slightly cluttered but otherwise it seems to support the features I liked about del.icio.us. And the ability to auto-add new bookmarks to del.icio.us simultaneously is really handy.

Good find.

... Delicious and Flickr. They just killed Delicious, and I'm hoping Flickr isn't so far behind.

I used to use Yahoo Mail, which was a great webmail service for its time... in 2000. I also used Yahoo Auctions until that folded. Before Google, I relied on the human-assisted Yahoo Directory for my web searches. I liked Yahoo Games, when they didn't have much besides pool and scrabble and word games.

But all of Yahoo's services have turned into ad-laden, bloated interfaces with out-of-date technology. It seems that the company has been unable/unwilling to innovate and has just been milking their previously respected brand for ad revenue. Flickr and Delicious were the only two services that seemed to resist this trend :-/.

I guess it's time to export my Delicious bookmarks and find an alternative host for them :(. SimPy and Del.irio.us used to be a couple of pretty nice open-source clones, but seem to have disappeared. Anybody else have a recommendation for a site with similar functionality, clean interface, and good browser addon support?

Opponents of software patents should root for Microsoft here, regardless of how you feel about the company (I loathe their philosophy but like a few of their products).

Believing in justice means believing it applies even to your enemies and opponents. Besides, we don't want the Supreme Court setting some awful pro-software-patent precedent that will haunt less-deep-pocketed open-source developers down the road.

I recently came across Rick Cattell's site which addresses just the questions you're asking.

Rick Cattell has written an excellent comparison guide of horizontally scalable datastores of different types (RDBMS as well as a variety of NoSQL systems).

Cattell has also written an academic paper with database expert Mike Stonebraker, which weighs the system design factors required to make a datastore scalable.

Executive summary of Cattell's work: although NoSQL may be a huge fad, the things that make a datastore scalable can be implemented in SQL RDBMS systems as well. Also, implementing do-it-yourself ACID in NoSQL systems is extremely difficult and error-prone, and is a significant advantage of most RDBMS systems. Stonebraker is the author of VoltDB, which is an open-source RDBMS designed for horizontal scalability, but they give a very fair and thorough look at competing datastores as well.

Wellll... sorta. Significant digits are not magic. They express the relative uncertainty in a quantity.

The relative uncertainty does not propagate equally under all types of arithmetic operations (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Significance_arithmetic for addition and multiplication).

This is especially true for exponentiation. If we start with the premise that AT&T's data usage grew 30x over 3 years, to one significant digit, that means that the real value is somewhere in the 25-35x range. That gives us a range of growth rates of 192% to 227%, assuming annual compounding... considerably less than one significant digit of uncertainty in the growth rate.

For linear (non-compound) growth, 25-35x growth over 3 years corresponds to 800%-1133%. That range is not easily exactly describable by significant digits either.

Significant digits suck. They are an imprecise and opaque way to express relative uncertainty.

You're right, continuous growth is a much more useful model for this sort of thing, but calling is "115% growth per year" is nonsensical in that case.

I still maintain that this whole mess is due to the fact that people assume percentage growth to be nearly linear (because it's so often used to describe low growth rates like 1-10% where there's no confusion), and often forget to add the initial 100% contribution (pretty much for the same reason).