The "What's Hot" was initially annoying but once they added the "volume sliders" to it so that you could just drop the volume to 0 (which says "Show nothing from What's hot in your stream") the problem went away. They do still have a fairly rapid rate of change on G+.

If you haven't already set that slider, click the "What's Hot" link on the left panel of G+ below the "Stream" section. It will show a volume slider in the center area near the top. Slide that all the way to the left, then click back to your stream. Problem solved!

It turns out that a certain amount of regulation can help correct for that government granted monopoly on frequencies. We probably need more regulation in the mobile market since we aren't going to have a true free market there in the foreseeable future. For example, if we required phones to work on all of the available networks, required contract (subsidized) plans to clearly separate the subsidy from the price of service and sell plans to "bring your own phone" folks at that price of service so that people could jump to whatever carrier they wanted in the US - we would see competition start to actually work as it should.

Yes, most of us use it with VPN. However consider this:

1) Someone with possibly a bit less skill at finding vulnerabilities takes this code and merges it with a social engineering attack.
2) The social engineering attack promises the user some silly thing (maybe extra smiley faces or dancing cats).
3) The user runs the program inside the corporate firewall.
4) All the company's servers begin blue screening as the user's machine spews these malformed RDP packets.

Honestly, that's not too far fetched and some type of blended exploit like this will probably happen. That's why it is important to patch machines for this and not think that a border firewall is going to protect you for long.

It's all well and good to trust the individual. But do you also trust that the individual is a phone security expert? Do you trust that he hasn't inadvertently installed something on that phone that included malware? How many untrusted people are you also giving your card data to by letting it get into that phone?

How about this instead - the seller can trust ME. He can enter his account information (perhaps an account that is setup in such a way that it only accepts deposits and cannot have remote debits) on MY phone and I will transfer the payment into it. He won't trust me with that? Then why would I trust his phone with my card data?

Right, but if you have a cylinder with radius z and height a, its volume is Pizza. Who needs pie when we can have wonderful, tasty, Pizza?

I came here to say exactly that. I've never seen where a teacher in elementary or secondary schools has been able to select a book. The school itself doesn't generally get to select them either. The books are selected by the school board or their designees (often, in practice, by a group of folks in the school district office). From what I've read here (http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/02/12/182223/texas-textbooks-battle-is-actually-an-american-war) and on other sites, the books selected by the Texas board of education become a de facto standard for many places. I doubt there are many places - at least in the US - where an individual teacher has much voice at all in selecting a textbook for primary education.

As an owner of a Kindle Fire (coming up on one month) who went into it eyes open knowing it wasn't a fully fledged Android tablet and was more of an in-between product between a e-reader and a full tablet, I don't know that I want a larger form factor. I've also got a Samsung slate (one of the devices MS gave out at their Build event, although I didn't get it from that event). I find the larger tablet is not conducive to using it very long. You want to hold it so that you don't get neck strain from looking down at it (like you would have to do if it was sitting flat on your lap). But it gets tiresome holding the larger devices. So you prop your legs up on an angle and place it on your lap. That gets tiresome too. I actually find now that I have the Fire I don't use the Samsung anymore at all. For light web browsing the Kindle Fire does fine and its form factor is much easier to deal with ergonomically. I went into it thinking that I would probably be happier with the 7' form factor (after using the Samsung device for a few months) and I now know I was right - the Fire is a lot better to hold and use.

Now, what would I want in a next generation device from Amazon? I know it would cost more - and I am fine with that - but add more storage, a front facing camera (I don't need a rear facing one in a device of this size), the Google apps and the Google Market, a GPS - boom, the perfect slate form factor table. Oh, and don't lock it. Provide updates quickly and for 2 years - unlike Motorola, HTC, etc. who don't seem to want to support their phones for more than 6 months.

Well, it is certainly trust based and open for abuse (people can certainly lie in the header). However, what Google should be doing is not providing a P3P header at all. It is only someone who is openly abusing the trust system who would create a P3P header that doesn't contain any P3P information. It is fairly clear that it was done on purpose - to abuse the trust system. Is that system a crap design? Yes. Yes, it is. Should major companies be out there abusing it if they want us to trust them? No. No, they should not. It is pretty clear from this that:

1) We need to call out companies that do this type of thing. Not just with P3P but anytime they abuse the system or game it. They need to be made to understand that a very vocal set of folks will make it known what they are doing and that it is bad for their business to be found gaming trust systems.
2) We need better systems that don't just trust whatever a company says about their intentions with our data.

I think that's a pretty good thought. I'd extend it with perhaps one of those, "which of these things doesn't belong" type of setups (which may have been what you meant). It could then show pictures of a banana, an apple, an orange, some grapes, and a baseball hat. I don't know, perhaps there is a way to solve these easily by computer. But I know the stupid text CAPTCHAs that I had to go through yesterday to sign up for one site were so "obfuscated" that I couldn't read them either and I had to click the button for "show another" about 6 times before I could get one I could actually answer correctly. I'm pretty sure if we were asked to do something like you mention that was higher level we would be able to answer it without having to ask for "show another" over and over hoping to get one that is legible.

If you need to block Chrome installs in your locked down environment you can: http://support.google.com/installer/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146164. At one point early in Chrome's life (before the policies existed) we had a desire to block Chrome as it was playing havoc with our authenticated proxy servers (it would just hammer them with failed authentication requests). It plays nice with proxies now, so we don't do anything to either enable or disable Chrome.

You may not be able to put much thrust on one of these objects. Many of them are "rubble piles" so the chemical rocket would just go right through. Others are indeed bound together, but without a high gravity to really cause heating, melting, etc. you still don't have an object that can take much delta-v. Perhaps instead a giant net with a solar sail? I don't know - smarter people than me will need to come up with the answer.

Certainly my family will have access to my local data. However things like Google+, the rarely used Facebook, my Google Docs and assorted other "in the cloud" data is a lot more questionable. Some of those things they may never find. Others, they can perhaps get control of depending on the policies of the providers (send us a death certificate + proof you are next of kin or the executor of the estate or whatever). Some of it will probably remain in the sole control of the providers as well and just be there until the providers get tired of storing it.

For Chrome users, the LinkPeelr extension works well to pre-decode links for you in a little tooltip window. I've been using it for quite some time and it seems to work pretty well. Saves your from many a rickrolling or goase link. Although I guess when people bounce them through several layers of link shortener it doesn't work for that.

It would be more correct to say the vulnerability (flaw) is in the windows kernel and the only currently known exploit is through the safari browser. There are decent odds that some other vector will be found through which to exploit this. But for now it looks like the exploit through safari uses a lack of correct input sanitization (in safari) in order to exploit the Windows kernel vulnerability. It would probably be possible to craft an exe to do privilege elevation using this kernel flaw by passing similar bad parameters to the kernel - but of course local elevation of privilege is much less of a threat than a true drive by like this exploit through safari.