Not only was there a serious security issue here, but Dropbox customers are having to find out about this through blogs. Dropbox has yet to email its users about this issue. It claims on its blog that users who logged in during this time have been notified. I logged in during this time, and have received no notice.

I am now leaving Dropbox. I need to review Wuala and Spideroak to see if they meet my needs, but I can safely say that this event and Dropbox's earlier behavior has demonstrated to me that they do not take the security and privacy of their customers seriously.

Why would I want a vicious shark to be an attack dog? It just seems like I either have a suffocating shark, or I was very confused about my requirements when I went looking for an attack dog.

Maybe they just classified the really good part: when the lights came back on, there were only 49.

Or Ke$ha, as long as you don't listen to it.

Come on, Darl, let it go. It's time to move on.

Dude, you ruined it. As written, you have a brilliant joke in C: the premise is bad (we're beating a dead horse), the plan is questionable (we're directly comparing a pointer and a string literal), and the execution is sloppy (thanks to the typo, we're testing the result of a non-zero assignment, so the horse is beat forever regardless of liveliness).

This is pretty much the story of SCO.

I have to admit, I had to ignore years of experience with Internet forums to follow a link to "goatse.fr."

The difference here is that "blast processing" was a vague, nebulous term that was never really elaborated on, and this is a very specific technical specification (the iPhone 4's 326 ppi screen), and is being compared against a reasonably specific reference metric (the sensitivity of the human eye). The practical upshot of this is that once you have a display whose pixels are so small that at a normal viewing distance nearly all of the population will be unable to distinguish neighboring pixels from each other, there is very little use in further improving resolution without also increasing screen size.

Do the specs speak for themselves? No, they don't, because while 326ppi makes perfect sense to me, I don't know anything about the maximum sensitivity of the human eye, and I'm interested to hear where that bar is set, whether this display really exceeds that, and what caveats I should be aware of in taking this metric into consideration when selecting screens for my own use.

Whether or not the iPhone 4 in particular meets this goal only of mild interest; it's a case study of a device that literally claims to be designed to have a higher resolution than the eye can distinguish. If it doesn't hit the mark, there's going to be a display that will come closer soon, and I'd like to be able to talk more knowledgeably about what this means.

I hope you like working solo, because it won't be selling until June 24.

Probably because the way I act at parties is different from the way I act at industry trade shows.

This is the same outfit that thought it would be an amusing prank to show up at CES with a universal TV power-off remote, which they used to interrupt demonstrations, presentations and meetings. I wouldn't blame anyone for banning them from a trade show. Apple just has more specific reasons than most for barring them.

You are not required to use the most specific word on every occasion. I may describe you as wearing "pants" when you're wearing "jeans." I may say that "new financial reforms" are being discussed when we're talking about regulations specifically related to securities. I might refer to "gaming" regulations when we're talking specifically about gambling or video games. Sometimes, there's ambiguity in the language, and you just learn to sift through it by context.

The word "gaming" was a valid choice here, as I have repeatedly proven to you with citations and references.

If a word is so commonly accepted as meaning something that I can find examples of it being used as such for hundreds of years in formal and casual settings in multiple countries, and I can look it up in the dictionary and see that the first definition of it is that meaning, how on earth can you call it a euphemism?

I understand the point you are trying to make -- the issue is that this is not an appropriate example of a case where a word is hijacked. They are using the term correctly, as defined by the dictionary, and in a way that is consistent with not only modern usage but also historical usage dating back literally hundreds of years. You are attempting to shame them into complying with your political agenda by using only words that you deem appropriate, with what appears to be the aim of separating gambling from other forms of gaming to make it easier to push an anti-gambling agenda. If anyone's being Orwellian here, it's you.

You have misunderstood your Wikipedia excerpt. What the excerpt is saying is that in some areas, "gaming" is distinct from gambling in that "gaming" is something which is legally-approved. That is to say, "gambling" may or may not be legal, but "gaming" is. The article suggests that this distinction is not universally recognized, and I agree with that -- I sure as hell never thought of the word "gaming" as suggesting legality one way or another. The example provided for the UK shows that "gambling" may also refer to legal activity as well. This does not in any way suggest that they do not recognize "gaming" as a synonym, nor does the article suggest that it does. Indeed, the UK has a number of legal recognitions of "gaming" as referring to gambling -- for example, in 1960, the "Betting and Gaming" act legalized Bingo in the United Kingdom. This helped weaken a move away from gaming in the UK -- for example, parliament's Gaming Act of 1845 held that wagers were not enforceable contracts.

So, yes, the UK does use "gaming" in the same sense, and that sense goes back for literally hundreds of years. While "gambling" can be used in place (and since we usually discuss "gaming" in the sense of video games, I actually think that's appropriate here), it is by no means incorrect or unreasonably pro-industry to use the word "gaming." It literally means, according to the dictionary, "the practice of gambling." It has been used in this context for centuries. That is why people continue to use it. Because that's what the word means, has meant for a very long time, and that is the word which is used most frequently by people who discuss it regularly.