You do realize that you can be both the customer and the product.

Not in a "free" scenario you can't. The service that Google offers you is their cost of producing their product (which is you viewing ads).

Some other company might develop a cheaper means of producing you as a product but you are still the product.

This "you are the product not a customer" tripe, can be used for almost anything.

Only if you do not understand "product" and "customer" and "marketing". You do not, personally, pay Google any money. You only cost them money to produce. Advertisers are where Google gets its profits.

I think that part of the rant is more talking about the limitations of the 'free market will fix everything' concept, ...

Except he specifically mentions Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail as the services. Those are "free" email services.

In those situations, you are not the customer. You are the product. The advertisers and such are the customers.

The 'free market will fix everything' concept does not really apply the way the cattle at the cattle yard would like it to.

So in the phone example, he can enforce the 'free market' by spending his money elsewhere. In the email example, the best he can do is to make his emails less spammy and that might cost money. But it is not money that would affect each of those services.

Can that be done with his whole "review" or whatever?

Similarly, every time I say that my Circumventor mailing list keeps getting blocked as "spam" by Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail, or AOL (despite being 100% verified-opt-in, natch), someone tells me that if the free market is blocking my emails as unwanted, it must be because the users don't want them.

Three links in one sentence about his mailing list being blocked in what is supposedly a rant about a company's cell phone.

What The Fuck?

It reads like some conspiracy theorist's rant. Subject A is linked to unrelated subject B which is linked to unrelated subject C, then D, then E. Stream of consciousness doesn't even describe it.

As users can do more for themselves and don't have to wait for IT, they do more, so more gets used. The real gain, then, might be that more gets accomplished as IT becomes less of a bottleneck.

As with your calorie example, you won't end up with more work being "accomplished".

You'll end up with more fat.

Look! I can record HD video and upload it to the data center and then embed it in my Power Point presentation and then email it to everyone as an attachment. With just a few clicks. Instantly.

Right now most of the people I deal with are more interested in the fonts on a document rather than the content of the document (which they will rarely read in the first place).

Give me information. Not opinion, not yellow press nonsense, not articles that were copy/pasted from some online news source or some news agency, ...

I'd be okay with opinions as long as the bias was clearly stated and the facts were presented to support it.

Do an exclusive interview with an interesting person, a politician with a vision (who doesn't just repeat whatever bull his party wants to spew), report about stuff that matters, send a reporter there and ask the people around for their view.

And focus on the LOCAL material. What are the LOCAL politicians doing? What LOCAL impacts will there be? And it is fine to have a bias in that reporting. As long as it is a bias and not partisanship.

And do NOT turn it into a fake "fight" between different reporters. I do not care about reporter-A's opinion of reporter-B's opinion of politician-C's latest statement. I don't care for "reporters" repeating talking-points.

Ignore the "official" bull and dig deeper.

And always "follow the money". Follow the family connections.

... although we've read most of the national and international news online 1 or 2 (or sometimes even 3) days before, there are stories in Sonoma County (and parts north) that simply don't show up anywhere else.

That is what is killing the newspaper business (IMO). Anyone can get the AP stories instantly now. If something happens in Washington D.C. there will be dozens of identical reports about it.

If something happens in your town you might catch it on a local news show. Unless they're also busy covering what just happened in D.C.

A local paper can give you the local news and tell you what the local impact of whatever it was that just happened in D.C. will be.

But in order to do that, the local paper has to hire local reporters who have more knowledge/expertise than the average person. And it is cheaper to skip that and just buy the stories from the AP. And then fail because no one wants to pay for a paper when you've already read the content on your PC, iPad and phone.

Security through obscurity isn't "no security at all". It's just inadequate. There's still the hurdle of overcoming obscurity.

No.

Security is not about becoming invulnerable. That is impossible. Security is about reducing the number of people who can EFFECTIVELY attack you.

Security-Through-Obscurity does NOTHING to improve the existing security model of the system BUT IT DOES PROVIDE A WAY TO BYPASS THE EXISTING SECURITY MODEL.

You're thinking "drivers", not "cars".

But you're right anyway. Without autonomous cars this will never happen.

You're absolutely correct. Let's look at recent publishing history. From TFA:

(We expect that for good stories, the ratings would tend to cluster around the high end of the scale, so with that smaller variance, it would take a larger sample size to find a statistically significant difference between the quality of two stories.)

Look into the critical reviews of Dan Brown's books.

Or the Twilight series.

Or the 50 Shades of Grey series.

Now compare those statistics to the Hunter S. Thompson or William S. Burroughs sales.

A month and a half seems like a publicity stunt.

Yep. Since they already know who leaked this the real question is whether he will be fired for breach of trust or whatever. If he's not fired then this is more likely a publicity stunt despite what anyone claims.

Anyway, she can always create another pseudonym and start writing under that name.

Or submit a manuscript to a different publishing company under a pseudonym and see if she can get that published.

1. I don't believe that there are any "biomarkers" for "violence" that are not common to every person alive today.

2. Remember "The Bell Curve"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bell_Curve Once you start attempting to match biology to behaviour you run into all kinds of problems with biases and statistics.

We need rules for these articles in the future.

Cyber-war/Cyber-warfare - take a drink
Cyber-weapon - take a drink
Cyber-warrior/Cyber-soldier - chug
Cyber-command - chug
Others?

Anyway, if this is such a big risk (aside from alcohol poisoning) then why aren't other countries switching to Linux and training their own programmers so that they can "harden" it?

If they have to use something that they did not write/audit themselves then that should be completely isolated.

Wouldn't the intelligent thing to do (if this is really a threat) be to develop a 5 year goal of moving off of software written by your potential cyber-emenies (take a shot).

Getting one's head bashed into the ground is a "life threatening situation" even here in liberal leaning Canada.

Again, that was AFTER Zimmerman strapped on a gun, got out of his car and followed Martin. Each one of those 3 actions is proscribed by neighborhood watch guides.

An easier way to see it is if Martin had been a woman. Zimmerman has a gun and starts following a woman. She uses pepper spray and while he's blinded, she kicks him. So he shoots her. No one would be sympathizing with Zimmerman.

While I think Zimmerman should have stopped following Martin once the police were contacted, following someone on a public street is not actually illegal in any way in Florida.

Wait until you get a girlfriend and ask her how she feels when some guy starts following her on the street. It may not be illegal. But that is not the same as being innocent.

Then he was promptly jumped and attacked by Martin.

That is Zimmerman's story. Whether that is factual or not cannot be determined any more because the other person is dead.

Zimmerman wouldn't have had a chance to try to flee considering he was on the ground getting pounded.

That would be after Zimmerman decided to follow Martin and got out of his car and kept following Martin. Even if the events happened in that way it is a bit strange to talk of fleeing AFTER the confrontation that Zimmerman apparently wanted had happened.

That lead to Martin being shot.

No. Zimmerman could have NOT carried a gun which is what the neighborhood watches recommend. Zimmerman could have stayed in his car which is what the neighborhood watches recommend. Zimmerman could have NOT followed Martin which is what the neighborhood watches recommend. Only after breaking each of those rules was Zimmerman armed and in a fist fight.

Since he was losing the fight, he shot the other guy.

If it were up to me there would have been no conflict, or the mere sight of a gun would have scared him off and it would have ended there, but let's be clear about this: if you want to violently attack a stranger who has not initiated violence against you, you are taking a risk

Except that it was Zimmerman who initiated the conflict by following Martin. Again, when you get a girlfriend, ask her about a stranger who starts following her.

We already have states where homeowners hesitate to shoot a home invader because they might get in serious trouble, and all this does is lower the risk of burglarizing the law-abiding which in turn can only make burglers more bold.

So a burglar is more bold because the homeowner might NOT shoot him? I don't think so.

I think that Ballmer is a decent operations guy, but obviously not a tech visionary, nor does he have good taste and an iron fist the way Steve Jobs did. I think that Microsoft was in a very strong position when he took over and that it just isn't that hard to keep Microsoft on its current glide path given a halfway decent operations guy in charge. John Sculley, who is widely viewed to have run Apple into the ground, could almost certainly done just as good of a job running Microsoft as Steve Ballmer. I realize this is speculation, but I think its true.