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Comment Re:Carrier IQ (Score 1) 160

Do you really think these things will be used to handle classified information?

This is why I asked the question -- I don't know. How do you connect to wifi in the Pentagon without having your credentials keylogged? This is my question.

Comment How (Score 5, Informative) 161

This seems to work by loading well-known resources into an iframe and using a heuristic of the "time to load" to tell if it's cached or not. Hence, whether or not you have visited that site. I just scanned the source code, but this is what it looks like. It any case, it's not like this code reveals your history -- just whether or not your browser has visited one in a set of popular sites.

Yay stateless web.

Comment What does this have to do with Sendmail? (Score 3, Insightful) 179

In the video, they don't even mention sendmail at all. Are they using it?

Also, they mention that the cost of the system is something like $1.30 per account per month. I don't know much about IT budgeting, but that seems like a really low number for something as critical as messaging and calendaring. I have to imagine that they spend more money per user just cutting the grass around the campus.

Comment Re:Prediction (Score 2) 465

Step 1. Someone figures out who the acress is. Step 2. A quick lesson in the "Streisand Effect".

Perhaps she was warned about the "Streisand Effect", and thought to herself, "an actress who continued working successfully well after her 40s? Sounds good to me!"

Comment Re:Updates to phones (Score 2) 309

Also why would a manufacturer spend money updating your phone when they rather you buy a new one?

I'm sure Apple would also rather everyone buy a new iPhone every year, and yet they bend over backwards to get the latest OS working on every conceivable model they have sold. Same with the Google phones, from what I understand.

The manufacturers who ship Android phones and then never publish updates obviously don't care one bit about their customers experience. It's as if they don't even perceive the people they sell to as "customers", but rather as "transaction generators". This approach might work fine for these businesses, but it's bad for the people who end up buying from them.

Comment Re:TV has been great for our kids (Score 1) 210

I did not say that TV was a requirement for a child to develop, so why the straw man?

All children should have limited time in front of the TV, because they should be out doing things with family and friends. But there is no way to severely restrict or eliminate TV, nor to suggest that it isn't a good avenue for learning.

I did not intend a straw man at all. You seemed to be implying that TV was needed (or significantly helped) your son to develop speech, therefor this science is nonsense. I was countering that with the fact that your son was over 2, and this study is specifically about kids under 2. Also, for a ~2 year old who is not in school, "much of the day" must be like 6-8 hours.

What works for your kids does not debunk general scientific guidance or support a position that it is nonsense. I'm glad you found something that works.

Comment Re:TV has been great for our kids (Score 1) 210

This is just nonsense.

My son wouldn't talk till he was over 2 years old. We were starting to worry. Then he discovered Thomas the Tank Engine. Suddenly he wanted to say the names of the engines and he learnt his colours too. [...]

Billions and billions of kids have developed fine without any TV at all, it's not necessarily nonsense. There are always outliers and special circumstances that are contrary to "normal", but that is not to say that spending "much of the day" with a TV is helpful to most kids under two years old. There is a big difference between a kid who is over 2 years old discovering Thomas The Tank Engine compared to someone who has not even turned one spending much of the day watching TV.

Comment Re:As compared to... (Score 1) 210

[...] is there ever a good answer to distracting kids so you can do laundry, make food, take a shower or other necessary tasks?

This finding seems to be specifically about kids two and under. It's not that hard to wrangle those kids and make dinner at the same time. They will slow you down for sure, but, for much of the time they can't even walk. The thought of an 11-month-old being plopped in front of a TV or a tablet for "much of the day" frankly makes me sad.

Comment Re:Amid all the FUD... (Score 1) 98

I'm having a hard time coming up with anything negative to say about the new timeline based layout. For those of you that have enabled it, what are your thoughts?

I don't use Facebook, so maybe I'm not the best person to answer your question. But, I was there today and attended several sessions, so I saw a lot more about how they are thinking about this stuff. It is really slick. From a technical and UI point of view, it's a really nice combination of the existing Facebook and Twitter and Google+.

The abstract purpose of the timeline was made lucidly clear, and it's pretty obvious that, if you don't think too much about how it is appealing to essentially ones naturally narcissistic slants, it's totally great in many ways. However, exactly how it works was less clear. What other people see of your timeline was characterized differently throughout the day. This could be just poor communication, or internal confusion about how it works. It was mentioned that other people will get a magically generated view of your timeline that matches interests relevant to them. My take on this was that, eg, you, a sailing fan but not into technology, if you were to be friends with Larry Ellison, his timeline to you would be populated with tons of sailing stuff but nothing about Oracle. That was contradicted at other talks, so I'm not really sure. It seems kind of mushy either way. Perhaps the speakers were just mixing up pronouns...

If you are someone who has a decent attention to detail, and decent taste, and will carefully curate all your stuff, it seems like it will be great. However, I suspect that comprises about 0.5% of all facebook users. What will the "giant photo" be on the majority of timelines? Who will make sure that this giant single document containing years of data will be appropriately "shared"? What does it look like when something profoundly bad happens to someone (dealing with death, divorce, etc)?

It reminds me of Windows Metro -- In the absolute best case, it's beautiful and great and highly functional. How will the average case work, though? My prediction is, "far from great".

Aside: The keynote was completely lame. A large group of Facebook employees were laughing uproariously to the unfunny jokes, and applauding and cheering to slides before the slide even appeared. I've never noticed this at any other tech keynote, is it normally done this way?

Comment Re:Google lost my trust when I became an app user (Score 2) 170

Considering Google's core functionality is ADS and SEARCH, and everything extra is literally done on employee spare time (20% to be exact), I don't think you can honestly expect a timeframe unless Google decides to hire people specifically for it.

Google apps is billed as:

24/7 Phone support and 99.9% uptime guarantee
25GB storage per user, no ads
Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook interoperability
Virus and spam protection by Postini

And it costs real money. That hardly sounds like a pet project of individuals. I agree with OP, the support and feature parity does not live up to what a normal person would expect.

Comment Re:Over-inflated importance (Score 1) 425

Are you saying changes like that are equivalent to burning every copy of the story and cleaning Humanity's mind of Star Wars altogether?

So the story teller has changed his story. So. What? Art isn't an engineering problem and entirely lives in the realm of ideas - YOUR ideas. If you don't like a certain performance (i.e. recording) of something then continue to enjoy whatever performance you do like. Life's really that simple.

Corollary: You might ultimately learn to enjoy the minor differences.

You make an excellent and valid point. I omitted that viewpoint in my statements.

But your point is not in contradiction to mine. The fact is that Lucas has removed the original from practical existence. He has intentionally literally destroyed all decent interpositives and internegatives of the original cut. He has literally destroyed all prints made for theatres. What exists of the original movie is a flawed print duplicated to VHS or Laserdisk, a paltry 400 lines of resolution, compared to a 4k or 8k scan that is normally used for archiving. He had, in his hands, a restored "original negative" of a fully restored and cleaned and re-timed version of approximately the original cut. This "original negative" was apparently stunning. He then destroyed that, in order to add Jabba to it.

Lucas can and should be able to do anything he wants to his forks of the movie. That's totally fine with most people, I think. But he should not be able to, for all intents and purposes, remove the original film, a film that is significant to millions of people, he should not be allowed to remove it from existence.

There is no way to watch the original Star Wars on anything better than youtube quality, and that is a crime against culture.

And, by the way, I do enjoy the "special edition" Empire Strikes Back. It is tastefully done, and it doesn't introduce new content or characters. If I take off my "original hat" and think about it, I would probably buy the Blu Ray set solely to have this movie.

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