Don't let yourself get bent out of shape over this. Read the paper which is being quoted by the article before you start believing nonsense and posting your own. The Klein article misrepresents and quotes out of context. For example, here is the Cass Sunstein quote that Aaron Klein picks and edits to his liking:

"We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories."

Sounds really scary right? Okay, here is the full paragraph from Sunstein's paper, available online at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1084585 :

What can government do about conspiracy theories? Among the things it can do, what should it do? We can readily imagine a series of possible responses. (1) Government might ban conspiracy theorizing. (2) Government might impose some kind of tax, financial or otherwise, on those who disseminate such theories. (3) Government might itself engage in counterspeech, marshaling arguments to discredit conspiracy theories. (4) Government might formally hire credible private parties to engage in counterspeech. (5) Government might engage in informal communication with such parties, encouraging them to help. Each instrument has a distinctive set of potential effects, or costs and benefits, and each will have a place under imaginable conditions. However, our main policy idea is that government should engage in cognitive infiltration of the groups that produce conspiracy theories, which involves a mix of (3), (4) and (5).

Note the last sentence. Sunstein leaves the 2 points quoted by Klein out of the recommendation. The paper itself is somewhat insightful and worth a skim. There are things to disagree with perhaps, but this isn't some civil liberty crushing maniac.

I'm asking this seriously, not rhetorically.

They have a budget of $7.2 billion for grants. It seems like they could wi-max a bunch of major cities, but not the whole US. Or maybe they just want to make the internet "affordable"--not necessarily free. Subsidize people's ISP service? Ugh. I don't want to pay for my neighbor to download Zombie Strippers off the internet.

I do like the emphasis on making things competitive. There are a lot of us that have just one practical choice for broadband, either the phone or cable company. And then there is maybe some not-really-high-speed 3G/GPRS solution available. But without knowing details, I don't see how they encourage competition when there is a monopoly on wired or wireless access.

Seriously, what useful thing can the FCC do here?

Here is my plan: Make sure all the schools and libraries have got broadband-equipped computers to match demand. Let people that can't afford home internet ride the bus down to the library or stay after school. This is probably 90% covered already. It's too boring and unambitious of a plan to be very interesting, but it would do just fine. You'd have plenty of change left over from that $7.2 billion--go stimulate something else more useful with it, i.e. education, mass transit. We don't need to make sure every person is connected to a high-speed multimedia wonderland all the time for free. The emphasis should be on education and basic needs like typing up resumes, checking your e-mail, etc.

If Oracle takes MySQL in a bad direction, doesn't the open source community have the opportunity to maintain its own version of MySQL derived from the previous open source releases? It seems the worst thing you'd have to fear is a subtle lack of support from Oracle, where a minimal effort is made to maintain MySQL--just enough to keep anyone outside of Oracle from being motivated to start a fork project. Am I wrong? What exactly are people afraid of happening here?

You have to go try it yourself, giving or receiving, whichever is appropriate. If you hit the spot right, and the subject can feel it, then it is usually really obvious to the person getting stimulated. Subjective reports shouldn't be the basis of a scientific study, which is part of the problem here. From a man's point of view, you have to know the woman well enough to judge her reactions and how much you can trust her recounting of an experience. From a woman's point of view, you just have to be able to judge what physical actions cause your orgasm. These subjective things don't translate into a scientific study well, but that is plenty for an individual to figure out for him or herself if a form of sexual stimulation is legitimate or not. There are many things that you can form a reasonable individual opinion about that are hard or impossible to evaluate through the scientific method.

The funny thing is that T-Mobile offers a pretty decent plan with 3G data for $50/month which would be my first choice. But if you buy the subsidized phone, you get the spendy $80/month plan which doesn't really have good value to warrant the extra cost, IMO. Difference seems to be just more minutes and unlimited SMSs. So I could see buying the unsubsidized phone, and just getting the cheaper T-Mobile data plan separately.

Also, T-Mobile is one of the major carriers that refused to turn over customer information to US officials without a warrant. And they got KZJ, who is much sexier than the "Can You Hear Me Now" guy.

Just buy it with a credit card. And pay the debt off at $20/month or whatever is convenient. You'll be better off in the long run, because we'll get the carriers to start competing as big dumb pipes. The emphasis will be on coverage/speed for the buck, instead of some wacky chase after the latest "It" phone. We should all stop being scared off by upfront costs and letting phone carriers handle our financing through subsidies.

Exactly.

Companies and orgs already barrage newspapers with press releases in hopes of favorable coverage. And they often rely on writers and editors to be so rushed that they will carry their advertisements without working for the benefit of their readers to verify facts and judge value of the content. Posting misinformation on wikileaks anonymously is just a logical and painfully rational extension of marketing.

Look at it another way: even if real, honest, factual content is posted anonymously on wikileaks, with no sources available, all an implicated individual or institution has to do is deny the content is true in some vague way. And the flakier our news reporting gets, the harder it is to convince anyone that anything is true. In the end, we will just wander around cynical and unconvinced of anything, but also unwilling to act since no information seems actionable.

We need old-fashioned journalists that report facts with verifiable sources. Not the cheap, Web 3.0, crowdsourced crap.

If the software is calling a web service that performs the translation, then on the smartphone the software is trivial--a simple client that gets some user input, sends it to the internet, and receives translated text back. If this is the case, then there's no point in calling it "smartphone software", the brains are all on a server somewhere. And that server software deserves to be compared apples-to-apples to other online translation services like say... Babel Fish, to determine how worthy it is. Adding the "smartphone software" bit seems like a marketing ploy.

The polarized 3D movies are nothing like the anaglyphic stuff that the BBC is planning to use here. Polarized stereooptics (RealD, IMAX3D, and others) works by getting light to arrive at the viewers eyes from two different angles, and filtering so one set of angled light exclusively hits the left eye, and the other hits the right. Unlike anaglyphic, the colors themselves are not used to filter. As a result, it looks vastly better than the anaglyphic filtering you get with the cheapie red/cyan glasses. To set this up polarized stereooptics in the home is currently pretty expensive, like $xx,xxx, so the home viewing experience of 3D TV is going to be cheap and gimmicky until that changes.

Also, the glasses they hand out are big enough to go over your normal glasses. I'm doubling up on the specs myself, and it doesn't bother me.

Battery life on mobile devices is still a large issue, and if you are just connecting headsets and syncing up with PCs the extra range isn't needed. So WiFi Direct sounds better for some applications maybe. But we are all sick of our phones crapping out after an hour or two of "heavy" use, and trading range for battery life doesn't make sense for nearly all of the existing uses.

It might have originally been leaked, and then Google asked for it to be made public. You don't know!

"The government took our filing and then we got back a no-violation letter, which is fantastic.'"

Mozilla basically asked if it would be okay if Mozilla (not you, not me, not everybody else) could put strong encryption in their software. They didn't get a court ruling--they got permission. And there's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't mean they are some champions of free speech rights. No, it means that they have successfully looked after their own interests. And other, particularly smaller, open source developers shouldn't expect to have the same good fortune in getting permission.

Not to be too grumpy. It is good news that somebody was exempted from a stupid regulation.

I agree. I think the page thumbnails are really just an automated way to create something like an icon or illustration next to each link. The thumbnails aren't actually useful--they are just decoration. It's not a bad way to make the accompanying article descriptions more interesting to read through. But it's silly to portray this small s/w engineering feat as some groundbreaking new way to review information.

Agreed. You could pretty much pick any activity from life, and make cutsey little generalized rules from it...

10 Business Lessons I Learned from Picking Dingleberries Out of My Ass

1. Always Bring the Right Tools for the Job - Blah blah blah blah blah
2. A Small Dingleberry is Often More Trouble Than a Large One - Blah blah blah blah
3. Everyone Has Dingleberries - Blah blah blah blah
4. And so on and so on...

Would someone please pay me to write life lessons from any randomly chosen activity? I will start work tomorrow with a $50,000 advance.