Wait, when did stopping work on old projects become arrogant?

Jesus. If that's now arrogance then I must be far more arrogant than I ever realised, as I've worked on many projects over the years and presently work on just one or two ...

"A 2.0 MW wind turbine would generate 6.12 GWh per year, assuming a 35% capacity factor."

Right in the fucking source paper. They don't even have that as an argument...

Google was originally going to show that message only on pages that had results removed. But that would make too much sense so the EU banned it, because then you'd know someone was trying to hide something! So now they just put that message on every query that contains a name.

After the cookie law that broke my browser settings by displaying a stupid nag on every website I visit, I thought the EU couldn't fuck over internet users even more, but yup they found a way!

How? That sounds like a pretty apt description to me.

Anyway, the real problem with this ruling isn't that it's stupid (though it is), it's that it's unenforceable without building a Great Firewall of Europe, and when people realise that they're gonna be pissed off that their new "right" doesn't really exist or work.

It should go without saying why a GFE would be a disaster of unspeakable proportions. It effectively means partitioning Europe into its own internet. And I don't think that will happen just to defend this stupid "right" of people who don't like what appears when people search for them. They have a much better solution - either put better information about themselves online, or go after the people who uploaded the original information, and if neither of those appeal, then learn to deal with it.

Hello there! :)

Broadband rectifying antennas aren't anything new really, sure the background RF from towers, other sources is quite significant, and most experts would point out that you can't power a bluetooth chipset on a few microwatts of harvested power - but you could use it to charge a capacitor and periodically power the chipset. An update every 30 seconds instead of continuous monitoring of an item still works for me. The only problem with making the tag so small is you don't have much space to make an antenna for longer wavelengths.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Somehow most countries manage to treat terrorists just like regular criminals. Lots of IRA members are sitting in jail at the moment - not spread over the countryside in tiny pieces courtesy of a drone strike.

If you're fighting with our enemies, as an enemy combatant, why do you believe you should get a trial as a criminal rather than simply being killed on the battlefield after identification As an enemy?

Blurring the lines between soldiers and terrorists is exceptionally dangerous, especially for America.

After all, using the implication of what you wrote above, it would apparently be OK for the British Royal Air Force to drone strike Congress, because a Republican congressman has been and probably still is an outspoken supporter of Irish republican terrorism. And if a few innocent other congressmen get blown to bits too, well that's unfortunate collateral damage but I guess they shouldn't have been hanging around known supporters of terrorism should they? The world's a battlefield these days.

It's sorta social, demented and sad, but social.

I'm surprised they didn't mention the bird in Mary Poppins - the one that sings sitting on Mary's fingers. I always thought that was the first use of Anamatronics. That and the Parrot Head on Mary's umbrella.

Heck things had changed 15 years ago. I don't know when mjwx went to school but a broad swathe of religions have been taught in UK comprehensives for a long time.

story is that one of juniper's major partners was underhandedly selling prerelease, demo, & beta products to cisco. while legal, it's shady as fuck, and is almost certainly something that would have pissed juniper off to the point of severing ties with the vendor.

I don't think it has to be explained why this is a potential problem. So then, it should be explained why this is such a great idea that the problems it creates are insignificant.

The Android permissions model is a mess and has been since day one, but not in the way most Slashdot geeks are up in arms about. When was the last time you actually looked at the full list of permissions? It's ridiculous. You have to be an Android developer to understand some of them. Many are pointless in the extreme: the result of simply associating every API with a permission whether it makes sense or not. Do I really need to know that an app might use the vibrator when I install it? A few permissions aren't even written in understandable English, so god knows what they become when translated into a language like Arabic or Chinese.

What's more, others (like the internet access permission) have never worked. People think it means "you can give this app personal data and it can't upload that data to the internet", but it never did that, because for example there are OS services that let you configure them to retrieve and process data from arbitrary URLs. The media player component does that. You can ask the OS to play music from a URL without having internet access permission, and it'll do it, so just put your personal data into the URL of your "music file" and the data gets uploaded. Heck even just invoking the web browser with a long mystery URL will let your internet-less app upload small amounts of data to the net. And there's no real way to fix any of this because any app that exposes services to other apps that involve downloading from a user-provided URL would end up breaking the "can't upload" model. So now they're hiding the internet access permission entirely, and good riddance.

Conclusion: the permissions framework was badly thought out. It was designed to let you know when apps might do something nasty to the OS, as a way to defend against aggressive apps that would otherwise do what they do on Windows and reconfigure the entire computer at install time. But there were no UI guidelines about how and when to use it, so it became a dumping ground for technical nonsense hardly any users understand. Worse, over time people's expectations have changed, and now some of them want it to be some all singing all dancing privacy framework that gives you a million knobs to tweak, even though it was never meant to be that.

Perhaps in future Android will actually get an all singing, all dancing privacy framework that does what people want, but it probably won't be a part of the app permissions system, which is meant to be for security. And it's not easy. A lot of the hacks people throw around in this thread could be easily detected and apps could just refuse to run entirely if you try and fool them.