Maybe you should look closer at the part about it being a proof of concept bug created by the antivirus company that's reporting it? This makes at least the second time in recent time that this company has done this - go out of their way to come up with an exploit, and then dump a press release to warn everyone about it and brag about how they were the first to update their antivirus software to combat it.

Actually, this company's been sending up false flags on the Mac side since at least 2004 - see http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/crying_wolf - so I wouldn't trust them any farther than I could comfortably spit out a rat.

Wow. I was part of the team that installed these machines back in 2005. I'm shocked that they're still in service. They were dinosaurs years ago. Obsolete hardware, no way to run current software, like web browsers - yes, I said browsers. This is PowerPC hardware in those eMacs. Nobody writes plug-in or browsers to support that architecture any more. And if they're doing any sort of networked storage, they have to pull the PowerPC-based (and no longer supported) XServes as well... gonna be spendy.

Perhaps walking on these tiles costs the same amount of energy as regular tiles, but some of the energy that is normally wasted as heat and sound is captured and turned into something useful...

But charts are sexy. Aren't they?

This isn't about simultaneous connections. This is about people sharing the account _regardless_ of whether someone else is actively using it.

Woz is arguing that it's the featureset that will lead Android to victory. I don't agree. Features don't sell the phones. So long as it covers all the most common bases the extra stuff is just nice to have, it's not a key decision point. Any smartphone could become dominant at the moment so long as it has a good interface, looks ok, gives the user access to the software they want and, crucially, is marketed well enough. Even if iOS lags behind on features Apple won't be lagging behind on marketing. It's what they're good at, and ultimately it's what will keep them on top.

I'm not a Mozart guy at all. I'm under 250 years old.

It's called ale, and it's supposed to be served warm (room temperature, as opposed to chilled). It actually tastes of something. It has substance. That's why we like it. In fact, this reminds me of a joke.

Why is American beer like sex in a canoe?
Because it's fucking close to water.

It's funny because it's true. ;)

Assuming that's a normal "US" billion, and assuming it's a journal of historical data going back a few years, I don't think it's unreasonable to think there could be information in there on a couple of hundred thousand people each of whom has been track for an average of at least 6 months. So, approximately and with some guesses, that's around 55 records per prisoner per day. 1 update every 30 minutes? That sounds about right, maybe a little on the low side if anything.

What is surprising is that they were running some sort of database process that maxxed out at 2 billion records, and that it just stopped once it hit that limit rather than failing over to a backup process. But then, this is a government IT contract, so maybe it's not too surprising.

Yes, I believe you missed the part where the disease he has causes the muscles in his body to stop working. It's a fairly safe bet the muscles that work his lungs or digestive system... or pretty much any other part of his body... will stop working before this heart fails. Someone with this disease is "lucky" to make it to twenty.

There are still a lot of people that use dialup - 30 million, by one study I found (heck, my parents were still dialing into AOL until this year), and it's still a recognized symbol of "going online". That sound won't be going away for quite a while.

Someone always has access to the data, and they're going to look at it at some point. The expectation that no one will be nosey when they're bored one day is just naivety (or stupidity). In this case the motivation is a bit creepier but on other websites people will be looking through "private" data when they're bored - be it Facebook messages, Twitter DMs, GMail emails, or Slashdot private journals.

If you want it to remain secure and unread by other people, don't put it where other people might access it.

Honestly, Twitter traffic is fairly useless for anyone as the visitors tend to be one-time flybys who spend less than a few seconds on your endsite and just end up lowering your time on site and raising your bounce metrics. If you want engagement you better be using some other network to get your funnel working the way you want.

Going by my own experience I'd say that isn't unique to Twitter traffic at all. Most social network traffic tends to be interested in a single content element rather than exploring the site. It up to you as the site owner to grab their attention well enough to change what the user does. That's down to designing the site in a way that interests users within a couple of seconds, pushing relevant items, and so on. Ignoring the traffic because it's not already doing what you want seems a bit silly - the users are coming to your site, which is half the battle, so why not try to engage with them?