Wow, he obtusely observed some humor!

From the included link to IAccessible2:

IAccessible2 is a new accessibility API which complements Microsoft's earlier work on MSAA. This API fills critical accessibility API gaps in the MSAA offering. IAccessible2 was created out of necessity to produce a usable and accessible OpenDocument Format (ODF) based office suite for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. IAccessible2 is an engineered accessibility interface allowing application developers to leverage their investment in MSAA while also providing an Assistive Technology (AT) access to rich document applications such as the IBM Workplace productivity editors and web browsers such as Firefox. The additional functionality includes support for rich text, tables, spreadsheets, Web 2.0 applications, and other large mainstream applications.

Are you telling me that this will magically get Windows Phone 7 phones to have accessibility support? Because I'm not reading that.

Additionally, Microsoft seems pretty conciliatory on this. From the AFB link:

Andy Lees, president of Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business, accepted responsibility, saying, "We were incompetent on this."

Your little wannabe-robinhood friends are nothing more than digital gangsters

While I agree with the theme of your post, I still haven't heard of any script kiddies sending people to go sleep with the fishes.

The Myth of the Isolated Kernel Hacker

Ant writes...

"The Linux Foundation's report (PDF) on who writes Linux — "... Linux isn't written by lonely nerds hiding out in their parents' basements. It's written by people working for major companies — many of them businesses that you probably don't associate with Linux. To be exact, while 18.2% of Linux is written by people who aren't working for a company, and 7.6% is created by programmers who don't give a company affiliation, everything else is written by someone who's getting paid to create Linux. From top to bottom, of the companies that have contributed more than 1% of the current Linux kernel, the list looks like this: ..."

Sorry CNET, you're just a tad late on Computer World on this one.

Could you (or someone else with satisfactory knowledge) decrypt that for those unfamiliar with your acronyms and understanding of military technology?

Please Mod Parent Informative so the "insightful" but not technically right definition isn't what gets drilled into people's heads. I have heard more about the African Diaspora than the Jewish Diaspora...

Yeah it got updated, so my post is now moot.

Based on his website he doesn't sound like a Gmail engineer but more of a "MSc student in Computer Science at the University of Cape Town where [he does] research how to scale fuzzy crowds on the GPU with CUDA."

I feel like it's possible that Doug Aberdeen, Software Engineer for Google, wrote that, or someone who represents Doug Aberdeen. It's more likely jason-za just copied and pasted that.

I really hate writing such snide remarks but come on slashdot editors, how long would it have taken to correctly attribute this stuff...

You and other people are right in calling out my jaded attitude. But my attitude is partially in response to the histrionic tone of TFA. I don't think Facebook going in on Foursquares turf is nearly as dramatic as the article writer made it out to be.

Also this isn't how they're being used, this is just coverage of a new implementation, and bad coverage about it since it's just overblown hysterics about how Facebook is going to end our lives and take over DHS and the Eurozone.

If Facebook takes over an app I never heard of or ever will use, and some blogger tries to tenuously relate it to the totalitarian state taking over our lives, and a tree falls on a mime in the woods, and I go on using email and ignoring Facebook like I know so many other people do, do I care?

they has broke

of collective privacy handwringing:

The good news for those concerned about privacy is that it appears for now Canonical is just interested in tracking the users of OEM installations -- those PCs that ship with Ubuntu by default such as from ZaReason, System76, and Dell. This information will obviously be valuable to both companies to see whether customers are keeping around their Ubuntu installations or just wiping them and just how often Ubuntu is being used on these systems (judging by the number of times that system reported to Canonical's server previously). For those not wanting to participate in this anonymous data gathering process, they could always sudo apt-get remove canonical-census.

of privacy freakout from those who chose not to RTFA:

The good news for those concerned about privacy is that it appears for now Canonical is just interested in tracking the users of OEM installations -- those PCs that ship with Ubuntu by default such as from ZaReason, System76, and Dell. This information will obviously be valuable to both companies to see whether customers are keeping around their Ubuntu installations or just wiping them and just how often Ubuntu is being used on these systems (judging by the number of times that system reported to Canonical's server previously). For those not wanting to participate in this anonymous data gathering process, they could always sudo apt-get remove canonical-census.

Before you all don't RTFA:

The good news for those concerned about privacy is that it appears for now Canonical is just interested in tracking the users of OEM installations -- those PCs that ship with Ubuntu by default such as from ZaReason, System76, and Dell. This information will obviously be valuable to both companies to see whether customers are keeping around their Ubuntu installations or just wiping them and just how often Ubuntu is being used on these systems (judging by the number of times that system reported to Canonical's server previously). For those not wanting to participate in this anonymous data gathering process, they could always sudo apt-get remove canonical-census.

Connecting the video terminal to the netbook was fairly straight forward. Starting from the VT320 video terminal I used a Parallel to Serial Port converter plugged into the RS232 cable from a Lego Mindstorms set. The other end of Lego cable was plugged into a RS232 to USB adapter connected my netbook. (You could go straight for a Parallel to USB adapter cable, but I personally would not want to miss out on some excellent Lego.)

What a blockhead.