Connectivity is huge, but it's only one of the ingredients in making this decision.

If you want the app to work for them outside of the corporate WiFi, you have to host it on the public internet, where all attackers are equally welcome without regard to skillz or skripts. Are you sure that server is secure? What about tomorrow? Are you patching it? Are your users securing their devices properly? Uh oh, it's the new version of Heartbleed, go back three spaces.

You also have to consider performance. Is this something that your users will use constantly for their jobs, or occasionally for some rare piece of info? If it's going to add one second to every screen, and you're asking people to tap their way through 600 screens a day, the inefficiency is going to cost you 10 minutes worth of payroll per user per day. Maybe you make that up in hardware costs if you force your users to bring their own smartphone to work. Maybe the sluggishness just makes your users miserable throughout the day. Or maybe it simply costs you a lot of money.

On the other side, if it's used perhaps once or twice a day by 2000 people, poor performance and connectivity issues won't be nearly as important as savings on developer costs and time to market, Or if you have only a half dozen heavy users, perhaps you're willing to eat the payroll cost of an hour per day instead of spending them on development.

It's a question best answered by the money.

Manning would almost certainly have been caught regardless. All those State Department cables could only have come from someone with access to the entire database. That's a reasonably short list of people, and everyone on it would have been grilled and inspected from head to toe.

His (her) talking about it just made the inevitable happen faster.

I'm much more cynical, and I don't think Pepsi is giving in to anyone. I think they're trying to exploit people's fears that "OMG chemicals bad". It's more like they're advertising "We're the only brand that dares to print arsenic-free on our products."

I think the real problem with Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Max is that they taste more or less like regular Pepsi. Their advertising slogan may as well be "Pepsi - for when you can't afford actual Coca-Cola."

Neither Manning nor Snowden remained anonymous. At some point the leak is so big that anonymity is not possible, and someone will pay the price for the leak.

"Call your doctor immediately if you experience a coding session lasting more than four hours, as this may indicate a serious side effect."

It is through the Dew of Mountains that thoughts acquire speed.

They could maintain a list of third party library versions and identify versions of apps that link with them. But then what? As a user, I might not want Apple to shut off some random app I depend on -- just because they think it might be hackable doesn't mean my device is actually being hacked; and I might really need that app today for some important client presentation.

They could contact impacted developers and request they repair the damage, but what can they do if nobody responds?

Apple focuses on end user experience first. They won't want to inconvenience their users that much.

You barely survived bullying, so you should know better than most that many people don't. That's plenty of reason not to tolerate bullying.

Look at it this way: survival of the fittest is already being changed by modern medicine; would you withhold penicillin from a child with pneumonia because he's too weak to survive? By extension, we owe the same level of concern to people with psychological problems.

No, it's pre-crime if they've done no harm at the time they're banned.

The triggers or flags the algorithm recognizes are not themselves the offenses. They are just attributes of posts from people who in the past have exhibited similar early behavior; this algorithm knows how to recognize that pattern.

Let's say that you categorize a thousand historical troll posts, and study their metrics (I'm going to make up some fake metrics here for example.) The average number of posts before they actually get to spewing the bile might be 15. Of those 15, an average of two of them might contain the misspelled phrase "your wrong". Another indicator might be writing five posts within the first hour of registering a new ID. None of those posts contain an actual troll message, but 75% of the time someone matches that behavior, they will have written a troll by their 10th-20th post.

Pre-crime would be banning people based on matching this pattern without waiting for the actual troll post to be made. It would ban 100% of pattern-matchers, but of those, only 75% would statistically have gone on to actually troll. The other 25% would be unfairly banned for their poor spelling and bad timing.

While I believe that people who are less sensitive tend to thrive more than others, I don't agree that "thicker skin" is a workable solution. Too many people have fragile emotional states and simply don't have the neural hardware psychological capacity required to dismiss the hate and insults that often happen on line. There have been some high-profile suicides among teens who were attacked online, and who knows how many people remove themselves from public comment because of the hate they've received? For safety reasons I don't think society should completely abrogate the forums to the trolls.

Does that not mean some people are overly sensitive? Sure. But just as we shouldn't velour-line the internet to cater to absolutely every person with a psychological disorder; we also don't have to tolerate the diarrhea that spews forth from the trolls. We don't have to draw a hard-and-fast line on the ground, either, and define "these words are always 100% bad in 100% of situations". Instead, we should be welcoming humans in the loop, asking them to pass judgment when needed. That gets us to a more fluid state than full automation. It also lets the user choose. Don't like the judgment process on Slashdot? Don't hang out on Slashdot.

I know full automated filtering is the holy grail of internet forum moderation, but as soon as you deploy a filter it becomes a pass/fail test for the trolls, who quickly learn to adapt and evade it. Human judges can adapt, too, and are about the only thing that can; there are simply too few for the volume of trolls out there. A tool like this might help them scale this effort to YouTube volumes.

Well, the Mounties haven't shown up at the border to haul away the G-men, so if I were Canadian I wouldn't place any faith in that treaty to keep myself out of harm's way.

If it looks like toilet paper and is used like toilet paper, it's worth the same as toilet paper.

Well, the Mounties haven't shown up at the border to haul away the G-men, so I wouldn't place any faith in that treaty to keep out of harm's way. If it looks like toilet paper and is used like toilet paper, it's worth the same as toilet paper.

Because too many people still associate coding with Computer Science, and are not taught Software Engineering.

Computer Science is all about the languages and the algorithms: how to make the computer count, how to make it sort, how to normalize data, etc. Software engineering is about the whys of design principles and design patterns. It's about testability, quality, readability, maintainability. It's about development methodologies. Almost anyone can write a sequential list of instructions, but unless they understand modularity, complexity, coupling, cohesion, they will not produce effectively maintainable code. They still think that because they passed a coding class that they're a coder, so they produce a crappy pile of hard-coded inappropriate dependencies, and then build more stuff that depends on the badly designed stuff, and then they wonder why programming sucks.

If we taught every child in the "Intro to Coding" class using Test Driven Development, we'd be teaching them to be the very first consumers of the code they write, and they'd quickly feel the consequences of making their own poor choices. They'd learn to course correct early, instead of struggling like so many of the questioners asking about homework problems on Stack Overflow. Instead of waiting to teach TDD as an advanced graduate level course, we'd have a lot more people who "get it". Or we'd quickly weed out the people who are incapable of ever getting it. Either way, everyone would be better off than we are.

Re the Upton Sinclair quote: I'm pretty sure (don't have time to dig through the library at the moment) that earthquakes from well injection were known in California in the 1920s (when Sinclair had a small interest in the oil boom there, hence Oil! [later "There Will Be Blood"]).

sPh

A heartbeat can theoretically be traced, at least to the last RF transmitter in the chain. If that's WiFi, it's a few hundred meters at most. If it's typical home automation, it's 20 meters or so. So, if the Evil Midnight Bomber is being watched, the messages originating from him could be noticed. It's definitely not the stealthiest of options.

Yes, a transmitter putting out a watt or two would lead to the needle in the haystack scenario, but the bad guys aren't doing that yet.