until someone writes a something which specifically circumvents it. Nice concept, seems of little value. A home NAS with automatic historical backups is much more sensible... or you could use cloud storage and just put it all out there for anyone.

If you use Windows, then you are already vulnerable?

Did you mean "If you put a computer of any type online, it will become a target and someone may eventually hit the jackpot."?

Out of curiosity, what exactly would the point of the hardware replacements be?

As far as I have seen, the vast majority of the operational components in Android are not actually GNU but instead Google's own code. GNU components are available... no differently than they are part of SFU from Microsoft. As far as I know, even the bootloader is not GNU. I suppose the init.d may still be, but I'd imagine that since services/daemons are mostly in Java land, that could probably be replaced with a pretty small monolithic script.

So, it is probably more correct to say Linux without the GNU unless we should call Windows "GNU Windows" since one might choose to run a Mingw app.

I would suspect that moving Android to llvm on bsd really wouldn't be so hard since Google's now homegrown most of their stack.

and it's no worse than Shrek. No _better_ than Shrek, mind you, but it's not worse than any of the adult reference heavy dreck that passes for children's movies today. The days of Secret of Nimh or even Black Caldron are long gone...

That's odd too. I do smell it now of course, but it's not revolting. I do enjoy the scent of a good cigar and I don't mind if someone is smoking next to me. I do want to wash my clothing soon, though, stale smoke is not really something I enjoy. But then again, it wasn't really something I enjoyed before either.

I did not turn into one of those fanatic anti-tobacco ex-smokers. My guess is this is due to me not wanting to smoke. IMO the main reason why so many of those that quit smoking become so vehemently anti-tobacco and anti-smoking is that they secretly (or not so secretly) do want to smoke and miss it, something that certainly gets stronger when they get to see and especially smell someone lighting a smoke.

I don't miss it. And hence I don't mind it when someone smokes.

It's very easy to say that. And of course you are correct that nobody forces them to smoke, snort or shoot (well, provided nobody really forces them to).

But few people do it because life's so great. We're living in a world that puts an incredible lot of pressure on people, and a lot of them cannot handle that. One can now of course take the position of "endure it or perish", but this attitude got us where we're now.

Why do we have drug addicts? Why do we have alcohol addicts? Because people think it's awesome to be dependent on a substance? I mean, how finished with your life do you have to be to trade it for the brief kick of heroin and accept all those insane drawbacks just for the few minutes of bliss? Can you even imagine how fucked up someone's life has to be for him or her to consider this a good idea?

The news at 11, of course, is that said serial port access is provided via TCP on a public IP, on a known port, with no password.

Yes, you can, at least with Google. Google provides opt-out tools, and they work. I know some of the engineers who work on opt-out and they're quite serious about ensuring that nothing identifiable gets stored about users who present an opt-out cookie. Any team that tried to work around opt out would be in trouble... and would get Google in trouble during its regular FTC privacy audits, pursuant to the consent decree Google signed.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. The above represents only my personal opinions.)

This is a common misunderstanding of Google's business model. Google doesn't sell information. At least, not very much. I think there are a few minor products that involve selling aggregated, statistical information, but they're an insignificant part of Google's revenue stream. Where Google makes money isn't by selling information about users, it's by using information about users. Google doesn't deliver information to advertisers for them to decide who to advertise to, Google accepts ads from the advertisers and uses the information it has to decide which ones to show to which users. Advertisers don't see the user data and have very little control over the targeting of their ads, which is fine with them because Google is better at the targeting than they are anyway.

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but I don't speak for Google. The above is all public information.)

lets get the Gov't to enforce the law. It's our Government. I never said we trusted it. I don't trust fire, but I use it to cook my food.

since they'll be removing the $5/mo surcharges for building out FiOS right?

I'm not saying Star Trek should be a plodding intellectual discussion, the action and adventure is an essential part, but without the philosophy the films have no heart.

Look at Wrath of Khan, you open up with Kobayashi Maru, a discussion about dealing with hopeless situations, and then transition to a discussion about growing old.

Khan isn't just a random villain, he has a somewhat legitimate grudge against Kirk who exiled him and his crew on a planet and then never checked up on them and thus never realized the world was dying.

In the new Star Trek Kirk is basically a kid with a spaceship, there's very little underlying philosophy guiding his actions and to the extent it does come up emotion is driving his philosophy rather than the other way around.

Even the first TNG movies remembered this and have a bit of lasting power, the new Trek movies are just very forgettable.

Thats why the best communities are those where comments are rated not by whether people agree with them, but by whether they are of discursive merit regardless of content: well-reasoned, polite, respectful, etc. That is why slashdot here has moderations like 'insightful' and 'flamebait' but not 'agree' or 'disagree'. So we can still preserve a quality of discourse with a variety of opinions, instead of either an echochamber or an unruly mob.

Of course that is really dependent on the people, not the software. The software can at best encourage behavior, but if people want to they can still abuse 'informative' as 'I agree' or 'overrated' as 'disagree'. Like all communities, everything depends on the quality of the people.

If you ever look at interviews or post-war writings by historical figures when their diaries are also available, you'll find a huge disconnect in perception. During the war, you get "nobody saw this happening" and "it's all winding down now, and will be blown over in a few days"; after the war, you get "everyone was on-edge with the thickening tensions in the air" and "the end was nowhere in sight, and we were desperately afraid it would go on forever." People remember a completely different narrative.