In the context of being an important part of the web, what is the page rank for the species homo sapiens?

If the incompetence of some of the drivers I see on the roads is any indication, I doubt an internet license will ultimately be very effective either in many cases.

"In addition, the iPhone userâ(TM)s entire Contacts database is transferred to Googleâ(TM)s servers, and we have yet to obtain any assurances from Google that this data will only be used in appropriate ways."

About a year ago my step-father bought an iPhone and asked me to help him figure out how to use voice activated dialing - a feature that came standard on his previous cell phone. The iPhone did not come with that functionality, I found out, so I figured there's gotta be "an app for that" and began looking through the App Store. On one of the apps, 95% of which were from companies I'd never even heard of before, stuffed a few pages down on the app description was essentially the statement "In order for Company X to provide this functionality we must upload your entire Contact database to our serves in order to match your voice request to a contact number."

I don't have an iPhone and I haven't looked into the matter since then, but if this is still how voice activated dialing works on the iPhone it makes me wonder what assurances Apple got from those companies regarding use of the Contact database and how Google differs in this regard.

Meanwhile, because shops and homes around you keep getting robbed your neighborhood is going to shit and people are moving out while nothing gets done cause no one cares about that news and the price of homes in the area is dropping and your home value just dropped $5k. But yes, that $2k the feds want is more important by comparison, right?

Or maybe it won't affect you that a federal panel ordered the release of 43,000 state prisoners because a state's (maybe your) prison system is so overcrowded that they are calling it unconstitutional. Are you against the conditions prisoners are subjected to or, on the flip side, are you against giving criminals a break and letting em out on your streets early? Do you have any idea what conditions led to this and how to alleviate it, one way or the other, in the future?

I never quite understood how people can say that local news is somehow less meaningful than national or international news. Don't get me wrong - I don't get my panties in a bunch over local news either, but to claim it doesn't matter is rather short-sighted and willfully ignorant IMO.

And no, the 10 second to 2 minute regurgitated talking points that you get from TV news are not the same as what you get from newspapers (or the internet, though I've often found much of the news on the internet to be almost as shallow as that on TV anymore).

Due to lower circulation newspapers are cutting the staff, at a staggering rate, that actually collect, investigate, and fact-check the comprehensive news which they report and I see no meaningful and trustworthy replacement of this indispensable function being fostered by the internet or TV.

The real problem is many people don't find value in comprehensive news anymore - they are just happy to be fed the one-paragraph, 'tell-me-what-to-think" news so they can feel they have an idea what's going on, even if it's just skin deep.

I think we will more than deserve the society we will have when the consequences of this mentality fully kick in.

From the sectera page you linked....

"Internet Explorer® Web Browser
Access to commercial Internet, classified and unclassified web pages"

This is the SECURE version of a blackberry?

"An error occured while rendering your error request."

If the internal server errors on her website are any indication, technology and the internet are lost on her.

I use to love that she was my state Senator, but the last few years she has... changed. I've lost a lot of respect for her based on the stances she has taken recently, including sticking up for the telcos in the whole warrentless wiretapping issue.

I can see it now....

Comcast: "We're sorry, your internet account has already reached its limit for the month."

Customer: "From our 3 TVs that are hooked up to the internet now that the internet is becoming a viable option to Cable and Satallite for content?"

Comcast: "Yes, but you can always sign up for Comcast Cable and have uninterrupted access! And we dedicate far more of our coaxial bandwidth to that than internet anyways."

Why not? All the companies listed have a vested interest in getting rid of the middle-man (telcos) in order to ensure maximum profit for their respective businesses. Google wants to make sure you can see their ads on any device anywhere. Motorola wants to make a lot of those devices. Microsoft wants to do both. The telcos have done nothing but limit all of these companies (and thus, us, the consumer) with their strangle-hold on the spectrum thus far.

There, fixed that for ya. And don't feel bad if you can't find it - submitter had to dig deep in the code to even know it existed, too.

I'm a daily newspaper reader. I've watched both the quality and the quantity of in-depth reporting at the Los Angeles Times decline dramatically in recent years. I'm also an avid reader of online news. Having said that, I tend to find out what's happening online and then I count on the paper to actually delve into the subject and more fully explore the meaning of the, usually, superficial articles I read online the previous day.

The real value, at least for me, comes from the depth of the investigating and reporting from articles in the paper. Basically, I pay for a newspaper because they've gone out and done the work to weed out the BS and give me a (hopefully) less biased, fuller, richer perspective of the topic. I am willing to pay for that because I do not have the time to research and vet every single topic I find interesting each day.

If modern newspapers do not adapt and move that same in-depth research and investigating online instead of simply cutting it down and reducing their already thin staff, they will cease to offer anything of value over the other alternatives and we will all be worse off for it.

Being first to report something is virtually meaningless if what you're reporting has no real depth or meaningful context.

I live in Los Angeles where, whenever it rains, our freeways turn into a huge red (as in the color on traffic maps) disaster zone just from a few millimeters of 3-dimensionality caused by water. It scares me to death to think of these same 'drivers' moving on to fully 3-d travel. Car accidents cause a huge amount of deaths each year. Without a fully automated process controlling these things, I only see the statistics of deaths going up if flying cars ever become as ubiquitous as current cars.

Please correct me if I am wrong here, but you're leaving out an important part of the equation... adding 30 lbs to each person also increases the amount of energy required for various things. How much extra fuel will it take to fly a plane full of people all 30lbs heavier? How much energy will an elevator use to lift X amount of people all of which are 30 lbs heavier? You think that 30 lbs of fat which started out as food magically got to their table for them to eat without using any extra energy? And we won't even get into the overall energy costs associated with reduced health of every person who is now 30lbs heavier. I'm not saying your point about carbon trading is right or wrong, just that I wish people actually considered all sides of equations, rather than just the one side that fits their argument (or parody, in this case).

Considering AT&T has an in-house system to get into the configurations of 2-Wire routers (provided by them) anytime they want, they apparently get access to something.

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/08/1946214 (read the update/comments)

On one call to AT&T tech support for a customer, a tech read me back the internal settings for the router, including which local IPs were being used by various computers behind the NAT.

Unfortunately, in this regard you are wrong too. Minority report used the telepathic trio to see/prevent murders. It used retinal scanners to actually track the day-to-day activities of the citizens' movements/actions. Thus the reasons he had his eyes replaced.