So Cracklib is garbage. That was easy.

Seriously, if your criteria for a good password is merely that it lacks repetition then "fffffffffiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeee99999999222222llllllllaaatttt" is a terrible password. In practice, it's at least as good as 9 character password made up of completely random characters.

Anyone care to check my math? (hint: it's 8 groups of letters, all letters being identical within a group and chosen from lower case letters and numbers, the length of each group being a random integer between 3 and 11)

There are a ton of Google services. I think the ones that would
surprise most people are:

• Google Health
• Google Trends
• The Google Pack
• Aardvark

Then of course, there's their non-Web site features. For example,
they have a VC group called Google Ventures; a whole series of public
policy and government-related initiatives such as their work with enabling
public Q&A and CitizenTube, YouTube's public
policy blog about "developing trends in the use of YouTube by news
organizations, activists, politicians, and governments."

They're also a major developer of FOSS. Sometimes this takes the form
of giant systems like Android or Chromium, but just as often, it's
little things like their new Image format, WEBP (my
analysis of WEBP for screenshots, here).

Google does so much that they really do have to mercilessly kill
things like Wave and GOOG-411 when their either outlive their planned
purpose (like the latter) or don't achieve critical mass (like the
former). Otherwise they'd be buried under an avalanche of
half-finished products.

Is that meant as humor? Lessee.. against the rejections of a large chunk of their software suite including latitude and voice (voice, BTW offers the same features now offered across several other iPhone apps that were approved). Against the painfully slow process of getting Apple to update the Google maps app on iPhone. Against the continued taunts of Apples CEO.

And really, that's just the stuff we see. Google has its own platform, and yet the continue to try to bring their tools to Apple's platform as well, and over and over again Apple rejects them without providing replacements that have even remotely comparable functionality.

Not a bad idea, really. You just need a way for the fighter to establish a high bandwidth link between the target and a few backbone providers, then post the target IP address in a link on Slashdot and viola! Instant DDOS, Slashdot style ;-)

Realistically, Slashdot's "effect" is fairly week these days compared to, say, showing up on Google Trends or having your URL tweeted by a celebrity.

No, you're incorrect. It will always remain hidden. You can change your location, but the distance to the horizon created by the interaction between the speed of light and the expansion of the universe wouldn't change (unless one of those two parameters is changing). WHAT you can see will change, but you'll never be able to see anything past the horizon.

Sometimes it's worth a reality check. Some companies are sexist asses, true, but that actually doesn't put them on the same playing field as a country that stomps on the freedoms of their citizens the way China does.

Granted, Godaddy didn't do this out of the goodness of their little, black hearts, but it's worth thinking about the relative scale of douchitude in the world, from time to time.

Re-read what I wrote. Here, I'll quote it for you:

Yes, your son had fun with it. I'm sure there are hundreds of people who've played around with GE, but that doesn't exactly explain why it's a Google product that they guard the protocols for jealously, which was the original line of inquiry to which I responded.

The answer to that question is that GE isn't intended for typical end-users, cute though it may be. It's intended for commercial applications.

For the most part, GE is not useful for typical end-user activity. It is mostly used to provide a tool for commercial applications of the Google maps data. For example, if you've seen a movie that did the zoom-in or -out between the globe from space and a single house, everything from 100 feet up and further was probably Google Earth. It's also used by law enforcement, NGOs planning access routes to remote locations, real estate, site surveys, etc. See their business use cases for Google Earth for more info.

You could always whitelist ads on sites that you want to support while turning off JavaScript (e.g. using noscript). Most ads will still display (unless they're flash, and then it really was their choice, wasn't it?)

That's what I do. I even leave Slashdot's ad opt-out checkbox unchecked.

This is a radical over-simplification to the point of being nonsensical. There are dozens of flavors of anarchy, all of which have their own unique relationship to this statement. Of course, one could suggest that anarchies seek to weaken the rule of law, and thus afford the strong greater ease in subjecting the weak, and in some cases that's a reasonable claim, but that's not what you said.

If that were sufficient definition of democracy, then prisons would be democratic. Everyone can yell into the central halls and all anyone can do to suppress your voice is to commit violence against you (e.g. shut you up physically), which is always an option in any situation where members of the social group have access to one another.

No, the definition of democracy hinges on a social contract whereby the society as a whole agree to be bound by majority decisions. The ability to partake in that process is only the first step. Open source projects rarely require such a social contract (some of the larger ones do). They are typically loose confederations which behave as benevolent dictatorships and whose resources the group is allowed to leave with, should they decide to disband.

The reason this is practical in the open source world is that the resources have no inherent cost other than time, and their value is not diminished by forking. This, of course, is not true of land, food and natural resources, which is why the open source model doesn't work in the real world.

You mis-read. The GP was saying that the fact that simple failure to comply escalates the charge to felony resistance is the absurdity which should be removed from the books. What makes it far, far worse is that his failure to comply was such a blindingly reasonable response to having been punched in the face merely for asking, "what's going on?" a point which appears to have been clearly established in the case.

No matter what happens, both officers really must be dismissed at this point. Their claims were shown to be false in court and they committed severe breeches of protocol in getting into the vehicle and beating the driver without any cause or notable resistance beyond his having been foolish enough to get out of the car to ask what was up.

From the author in question's recent blog post:

As best I can tell from the jurors who have commented since, it came down to a simple question: did he, after being hit, seemingly only for having stepped out of his car and asked why he was being searched, comply with the demand that he get down on the ground. The answer was: no, he did not. Case closed, conviction handed down.

He's right that the law is awfully broad, here, and I agree with him that the law is likely to be shot down in the near future, but the jury really had little choice but to convict. I hope the sentencing is light on him, and I expect it probably will be.

So it seems that someone wanted to survey the names people use for wireless access points, but was too lazy to do the research, so they put up a Web site with some fake data and posted to Slashdot in the hopes that everyone would post their clever names as comments.

Guess it worked... ;-)

What data? My data is safe and sound, thank you very much. Google's data consists of any information that I've chosen to allow them to collect.

What cookies I may or may not have associated with my browsers, JavaScript I've allowed to run and IP addresses I've elected to share (all of which I can subvert at the press of a button, should I choose, using private-mode browsing, cookie controls, Tor, privoxy, etc.) are my choosing, and I've never taken much stock in the idea that that information was mine in the first place.