And perhaps Microsoft is onto something applying it to current OS interfaces with Live Tiles.

Heart attacks are physical events; the muscles in the heart stop contracting, risking death. The patient's experience of it is relatively unimportant, except as an indicator of the physical event. It's the heart attack that needs treatment.

But for mental problems, the patient's perceptual experience often (usually? always?) is the condition that needs treatment. If the patient experiences depression, that is the problem. The physical conditions may be helpful as indicators of the perceptional condition, but it's the depression that needs treatment.

... why the world needs another mobile OS. I imagine they have good reasons, but I read /., I even read Planet Mozilla occasionally, I support Mozilla's overall mission, and I still have no idea.

Perhaps a tagline or a some consistent, widespread marketing message would help.

At least The Economist, Foreign Affairs, and the NYRB are available online.

I get patted down regularly, and the TSA agents have been professional and polite. Occasionally one will talk to me about using the scanner, but it's always a brief, polite discussion and they haven't tried to push me.

I'll say that TSA staff, years ago, were much more aggressive and liked to throw their authority around. Maybe they received customer service training because that isn't a problem any more.

Agreed. I meant that their output was free-as-in-speech and free-as-in-beer for others to use.

Myhrvold talks about how creating a market for invention give incentives and rewards to inventors. But it also creates a barrier to entry: An inventor needs the resources to participate in the market, to buy patent portfolios and to defend them in court. How many innovators are deterred and how much innovation do we lose?

Also, I'm not sure how necessary that market is, or in what cases it's valuable. Many of the greatest innovations were FOSS, such as the Internet, the World Wide Web (and associated technologies), FTP, SMTP, etc (not to mention almost all scientific research and human knowledge!). In fact, they were successful in part because they were free, lowering the barrier to entry for others to build on top of them, such as Microsoft.

It's trendy in some circles to complain of excessive government regulation interfering with business, but intellectual property is where it really happens. Sometimes it seems like any entrepreneur or innovation can be stopped cold by the legal burden of defending intellectual property.

IIRC, polls showed around 90% of American supported the war on the eve of invasion. I recall an environment where objecting was widely seen as unpatriotic and cowardly -- the jingoism started after 9/11 and I never saw anything like it in our country; it was shocking and frightening. Twitter may have fanned the flames even higher.

Of course, I'm sure a poll today would show that only 10% remember being part of that 90%, and the rest will assure you that they would have protested loudly.

One solution is a service that filters domains at the DNS level, such as OpenDNS.

But does anyone know of a similar service on the IP level? Malware attackers may not cooperate by using domain names; IP addresses are less hassle for them, less attention-getting from the average end-user (who knows somewebsite.ru is wrong, but not 134.14.215.12), and they bypass DNS-level security. The IP-level filter would have to be either,

  * Something like an RBL, but for all attacks not just for spam.
  * A proxy to a service that scans Internet content for attacks, again like their email equivalent (MessageLabs, Postini, etc.). This would be like the malware scanning on some firewalls, but I find those slow down connections too much (especially for fiber-level bandwidth). A datacenter would have much greater bandwidth capacity and much greater scanning capability than the local firewall.

Does anyone provide these services?

I just want a simple, fast RSS reader. I'm not looking for many features.

I tried a few dedicated products, but Thunderbird 2.x works best for me (I didn't try a later version). It's got a 3-pane interface, it's lightening fast (essential for browsing hundreds or thousands of headlines), you can turn off remote images for more speed and privacy (use View > Message Body As > Simple HTML), and you can navigate (mostly) by keyboard (the amazing Nostalgy extension may help here; I've used it for so long that I'm not sure how TBird works without it).

For people looking for more alternatives, here is what I found when I looked around a couple of years ago:
  * Awasu (local client)
  * NewsGator (local)
  * Brief (Firefox addon)

Hosted:
  * MyYahoo
  * MyAOL
  * NetVibes
  * Bloglines

Also, discontinued but still available at the time:
  * Newzcrawler
  * FeedReader
  * Sharp
  * Omnea
  * AmphetaDesk (FOSS)

Disclaimer: This is a very speculative long shot ....

But it used to be that differences between platforms in terms of end user control were a matter of degree. Now with commercial operating systems moving rapidly away from that, with more closed systems, restricted app stores, secure boot, locked devices, disregard for privacy, etc., Linux has a much larger opportunity to distinguish itself on that feature (as well as the security that goes with it).

Don't wait for users to tell you they need it; that will be too late. Though privacy and control aren't so 'cool' now, I find it hard to believe that suddenly human beings will have permanently stopped caring about them. The pendulum could swing back, and if that happens you want Linux firmly associated with end user control and privacy in people's minds.

Plus, Linux could educate them simply by presenting an alternative. Few end users understand the value of end user control and openness.

If it's so easy, why do so few do it?

The situation that is playing out was anticipated by many: The politically powerful have their proprietary information protected, because they can make government do it for them. Everyone else has no privacy.

Individual end-users don't have the ability to protect themselves. Most have no idea of encryption, much less what data is accessible to someone scanning Wifi frequencies (most people couldn't even tell you what a "frequency" is!). Even if they had the knowledge, they have limited time and resources. That doesn't make them fair game or mean they surrender their privacy rights.

Google exploited a loophole in Wifi; Schwartz exploited a loophole in a server. Both took proprietary data. What's the difference? The law, made by the politically powerful, says that the data Schwartz took was valuable and protected, while my personal data is not. I wonder what would happen if I went to Google offices and homes and collected unencrypted data; would I be arrested? Fined 20% of 1 day's net income?

(It's hard to believe that Google didn't know what they would end up with by collecting unencrypted Wifi data -- they certainly know about frequencies, encryption, and wifi. They could have saved a lot of storage if they just took SSIDs and ignored the rest. Plus they are experts; they are responsible for knowing what they are doing.)

You mean, only your fellow citizens. It's comforting to blame the government, because that seems fixable. But that's not really what's happening ...