Seeing as you care about accuracy: the phrase "security theatre" doesn't mean what you think it does.

what it results in is an environment where closed and repressive societies have an advantage in the information realm over open and democratic societies.

Here here! Obviously the proper response is to stop being an open society and keep hiding information from the people in this, our God-given democracy, until such time as the baby-eating fascists from Oceania are driven back to their watery realm. Do you have a news letter to which we may subscribe?

How is it Ralph Nader's fault that Obama is busy bombing the fuck out of the Afghans and is letting circa 50,000 mercenaries from US-based firms continue the brutal occupation of Iraq?

Well said. The framing of this stuff is insane. Another thing that disturbs me is the quote of 100,000 killed. That's just the recorded incidents of "killed by munitions". The number of deaths due to the destruction of the clean water supply, hospitals, food supply, electricity, roads etc is vastly huger. By nearly any standard the Iraq War is a war crime.

but seriously measuring contributions made by other people is divisive and unnecessary. I've contributed in a few area's and just helping newbies is a contribution that most can make. The size of the contribution doesn't matter. Redhat is commercially successful and turns a profit mark shuttleworth pumps money into Linux via ubuntu and the parent seems to say that isn't good enough do more.

Measuring contributions is a useful way to see what is an efficient way of generating Free Software vis a vis different business models. It's fairly obvious that Canonical's model is a bust both with regards to generating profit for its owner and producing Free Software that the rest of us can use. When criticized for their lack of useful kernel code in the past Canonical's marketing spin was that they added value back to the wider GNU/Linux community by doing desktop work.

Now we have actual statistics on Canonical's desktop contributions and they're less than impressive.

When Canonical fails all that they will leave behind is a lot of marketing hot air which will provide fodder for Apple and Microsoft and Oracle to claim: Linux Failed On the Desktop.

1. You're conflating Ubuntu and Canonical.

2. Canonical is a large, private company which has been around since 2004. If we compare the contributions only since 2004 then Red Hat has still contributed more code than Canonical: to EVERY part of the Linux stack. More egregiously if we compare the large, well-funded Canonical to small start ups like Litl, Collabora and Fluendo even then Canonical fails to contribute as much.

We've come a long way since our launch in 2004. We now have over 350 staff in more than 30 countries, and offices in London, Boston, Taipei, Montreal and the Isle of Man.

Everyone puts these Canonical freeloaders to shame.

You would indeed be wrong if you merely said "Red Hat contributes 16 times as much code". That's ONLY what they contribute to GNOME specifically. They develop the kernel, most of the toolchain for compilation, vast parts of the network stack, fonts, ... basically bloody everything AND they do that by adhering to Free Software and SHARING EVERYTHING UPSTREAM where it's easy for any distro to benefit from their work.

Fedora and Red Hat provide Free Software in their repositories. It's trivial to install the non-Free drivers (and their associated hidden bugs) supplied by NVIDIA.

In addition to that Debian, Red Hat and Novell and Intel and other honest players have spent huge amounts of time coding up Free drivers with the Nouveau project (free NVIDIA drivers), Intel drivers, and ATI/AMD drivers

Sounds like the only one saying a big FUCK YOU is your self.

Sure it is. Community and users are a resource. They can an asset to either a succesful company (Red Hat) which has a consistent, strong track record of contributing vast amounts of Free Software to every part of the stack (from kernel on up to network and sound management, to the desktop and free fonts) OR they can be expended by a (so far) commercially unsuccesful hobby company (Canonical) which is devoted to recouping Mark Shuttleworth's lost millions and has so far failed to contribute anything of note.

Many pieces of GNOME software live on Launchpad and are not strictly part of GNOME upstream (Simple Scan, for instance).

That's the problem: Canonical is not doing the hard work to get what little they do write upstream. Stuff that is not upstream is just balkanized, fractured, non-maintainable code. It doesn't provide any benefit to the rest of the GNU/Linux community, i.e. the people that write all the rest of the code and upstream it so that Canonical can exist in the first place. Usability research is useful, but when I click your link I see one study (on Empathy) and further clicking around on the Canonical Design team site reveals that, as so much of Canonical appears to be, it's all about marketing. Seriously: ONE study and then three guides devoted to "guidelines to support the brand documentation and help create consistent brand usage."?

Yep, this is pseudo-science bullshit on a par with water-dowsing

What they were collecting were locations of access points.To collect that data, they had equipment in the vans capturing data broadcast by those access points and processing it to determine their location. When a vehicle is moving around, it is not within range of most networks for very long. You can only capture a limited number of frames in that time period. Then you use software to analyze the signal strength data from those frames, along with the gps log, to determine the locations of the access points. This only looks at lower layer segments of those frames, and the higher layer segments (including the payload) don't affect it.

Google failed to go back and delete the raw capture files. Maybe they wanted to keep the raw data in case there are future improvements in the analysis software. If that's the case, they failed to reprocess the captures and edit those frames to remove any potential user payload data. I'm not aware of any functionality for doing this on-the-fly with any of the open-source tools for capturing traffic. Ignoring all information from all non-beacon frames would have far less accuracy, especially in areas where wifi is heavily used. There isn't anything to indicate that they had any interest in any user payload data, or that any of it was collected anywhere outside of the raw capture files.

The whole purpose of using analysis software is so that you don't have to look over large amounts of meaningless raw unfiltered data... I'm willing to bet there are some sources of raw data that you have and fail to thoroughly review by hand. For someone who has a job to do, wasting that much time isn't usually an option. Even for someone who doesn't have a job, that still could require more time than they have depending on the amount of data.

Anything capturing data is going to inevitably collect some data that is not intended for it. For example, if you've ever typed around any audio recording device. That captured audio can be analyzed to determine what you typed, even if it was not intended for the person capturing the audio. Or if you've ever been to a tourist attraction you've probably been at least captured in the background of other people's home movies, whether or not you indented to be.

Don't you see? The bias in the article is a prime example of reverse psychology. Notice how many people are already acepting the idea of nuking it.

Two arguments over semantics there.

Yes you could say if someone held a gun to your head you had the choice to die or to do what they said.. but that would never hold up in court or under moral scrutiny and you know it.
So why not address my points instead of meandering around the dictionary definitions of "Choice" and "Worth"

It's not a republican mantra, it's a corporate mantra rubber-stamped by both political parties to abscond with money not theirs from people who have no choice in the wherefore of spending.

"One thing that I think would be a good idea for Facebook to implement would be rule-based access privileges for different groups that you can define. The groups shouldn't be visible to anyone other than yourself, of course; the last thing you'd need would be for "friends" to see that they weren't "good friends.""

Facebook actually already has this. I use it all the time. Grouped my co-workers into a group, and I can exclude them from seeing certain posts (of a more personal nature, not things about them.)