"The Empire never ended."
-- Horselover Fat

That's because Android puts a Phone/tablet interface on PHONES and GODDAMN TABLETS.

This single-window, single-task garbage has nothing to do with "why linux never succeeded on the desktop." It just wasn't enough TO make linux succeed on the desktop. It just means that it wasn't enough to MAKE Linux take off on the desktop. And that's not really surprising, because it's idiotic and counterproductive. The "hard core geeks" hated it when Ubuntu brought it to Linux, and everyone else hated it when Microsoft brought the misfeature to windows. So much that MS is actually back-pedaling on it in Windows 8 SP1.

It's horrible design that self-proclaimed "UX" experts (who throw up a big "full of shit" red flag by inventing a new masturbatory nonsense phrase for themselves) are completely clueless to anything that's actually important in software interface design. It's more important to them that iPads and Droids are popular, so why should they worry about dorky things like "use cases." There's a reason you don't drive a car with a flight yoke, why TVs moved to buttons instead of knobs, and why you don't use a single-task touchscreen interface on a non-touchscreen goddamned computer.

If "UX" means "turning a computer into a fucking cell phone," as implied by your delirious shout-out to Unity, then I think there are already more than enough of those unholy bastards infecting OSS already, tyvm.

To be fair, you're right, but that might be easier to accept if they were priced accordingly. When a replacement battery costs 25-30% of the replacement value of the machine, it's not hard to understand why running out of usable life feels like a hardware failure.

I tried that, and was disappointed.

Not that I expected some evil overlord-esque document to popup or anything like that, but I was kind of hoping it was one of Google's easter eggs.

Maybe returning some kind of reference to Pinky and The Brain...

My super sekret source, "Gaping Gullet" is preparing an information pack which will reveal, irrefutably, that during a particularly nippy week in April, Ayers was, in fact, Milk Monitor in the cafeteria! Clearly, this is where the whole sordid mess began.

BBC did a viddy on this in 1992.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AUvrPvV-KQo

Just paranoid, bullshit? Sponsored by the CIA and British intelligence, NATO operatives - under the false-front, operating as a "Marxist Terror Gang" kidnapped and murdered the Prime Minister of Italy in 1978.

This was just a single instance of organized para-national political violence including strings of European bombings and assassinations, beginning in the 1940's and continuing at least into the 1990's.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Gladio

Then, after the cold war, there are no longer "Marxist Terror Gangs". They all just gave up and went home, I guess. Now, there are "Muslim Terror Gangs". Amazing.

PS. Don't look too closely at the Balkans.

In those places, a $100 bill would work as well or better than a passport for getting through checkpoint guards. The idea that someone would bother with your passport number in trying to forge a passport to get through there is rather laughable, since they didn't even bother to check said number to see if it was legit.

At a border with better security? Not going to work. Passports have a lot more security to them than that, particularly now.

Basically if places have weak security, the have weak security. Someone isn't going to bother to try to get a legit name and number to forge a passport. If they have tight security, then it wouldn't do any good as they check the other features, which wouldn't match.

Especially fire ants. I've got an ankle that serves nicely as evidence.

Little bastards...

See if the point of someone having your information is to, well, be able to access your information then it needs to be stored in that format. A password can be hashed, but something like name and address needs to be stored in text. Encrypting it is the kind of thing that does a limited amount of good. They may well encrypt it on disk, but the software that accesses it still needs to be able to decrypt it, wouldn't be of much use if it couldn't. So if someone busts in through a problem in the software, they can get your data.

It is easy to get mad and say companies should "do something" but ask yourself what that something is, I mean really analyze the problem, and then try and come up with a solution that works. It is harder.

We deal with that kind of thing at work. Securing data isn't just a magic switch you can flick. Like our new storage array has self-encrypting drives. Great, we can, with no performance loss, encrypt everything on it... However that only really helps against it getting stolen, or if we forgot to wipe the disks when we decommission it. Being that all data is encrypted, the unit has the password (it is a power-on kind of thing) so if you bust in over the network, well then you can get at the data unencrypted.

For more sensitive stuff you can take it a step further, use Sophos (ya that is what they bought, no not my choice) full disk or file container encryption. That means that if a system with it is lost, nobody can get the data. However, when that system is online and the FS mounted, again a break in can get at the data.

The only way to stop network breakins from being a possible compromise is to take the systems entirely off the Internet. Not only is that unfeasible in normal cases, but it is impossible if you are talking the system that is to handle talking to the users online.

I can't come up with a way that you can have a system where the data is secure, even if the system gets compromised. Of course you try and stop systems from getting compromised, but the idea that data should be stored somehow that even if a system gets broken in to you can't get at it is rather silly.

Seems like it will continue - despite any ruling. Look at the overall indicators and trend, not just one specific ruling or data point.

Those cool, adventurous science-fiction dystopias in Bladerunner and the like. Well, they aren't so cool for most people to live in. They certainly aren't cool for the people who witness the transitions - from the 70s to post 2001...

It's a long way from the top, now. And we didn't tie a rope to climbe back.

For example the powers that be at work decided that the important thing was 3 of the 4 groups (upper, lower, numbers, and punctuation are the groups), and length, with 14+ being what makes it happy. So you input a short phrase like "I like puppies" it'll call it strong and take it. However if you input "@la2wo!d?o-z4" it'll call it weak because it is too short. Input something like "niecrlazleswiariucriuml7priu8roab7iuyluc0oawr1u5pl" and it'll reject it because there are only 2 of the 4 groups).

There's no further analysis, it is just a length and groups thing, with rather poorly defined groups.

Also in terms of strength, while there's no perfect one, measuring bits of entropy, which you can do, is pretty good. However few sites use anything that advanced.