What a minute. Shouldn't we be putting the blame on Apache? By deliberately ignore the DNT flag on IE 10, they are breaking an essential trust and screwing users.

What is really going on is hat these Fusion centers have found the ultimate workaround for those pesky little constitutional annoyances like Probable Cause and jurisdictional boundaries.and due process. Names just happen to turn up from anywhere and some tangential, half muttered possible connection to possible terrorists is given IF it's even requested and then the fishing begins. Another particularly frightening thing to consider is that the Fusion centers have become the destination spots for the super high tech surveillance technology after it returns from being deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan and other military operations. One of the inherent problems presented by some of the new advanced capabilities that are available with these toys and esp the way military has been using them, are illegal or or require very specific legal procedures in exceptional circumstances. It shouldn't be a surprise to find that when this gear is sitting around, available to the personnel, that there have been disturbing reports of it's being used by local law enforcement, with the assistance of US military in ways that are simply not legal. What disturbs me even more is the culture o shoft that might be taking place within local police ranks in terms of being comfortable with rationalizing sloppy adherence to privacy protections, probable cause and some of the legal protections that may the only things that are protecting us from sliding into a the kind of data and scanning police state. And these Fusion Centers have enough loopholes in their charters to get away with just about anything. There aren't even enough people to keep an eye on them or even occasionally review them.

We're ten years away (tops) from cheap, very portable scanning technology that will be able to instantly detect anything from 100 feet away, even a dust sized particle on your shoe. It can deployed to scan a busy street corner 24/7, and when it yields a positive detection from something stuck on your shoe, it spits out a a full ID via facial recognition. Probable cause test passes with flying colors, a visit with the judge, and a few hours later, with that search warrant in hand, they could be busting down your door. What could go wrong?

I think the only thing Linus needs to do is make it clear that he's speaking as an individual and not in any capacity related to Linux or the Linux community. The fact that he was correct in his assessments is just something that makes me smile. Their size and their business clout, plus a lot of lot PR has given the Mormon religion an aura of normalcy but taken strictly on it's own beliefs and teachings it would be considered a fringe, quite bizarre religious cult. Before anyone jumps up to defend the Mormon Church, go ahead and spend a good 4-5 hours visiting the Mormon complex in Salt Lake City, as I did a couple of years ago while I was passing through the area. Bizarre, intellectually bereft, culturally constricted, frightening political power, spookily secretive. My impression after my visit was that underneath the surface, there is something very unhealthy and more than a little scary going on. I left SLC depressed and concerned.

There was considerable customer interest in a full touch screen mobile phone well before the rumors surfaced re: Apple making one. It was discussed as a natural evolution of the Palm Pilot concept and the Treo, just using touch either with a stylus or replacing it. Apple's brilliance with the first iPhone, was obviously in their their particularly elegant implementation. There were other companies working on touch screen phones but the iPhone was much more elegant and immediately captured almost total consensus that it represented the best direction for touch phones

Because there was a very strong interest in smart phones in general and touch implementations in particular at that time, Apple should addition brilliance in the timing of the iPhone's release. It was innovative to the ideal extent: it created excitement and gear lust but it wasn't so far out that only geeks could relate to it. But I think the crucial timing decision was related to the price. I've been told by a close friend who was involved with the hardware design, that the price point was a a hard target and they simply wouldn't release it until they could hit that price. He said that they could have released it almost a year earlier but the extra cost would have slowed adoption and reduced their head start on their competitors. Jobs was determined to come out with huge sales numbers. He didn't want the perception that Apple was just doing OK in a new market (for them).

I think MS are idiots for trying to force feed Metro to non-tablet users, rather than letting interest and adoption be driven by the tablet users. And they're double dumb for making everyday workflow more difficult for most of their users. But in the absence of an alternative OS that will reliably run the Windows software that users and corporate IT have invested their time and money to learn, most Windows users will just deal with the annoyances. If people really hate it, then MS will have the next Windows 9 out in 18-24 months. If I want or need to stay with Win 7 for another 2-3 years, that's just fine.

It seems to me that a lot of the discussion/arguments around renewable energy tech, esp solar, revolve around whether it will be the complete solution. Wouldn't it be worth pursuing solar electricity generation on a massive scale, even if it "only" supplied 50% - 80% of what we needed? If solar was installed on *all* new residential and commercial buildings and say, 50-70% of existing buildings were retro-fitted, wouldn't that move the planet significantly away from oil dependencies and jump start the engineering and cultural changes that will *have* to embrace at some point. Doing something like would provide the real world lab to improve the technology and inspire new ideas. It's always going to be an iterative process.

We can't wait around for "perfect" solutions. Sure it's not smart do rush into something with a small payoff but it looks like we've reached a point where at least 2 or 3 energy technologies are well worth implementing on a global scale now.

I know this is off topic but I think it's important:

I fix malware infected PCs for a living. Every Windows user should be aware that in the last 4 weeks or so I have seen what I believe is the beginning of a new pandemic of malware infections. Unfortunately, the anti-virus companies still haven't agreed on a common naming process. Microsoft Security Essentials is calling it Trojan:Win32/Sirefef.AC (or AH or C, etc.). AVG is calling it Dropper.Generic_C.MMI. This is a rootkit and multi-virus type infection and in many cases it is so difficult to remove that for the AH variant, Microsoft doesn't even offer removal instructions and recommends reformatting and re-installing Windows. All of the systems that I have cleaned have become infected via web site "drive-by": simply visiting infected web sites.

Most of these infections are taking over the Services.exe file. I also strongly suggest using a Repair Disk or DART and learning how to use the SFC command line utility. Booting off of CD/DVD, deleting the infected Services.exe and running SFC, which will scan all of the Windows system files and fix or replace them, including Services.exe. You can also delete other infect files from the command line. Then you can at least have a somewhat clean boot into Windows and run a tool like Hitman Pro to finish the job.

A Google search for those virus names will show the huge number of threads on the malware help sites and note how recent the dates are. I think we'll be hearing about this in the news very soon.

You can also invite people who aren't Google+ users to events via the same invitation that I use for the G+ folks. email address. This is a major usability win for me.

Well, on 7/4/12, the European Parliament rejected ACTA by a 478 - 39 vote with 165 abstaining. Maybe some of the TPP members will grow some stones and stand up to the US/MPAA pressure?

OK, so I wanted to have a minute of hope this morning. It's over now.

Back in the late 90's, I had a conversation with a Microsoft exec in which he said that in the early days of Windows, they hired several very young programmers who initially were hailed as heroes for their work on some the Windows internals because of how fast they were able to solve problems related to performance, etc. but that in the long run, their inexperience led to problems that took a lot of work to correct and cost them dearly. He said that it was an expensive lesson on the value of older, more experienced programmers.

Every time I start assessing the differences between the Democrats and the Republicans outlooks, policies and actions as insignificant, I remind myself that, in the area of environmental policy and legislation, the differences have been fairly substantial. Granted, those party differences stand out strictly in relation to each other and the current Democratic policies and overall outlook aren't likely to be sufficient to divert the oncoming environmental disasters. However, on many occasions over the last 50 years, in the face of massive opposition from Republicans and big business, the Democrats have at least shown a willingness to take stands and take action on environmental issues, just because they know it's the right thing to do to protect our planet (or some corner or it).

Despite the obvious shortcomings of the Democrats environmental efforts, there is an underlying outlook and set of values at play that is clearly not the same as the Republican's entrenched, cynical, psychotic contempt for anything that would reduce their short term profits, no matter what the consequences.

Yeah, the summary reads like it was Verisign.com that was redirected ...

Music is a form of EXPRESSION. Some music emphasizes the expression of complex intellectual ideas, some emphasizes emotions, etc. Rock and classical (and of course many other types of music) have both. If you don't think that there's rock music that's intellectually or musically sophisticated, either you haven't listened to much of it or simply don't want to cloud your theories with facts.

Music that's "simple" in terms of it's musical structure may have a powerful emotional impact. I prefer the latter though I can still thoroughly enjoy other approaches to music. I don't criticize one approach because i prefer the other.

"btw, Hendrix is merely an exceptional blues guitar player."

Hendrix certainly was an exceptional player of blues based music but many of his tracks are not related to blues at all.

" In fact, I believe it is quite possible to reduce every single rock/pop song since to either one of David Bowie's offerings or that of Creedence Clearwater Revival."

OK, I get it. You're either a troll or an idiot.

Don't make assumptions about why FF is losing users. The overwhelming majority of ex-FF users that moved to Chrome, strictly cite performance. Most of the ex-FF users I know that moved to Chrome, were not add-on users and didn't have that as a issue to deal with.

Personally, I have quibbles with some of the UI changes (I'm a left handed mouse user and I find the relocation of the Reload button annoying) but otherwise, I welcome the frequent updates. Looking ahead, I trust that FF will use their common sense and not overwhelm users with frequent UI changes. Speaking of which Google is as guilty as anyone in terms of foisting idiotic UI stuff on their users and in their case, with few exceptions, they don't even bother to respond to thousands of complaints.

My only serious complaint about Firefox is the huge memory footprint and the performance degradation that accompanies it. When I'm I'm researching something and get deep into it, with the usual 3-4 windows with a plethora of tabs that inevitably are attached to each window, Firefox slows toa maddening crawl and sometimes just locks up solid. Take the exact same Windows and tabs into Chrome and it the difference is quite obvious: Chrome just handles it much more elegantly.

I much prefer Firefox's interface (maybe it's just familiarity, but there ya go) and there's simply no comparison in terms of add-on, etc. but I'm on the verge of giving up on FF if they can't find a better way to handle those huge sessions.