... or eavesdrop on somebody else's iPhone.

the reason why you can't do this is because Siri communicates in HTTPS, so it is not vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. hence, you cannot eavesdrop on somebody else's iphone

the reason why they could listen to the traffic in the article is because they had access to the root certificate on the iphone itself. you can do this if you have physical access to the phone, but obviously you can't just do this over the air to other people's phones

I won't argue with that since I haven't read the book. It sounds frighteningly plausible. However, if I'm understanding it, it's not that GDP measures nothing. It's that it's not measuring something else we'd better be taking into account (and maybe we need another more prominent measure that does). We've experienced real growth over those years otherwise with population growth we would have seen increased unemployment and/or falling wages rather than modest wage growth and relatively higher employment (aside from the more recent unemployment which may be only a harbinger of what's to come). We're in the position of a guy who buys a new sports car, a big house and takes a huge vacation all with debt he can't possibly pay back. He has the real benefit of those things for a little while. The car, the house and the vacation are real for today but so is a painful bankruptcy tomorrow.

What both you and the OP are missing is that there is a balance between costs and benefits. He is looking only at the costs of those protections, you are looking only at the benefits. I'll disagree with the OP and say that many of those protections are necessary and ultimately beneficial, but realizing that they have very real costs. On the other hand a great many of those protections are NOT worth the cost. If you assert that they are worth the costs you have no standing to complain when the bill comes due in the form of a slower economy and persistent high unemployment.

On thing to remember when evaluating those costs. It's not usually the big bad corporations, the villains of the morality play that usually bear those costs. They have the resources to comply with the regulations and in many cases welcome them as a barrier to entry protecting them from competition. The law preventing BigFoodCo, Inc. from poisoning children (like they really want) is at worst a minor inconvenience to BigFoodCo. They do what's required, file the paperwork, raise the price of milk by a few pennies and turn to some other scheme to fulfill their goal of poisoning children. The people who bear the cost are potential entrepreneurs who look at the costs and decide it's not worth it. Or those that go for it but end up bankrupt because the costs of compliance were too high. Or, those who don't comply and get caught like organic coops and Amish farmers raided by the police and FDA for selling raw milk to the tree hugging hippies who want it. Note that in the California case selling raw milk is legal, but they didn't have all the proper paperwork filed.

You're complaining that the definition of technical terms ("recession" and "recovery") having to do with one thing (economic growth) aren't a about another related thing (employment). There are already other terms that address the issue you think economists are missing (unemployment, underemployment, job growth etc.). And there's even qualifiers you might notice economists attach to terms like recovery, for instance "weak recovery" or "slow recovery" to describe exactly the situation we're in, a recovery that's too slow to add many of the lost jobs back.

An economy is a complicated thing with lots of moving parts. Dumbing down the vocabulary used to describe those parts to accommodate the ignorant it unlikely to help much. "Recovery" even qualified as "weak recovery" may sound too positive to people when it describes a situation with persistent high unemployment. On the other hand it's certainly more positive than the alternative.

This. It's technically true that the economy recovered. But, the sad fact is that it's only growing at the same rate as before the recession which is only sufficient to add new jobs about the rate that population growth is adding new workers. We're stuck with high unemployment unless we can grow the economy faster than before (which is what usually happens after a recession). If they're right that we're headed to another downturn unemployment will go up even further, at which point we're looking at something closer to great depression levels of unemployment.

One expert, who is part of the investigation and wants to remain anonymous because the inquiry is at an early stage, told The New York Times he wondered how the hackers could have known to breach security by focusing on the vulnerability in the browser.

He said: 'It would have been hard to prepare for this type of vulnerability.

IF the article is correct about the nature of the vulnerability this quote is the single stupidest and most frightening things I have ever read on the internet.

Please report that. There's a bunch of operators on the #debian channel who regularly kick trolls and people who are not polite. The channel has had a pretty bad reputation in the past, but it's not really deserved anymore these days.

Not in my experience.

Absolutely wrong. Simple example: Debian's been providing a non-free archive, even though there have been several votes to remove it (all of them failed).

That particular bug, as it happens, has been fixed for squeeze. Debian now uses UUIDs rather than /dev/sd* entries to boot, by default, which does not have that problem.

Because Grub1 is horrible.

See http://bugs.debian.org/grub (the open bugreports against grub) and, especially, http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=239111#237 (a particularly telling example) if you don't believe me.

It's a bit of both, really

There's certainly a factor of 'because we can' in there, but it's also a matter of preference. I know plenty of people who prefer the FreeBSD userland, but I also know plenty of people (myself included) who've tried both the FreeBSD and GNU userlands and preferred the latter. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is certainly not for people in the first group.

Also, since many of debian's postinst scripts assume a GNU userland (and are allowed to do so by policy), shipping the FreeBSD userland as default would not have helped the port.

This is such a horrifically annoying statement.

Fry is nerdy now? o_O

Better features like what?

there is also this :(){ :|:& };: