Sometimes doing the right thing is illegal. I don't expect the government to look the other way. Doing the right thing in spite of the consequences is what makes it heroic. I know they won't give him amnesty, I'll be happy enough if they just don't capture him abroad or have him killed.

Darn Snowden and his outdated sense of patriotism. I guess he didn't get the memo that the Bill of Right's was downgraded the legal status of "Just a suggestion". It should have been clear to him that the American people couldn't be trusted with knowing what the government is doing to them. Good thing they already got all that money budgeted, because if there is one thing we know it's that once a program is a line item on the budget it can't be stopped.

License plates are visible and a single check at a point in time isn't very telling, but if you write a query that says "show me all the license plates that have been in the vicinity of this intersection by this church on Sunday between 9AM and 5PM more than 3 times in past 60 days", I bet you'd have a pretty good idea of who attends. You can apply the same logic to find residence, employer, or just about anything that is a consistent pattern. You can treat anyone who was present around the time of an incident as a potential suspect. The argument gets made that it is legal to follow a car on the street without a warrant so this is no different, but while cops can follow one car, they don't have resources to follow everyone and in this case the technology allows them to follow everyone all the time. All they have to do is ask the database the right question and they can find out just about anything they want about people's habits or about which people are likely connected to a specific location.

Valuing device longevity rather than having all devices being disposable after 2-3 years seems like low hanging fruit from an environmental perspective that gets very little attention. Especially now that things like Blueray players and other devices are getting embedded apps like Netflix and a variety of other applications, it is getting harder to have devices with reasonable lifespans. The manufacturers in general are driven to produce products with the lowest possible price right now, and have little incentive to build in longevity. Devices containing internet connected software applications make this worse because manufacturers don't want to develop and support updates for something sold five years ago. My experience too often is that manufactures force firmware updates and eventually one of the updates breaks the functionality of the device. There is no incentive to maintain a stable code base that can exist indefinitely without intervention. How many appliances purchased in decades past lasted for twenty years or better? How many of the things we buy today will be in use 7 years from now? I think we are in a period of rapid innovation where stable higher longevity products are not going to be the norm, but I really hope in a few years we can adapt to a more sustainable model where the things we buy can have a longer expected service life. Rapid innovation and extreme devaluing of commodity items comes at cost, despite the benefits to the consumer.

Employers should prefer you not to be on Facebook. My employers expect me to maintain their security and not to blab about their business to the world. Interviewers who knock people for not having a social media profile or a "fully developed" Linkedin profile are idiots. Unless you are in marketing or PR fields it shouldn't matter at all. Socially, you can compromise your own personal values to blend in, or you can live as you choose and not give a shit. The idea that someone without a social media presence is suspicious is an over generalization of human existence and a very unfortunate trend in society.

Staples creates Easy Button for marketing purposes, Amazon makes it actually do something in real life.

I'll add, you should actually keep the stuff he says is important to hold onto. I've spent a lot of time in the past collecting historical documents and organizing stuff so my employers can retain it after I'm gone. Three times now I've returned to companies where instead of keeping my data they wipe the laptop, delete my email and destroy years of valuable data. I've learned that companies cannot be trusted to keep valuable data and they will often not keep you on long enough to do proper knowledge transfer. Now I prepare docs ahead of resignation and hand them off to my peers and stuff it on shared servers, because management doesn't seem to consider employees might have had data of any value.

As much as I'd hate to see a circus of lawsuits around this issue, it's clear there is an ethical obligation of sites to warranty their advertisements to do no harm. A user willingly goes to www.reputablesite.com, but they have no informed consent over all the advertisements and other links that site displays, they just load along with the requested page. If the requested page is loading third party content and getting paid to do so, then clearly they should make every effort to screen for malware or abuse.

Amazon is the Wal-Mart of the internet. We should build a drone large enough to deliver Jeff Bezos to a remote island where he can no longer harm anyone.

Good thing they have all that metadata to parse so it's easy to know who the journalist are, you know, so they can get a warrant before accessing their data.

My preference is for public execution by gun to the back of the head, to be completed exactly three months after conviction. Paying for lengthy appeals and decades of sitting on death row costing the tax payers money is not effective. It should be swift and without apology or undue spectacle. Either, do it and do it quickly out in the open, or abolish it completely and stop wasting resources.

A Pony is a tiny horse, but a Clony is a tiny horse and an abomination. The four horsemen of the apocalypse may yet arrive on four genetically identical steeds.

I understand this article to mean that we have simply given up on having any agreed upon proper English. I'll admit I'm a pretty sloppy writer, but I'd rather that the true academics guide the course of what is considered proper English, than allow language to be whatever general society decides. Rather than saying there isn't one definition of proper English we can simply acknowledge there are regional differences and varying tolerances for lack of strict usage and percentage of slang. In common speech we may accept that with is considered normal, but when the occasion arises that more formal language is expected, the need for proper English becomes evident.

The password could still be saved in the client and 2FA added as an additional layer. I personally won't be using Yahoo! mail for mobile much longer as their new versions require extensive additional permissions. Currently the app has no objectionable permissions, but the new version wants much more, namely: Device & App History, Identity, Contacts, Location, SMS, Wi-Fi connection info, Device ID and Call info. My current app functions as needed, WTF would I enable all that additional access? I pay for premium services on Yahoo mail, I expect better.