Hey, thanks for that. I find it kind of odd that "wiretapping" has come to refer to live conversations. Though for that matter, I find it kind of odd that it extends even to the two parties a phone call; yes, there's a wire, but both are speaking voluntarily, and the term "wiretapping" was coined to refer to a third party listening in.

I know that people have an idea that there's some kind of privacy even in public: you want to be able to do stuff with other people around but not be remembered. I find that expectation kind of odd; cameras and recording devices are older than anybody alive and we've all grown up with it. So people are apparently trying to legislate a forgetfulness, but I suspect that expectation is gradually going to change.

OK, down-thread somebody cited the actual law, and sure enough, it DOES include live conversation. Weird.

OK, fancy-pants article-reader, 'splain me this:

Why "wiretapping"? I'm not a legal expert (obviously); has the term "wiretap" come to also refer to live conversations?

I don't think that's necessarily the case. Rather, the Second Amendment can be seen as vague, yielding several interpretations, especially in light of its ungrammatical "prefatory clause".The Supreme Court's current interpretation of it effectively ignores that clause; the notion of a "militia" simply doesn't enter into its reading one way or the other. The Founders' intent is unclear, and Stevens is proposing to clear it up... in his direction.

Now that the Supreme Court has spoken, it becomes the law of the land. If 500 Floridians had voted differently back in 2000, maybe the justices would have spoken differently, but they didn't. So now, the only way to change the interpretation of that baffling "militia" clause is to change the wording.

Which is a notion so utterly quixotic that I can't imagine why Stevens is wasting his time penning the editorial. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that it reinforces just what you said: since there is less chance of altering the Second Amendment than there is of me flapping my arms and flying to the moon, the current interpretation will stand. Whether that's what the Founders intended is irrelevant.

(And given the changes in what "arms" are over the past two centuries, I don't think that's unreasonable. What's unreasonable, sadly, is that the divide is so deep among Americans, and the legislative processes so focused on stasis, that there's absolutely no forum in which we can meaningfully discuss the possibility of change.)

You should consider avoiding pretty much any OS kernel then for the same reasons!

All I want from a car unit is a touchscreen + audio. Alas, while most phones can handle external displays, external touchscreens are generally unsupported.

A car has to last at least a decade. Trying to build in intelligence is futile, and adding 3G/4G is not much better. In a decade, CPU's and software and data transfer standards will hopefully have advanced greatly.

I've spouted it a hundred times, here's #101:

Intuit's QuickBooks package is in desperate need of competition. It's thoroughly entrenched in the accounting industry such that the interface is nonsensically-antiquated. Yet, it's become one of those industry standards that Intuit refuses to modernize it or introduce any kind of improvements for fear it will alienate the armies of accountants that have been compelled to learn it.

If google were to launch a cloud-based bookkeeping app, this would be a tremendous benefit to small business owners worldwide.

heh and I see it was linked to in TFA. Sorry.

Ted Unangst wrote a good article called "analysis of openssl freelist reuse"

His analysis:

This bug would have been utterly trivial to detect when introduced had the OpenSSL developers bothered testing with a normal malloc (not even a security focused malloc, just one that frees memory every now and again). Instead, it lay dormant for years until I went looking for a way to disable their Heartbleed accelerating custom allocator.

it's a very good read.

The news being distorted to make for a more paranoia-inducing headline? On my Slashdot? Unpossible!

They're both removable storage, but even that function is conceived very differently now. Floppies are intended to be swapped in and out; the picture even depicts somebody sliding one in. They had very small capacity, and you'd use multiple floppies as an organizational tool the way we now use directories. (MS-DOS had directories, but CP/M just had a flat file structure since it only supported 200k floppies anyway.) The idea that a chip that small would also store 1000x more data would have been dismissed as hilarious.

SD chips tend to be fairly immobile: some are removable (especially on devices like cameras), but in most cases they tend to just stay there. You can get the SD card out of my phone, but you have to remove the case and a battery to get to it. We've substituted networking for most of the "removability" of a floppy drive. I know that some printers still support using SD cards as sneakernetting, but I suspect that more and more cameras will just end up with built in networking. The main reason to remove the chip will be to put in a bigger one.

The Japanese government actually contracts for the production of certain handmade saw blades which couldn't be sold profitably so as to ensure that the skills for producing the saws will be taught and passed down to succeeding generations of saw makers.

Thanks. The summary has a spectacularly ambiguous pronoun.

Dedupes client side.

I have my own domains and do this with tunnelled rsync to a NAS4Free box, though for long term storage I like SpiderOak (and TarSnap). SpiderOak keeps historical versions and dedupes the data.