Not true! They said Sega must be defended!

That is, if the organization's not a false flag.

Do you remember when, not so long ago, Apple was popular among Slashdotters? Back when their primary focus was on computers and not appliances? It's almost amazing thinking about that now.

It would be interesting if there were some way to plot the volume of comments about Apple over the years that have been positive and negative with their corresponding moderation totals. I can't think of any topic that has gone from overwhelmingly positive to overwhelmingly negative in the past six or seven years.

What you say about radio stations is true. One of the newer tactics is enticing cash strapped colleges and universities to sell their radio stations/frequencies (usually to the great dismay of the communications department and the community). So instead of having a community service or an educational tool or both, you end up with something probably legally classified as a "religious nonprofit" set up as a repeater of some remotely-produced dogmafeed. [Did I just make that term up? No search engine results from the majors. I think it's appropriate for this type of station.]

With digital book platforms where your purchases along with page numbers and dates are stored, you might be right on.

It will be a sad day when there is no way to legally obtain and read a new book without having your name attached to it in a database... if we let that happen.

Exactly--a preoccupation with "news" stories is the opposite of being well read. Being well read involves understanding the depths of artistic works / events. News stories provide the opposite, especially from the establishment media. They provide surface-level summaries of what some people have said that generally serve corporate and political interests.

I don't think anyone's immune to being interested in the latest happenings, waiting for some great or tragic event to bolster or destroy a cause or bring salvation or damnation. But this superficiality works against a true understanding of what's going on, and such a reward system incentivizes chasing "what's new" over what's true or what's good.

So what is your preferred spreadsheet application?

Open/Libre Office is good for a number of things, but it still doesn't have the full feature set (which doesn't matter for a large number of people, but it does for me, as someone who used to use Excel quite a lot and who appreciates what it can do). It has a lot of functionality in addition to a user interface that allows discovery to some extent. I think it's still pretty good--i.e., I haven't seen anything better for its common uses. Even though I use LibreOffice for most of my personal uses.

Not a troll--I'd really like to know.

No matter how you feel about WikiLeaks, it is not illegal to publish classified documents in the U.S. There is no "state secrets" law like some other nations have. While there are laws that can punish the person who is entrusted with a classification and uses that to leak information, there are none about publishing it. This was affirmed by the Supreme Court after the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Newspapers publish classified information all the time.

Not sure why you felt the need to add this rather than providing some evidence, but again, it's not true.

You gotta--I say you gotta hear that whoosh over your head, boy. Whoosh, that is.

Bitcoin has the design of and potential to be a useful currency.

Bitcoin could have been created as or could be primarily used by others as a ponzi scheme.

Even if this incarnation of the currency fails like a ponzi scheme, the system still is potentially great as a currency. The initial creation and distribution this time just failed to be broad enough.

Not grammar trolling, but FYI, it's "all intents and purposes".

I wasn't trying to extol myself as a genius--I was making an observation for those who haven't had much of a look at the history of the market.

I think bank-issued digital currency would be worse than government-issued currency, because the government has at least some semblance of advancing the good of its people, whereas a single bank issuing a currency could do whatever it pleases to the market, having only profit motive.

A system like bitcoin where a very large number of users of the currency all have a stake it in with no single user selling all their bitcoins would cause more than a .1% fluctuation in value would be a system that would be very good at holding value for its users (assuming there are no design exploits and no organization with enough computing power to start playing games with the block chain).

The problem with the current bitcoin system is that I imagine there are hundreds of people who could crash the value of the currency because it's likely too concentrated with a few individuals and the market is not deep enough for them to sell their stakes to those who are willing to invest in it more. At the value of $17 US / bitcoin, there are $112,141,350 US in the bitcoin market. There are probably dozens of bitcoin "millionaires" (in USD) who would end up with probably only somewhere in the thousands of dollars if they sold, with the result being putting the bitcoin value back at something like $.10 - $.20 / bitcoin. The system is extremely intriguing, but the current ownership distribution and market seems like a disaster, either waiting to happen or already starting.

Maybe if the system were started again, with the current level of interest, the results would be different. I'd get involved in that. The market with the current ownership distribution? No way.

I've been watching the Bitcoin system/experiment since the beginning of last autumn, and I can't help but feel it's receiving too much attention and increasing in value too quickly for its own good.

I really like the idea of the system and I want to see this system or one like it succeed, but with the extremely quick rise in value since last year and all the attention it's been getting, coupled with the games those with lots of bitcoins could play with the market and the somewhat unknown nature of who controls these fortunes (now in both bitcoin and USD), I felt a devastating crash is unavoidable at $.70 US / bitcoin, much less $17 / bitcoin.

At this sort of insane value, the system is an extremely interesting experiment, but I think it's a huge roadblock for serious adoption.

*sigh*. Okay. I thought it was obvious why this "story" is not quality discussion material, but I'll explain.

The article is presented as if its subject is Eran Feigenbaum's claim that "Professionals should worry about security and privacy of data, rather than where it is stored." But instead the article is a potpourri of quotations and facts unrelated to the main problem with the claim, which the article totally ignores. Any article on the subject of this claim needs to in some way establish that security and privacy can make location irrelevant, and I would expect the supporting statements of the article to do this, but nothing in the story even approaches this basic aspect of the claim. Instead, it is filled with a number of superficially-seemingly-related-but-ultimately-off-topic anecdotes.

After presenting Feigenbaum's main claim, the article presents a "supporting argument" by Feigenbaum: "He cited a meeting in Europe where he had tracked an email sent within an office as it bounced through five countries. In this circumstance, Feigenbaum said, security trumps data sovereignty." So email currently goes through a lot of countries when it is sent from one person in an office to another, where it is likely in plain text and can be read by any number of corporate and government entities. The only way this could possibly be construed as supportive of Feigenbaum's point is if read as "Email currently goes through many nations and it is secure enough". If read with any understanding of how the email system works, it undermines Feigenbaum's point.

Then the article has Michael Cloppert "support" the argument with the same type of claim: "I'm not convinced that the data location issue is a problem - after all, packets are routinely routed around the world irrespective of the export status of their content". Again, the argument is "this is what we're doing now, therefore it is secure enough". Actual security of information going through various nations is not addressed.

Then it presents the "other side" of the argument: There is no way you can know how Google is handling your data even though they assure you they are doing it well. And their contracts have lots of language that could excuse them from legal liability if that is not the case.

Then we go back the argument supporting Feigenbaum's main point. "He said customer data can only be accessed on a need-to-know basis". This does not support 5he argument that privacy and security make location irrelevant. "[L]ess than two per cent of Google staff had entered its top secret data centres". This does not support the argument that privacy and security make location irrelevant. "Google also stamped each hard drive with unique barcodes that allowed the company to track the lifecycle of data stored on each disk." This does not support the argument that privacy and security make location irrelevant.

Then we are presented with this: "But it did not encrypt data at rest, and had no immediate plans to introduce the protection." This makes it sound like location is very important to security and privacy--that someone could entire a facility by force and read the data.

The article acheives nothing other than quoting a single-sentence, questionable claim. It presents the claim, then a number of partially related statements that are presented as "discussion" of the claim but that actually have very little to do with it. I wouldn't be surprised if the article twists what Feigenbaum actually said for sensationalistic purposes.

This article represents the worst type of "journalism".

1. 1. Article is worthless.
2. 2. Security and privacy of data are affected by where the data is stored.
3. 3. Article is worthless.