That and a conduit for malware.

In effect, the site is trying a social contract, i give you free stuff and you look at ads. Whether that can be an enforceable legal contract is interesting.

In the link above, we reference Zedo. I worked there early on. The initial design was that ads were a think to be both chosen and voted on, a primitive ad Like/Dislike button set if you can think it that way. We were steamrolled by Google/Doubleclick early on and abandoned that model early on, but it would be interesting (in a theoretical vacuum) to see if the ad choice model would catch on. I particularly liked the Lego Mindstorms ad, which actually had you program a sequence to get a robot to move to a goal around obstacles. When was the last time you actually interacted with an ad? What would the world look like if ads were competing on likeability and not on how much info someone knows about you?

It is a loss of freedom. And with little benefit. Every loss of freedom should come with a benefit, and their is none here. I get into line, get irradiated by an X-Ray that can't even find what it's looking for (and the irony of me "assuming the position"). It's all security theater, from the XRays that can't find the bombs that they were designed in reaction to, from the change of the uniform color from white to blue (to look more police-ish).

The USA PATRIOT Act was in response to 9/11. We don't even know what freedoms we gave up because much of the law is secret. The US should not have secret laws. How many NSA violations came as a result of laws passed at that time? Google the term LOVEINT for a small taste of violations. If i want privacy, I need to look like a kook and be completely off the grid. Or else the NSA (or some other TLA) can get data from pretty much any big corporation. There are "border" checkpoints hundreds of miles inland in the US. You can probably find a bunch of confrontations on Youtube, where the agents pretty much refuse to answer direct questions about your rights (these are all "voluntary" stoppings, but some agents don't see them as such) until you comply.

Don't reduce the 9/11 changes to taking your shoes off at the airport. We're in a much different world. We're over a decade after 9/11 and we still have a massive security apparatus probing every US citizen with little oversight.

The French poured buckets of money into the Maginot line. The Germans just went around it. The Germans had tried the same end around in WW-I (though failed), so the lack of defense at the BeNeLux border was a costly strategic mistake. Hitler had it in for France because of the Treaty of Versailles, and even went so far to track down the rail car that the Treaty in Versailles was signed in, to rub Gallic noses into. Even the new tactics could be seen on their doorstep in the Spanish Civil War. The French should have seen it coming.

I think the part of the "cheese eating surrender monkeys" comes not from the initial invasion, but the puppet government that was Vichy France. The Russians fought to the last man in horrible siege conditions for years. France started to be a puppet regime paying tribute to Hitler and rounding up Jews just a couple months after initial invasion. Only later when Hitler changed terms of the agreement did the French underground resistance really form.

That, and there were two, probably more interesting "surrenders". When the French left the colonies of Algeria and Indochina (Vietnam), there were those that saw that as surrender. I call them interesting because they didn't leave because of being defeated, but they realized that the barbarism that it would take to hold these territories would change the national character. It's hard to talk about "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" when you're tossing people off of helicopters or torching villages. Was this surrender? Maybe on the ground, but to win a military would entail other surrenders of character, again, an interesting trade off.

In reality (and I'm of Polish descent) the Polish fighters lasted longer. (Compared to the French) the Polish had the disadvantage of being a new country, (re)formed in 1919 after, in effect, disappearing completely for a hundred years or so. Oh yeah, and they got attacked on two fronts.

I don't begrudge any credit to the French resistance. Their fighters fought bravely. The Poles fought just as hard against two armies, with less notice and much fewer resources. I wish they got more credit. Part of the Polish jokes were real - you did have farmers on horseback with single shot rifles going against tanks. But what else are you gonna do, let them roll into Warsaw without a fight?

"Qualified" usually meaning "won't work peanuts like we want".

This. Every time I hear "we can't find enough employees" I substitute "... at the lowball pricepoints we're willing to give out". It strikes me as odd that the laws of supply and demand somehow are allowed to disappear when it comes to people/employees. If demand is so high, wages should be pushed up. They're not. Over a course of years, the tools for people to fight a more fair fight have been peeled away. As a kid I still remember the PATCO strike. Government intervention against workers collective bargaining, and then all the way to Wisconsin and governmor Walker. Suppliers can't be squeezed. Profits should never be squeezed. Lets squeeze the employees.

That and the fact that employee wages are inputs to the system. Even Henry Ford, hard right capitalist, realized you can't squeeze wages so much that people can't afford things.

1) remember that computers (especially networked ones) are in effect infinite state machines. There are thousands maybe millions of ways of hacking these, and it looks more and more like an inside job. Remember that one of the tradeoffs of protecting against an inside job makes it a P.I.T.A. to get anything done inside.

2) Also remember that current atmosphere for public companies is, hell even if you're lucky, not past the next quarterly report and a good chance no farther than the daily stock price. Security (and privacy) in most firms is (are) viewed as a cost. They're not baked in. Witness the horribly hot mess that is Snapchat

Sony is just a worse than average, but sadly not atypical company when it comes to security. We're still bathing apes from the savannah, and not quite there when it comes to remote presence and the ease of which information can be copied or destroyed at a distance.

Because it's all about that User Base, User Base, so much Trouble....

I want a Meghan Trainor/All Your Base Belong to Us mashup.

When someone thinks the standard isn't working....

How many years after the OpenOffice fork are there people still thinking what's OpenOffice vs LibreOffice? How many years past Oracle giving the keys to the source repository to OpenOffice do we still think OpenOffice vs LibreOffice

When it comes between slogging through a new architecture, or dealing with people, usually the new architecure is easier and almost always more fun. One advantage to paid projects (note: before mod down, this is a single advantage, not me saying paid is better or worse) the money can make people stick to a single project and not fork, meaning we have more consistency in interfaces. On a fork you may get goodness like the gcc/egcs split where the fork is so much better it becomes the mainline, or you might get the emacs/Xemacs split which is still an issue a decade plus out.

There's a whole science of this called Emergence.

For us geeks, there's an easy demonstration of this with Conway's Game Of Life. Each cell is simple, nothing. But get a few cells together and you can make designs, and guns, and generators and all sorts of good stuff.

The problem with Emergence it's that it's contrary to what we've been taught for years. For years, we say "break things down to components" and our primate gray matter can comprehend them. But Emergence has 1+1 =2, but 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 5.something, and who knows what 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 brings.

The problem with Creationism is that it's "there's a hole here and only God can fill it" which means don't even look for other things. Emergence fits this hole just fine.

And no, using finger print as input instead of password is even weaker if you are in custody. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to understand this point.

This is one reason to turn off your iPhone in airports or other "border" locations (which are now several hundred miles inland, shudder).
After shutdown, the keys in memory that allow the fingerprint sensor to work are wiped out, requiring you to enter your passcode on startup. So, turn off your phone in airports, your fingerprint will do nothing on startup.

For true safety, you shouldn't pair your phone with any laptop you travel with. A lot of things can be snarfed up through iTunes. That works for me with a desktop at home, but if your laptop is your only computer, you may have an issue.

And it sucks that I need to know all this. My government shouldn't be trying to get my info this badly without probable cause.

/sys and /proc

remember that it's split in two places on Linix now. AND some knobs can use sysctl too on Linx

This... specifically the way he felt FreeBSD over complicated threads.

A simple implementation would be "every user space thread has a kernel thread". FreeBSD kind of went to the "lets give a lot of knobs and levers for people to play with." It went to something similar to the old Solaris multithreading model where you can say how many kernel threads for each user thread, or one kernel thread per app, or whatever combination. This added a lot of complexity. Ironically, this happened just as Solaris was moving to a much simpler 1:1 model.

Dillon was worried that it would make it so complicated that only a handful of people could do any coding in the kernel scheduler. This for very little gain as most people couldn't do anything useful with those knobs and levers. He was kind of proven right. FreeBSD kind of stalled out for a bit.

That was the initial reason for the break. Over time, the design diverged to where he added more message passing architecture in the kernel, inspired by the Amiga's design.

Yay, most Bittorrent Sync things are still free, only some new features will have a cost (and only some, not all new things will have a cost). Yay, i control my data,and have a cheap hard drive, or even a NAS at home anyway, now that's able to be synced all over. Yay, I don't need to worry about Dropbox or Google rummaging through my data to sell me things.

There are a lot of cool things about Bittorrent Sync. Most of the new things will still be free. Yeah, it may or may not fit what you want, but there are always tradeoffs. I have both Drive and Bittorrent Sync on my devices, and keep different thigns in both.

John Oliver had a hilarious and very sad skit where he talked about this. The Daily Show also had a routine. It's just sad.

In many municipalities, the government starts a suit against the property itself so that it's much easier to keep all the loot.

I thought part of the reason for the cost of certs was the identity portion of the server. It's not just encryption, it's making sure that Citibank is Citibank not Bob DeHacker. I didn't see much talking about this, just about encryption.

At some point, somebody needs to pay for identity verification. Maybe a group of companies does it for free for a Better Net, but there will be a cost someplace.

"The Peter Principle", yeah, my uncle bought this book when it was "new", when he was studying his MBA. A good read.

Also in the book was "Peter's Parry", with parry having the meaning "to dodge". If you know you're going to suck in the higher role, how do you back off? Sadly, there's also a huge bias against people knowing their skill set limitations and saying no. "How can you refuse a promotion?!!??".

Another solution is parallel tracks. If you don't want to promote your developer into a management track (going from technical skills to more organizational and people skills) what's a parallel track for promoting her as an engineer? Senior engineer is bandied around a lot, but how about architecture roles, platform evangelist, etc, to keep them in roles with skill sets closer to what they've shown.