Indeed. HFT takes money from investors who do their homework. We (citizens, corporations, gov't) need to accept that the world won't end tomorrow, so we must ensure our short-term solutions are not going to f*ck us over in the future. The debt bubble is a good example: It was just so darned comfortable to enjoy the easy growth that came from accepting ever more debt and relaxing risk management practices. There were plenty of risks, but who listens to naysayers when we're in a party mood? And HFT is another such example: It's very, very profitable, but also an obstacle to making investment less short-term and more focused on fundamentals.

Say wut?

Social media enables mass communication outside government control - IFF there is a sufficient number of people who knows how to circumvent government censorship then the government loses control of information. Once that control is gone, a large number of smart people are able to communicate. In a censored country, you are stuck with whoever you can physically talk to. Once you breach the communication barriers, these people are free to exchange thoughts and maybe plan and execute a revolution. Or at least a series of demonstrations that forces the gov't to change its position.

Social media is a revolution enabler.

Nah. The first movie spilled all the beans. The universe was really only compelling and interesting (to me) in the first movie. After that, no amount of SFX can cover up a mediocre story. That's also why I'm doubtful regarding movie 4 and 5.

Our apps are already watching us beyond what we've authorized. How is that not malware?

Not at all.

The current paradigm is inherently flawed. You cannot expect what is asked of the users: To remember 20-30 secure passwords. Sure, some of use are rain men, but the security design is out of touch with reality. We need something common, like signed certificates.

Step 1: Create a solution. Like OpenID. Or maybe we already have a solution in OpenID.
Step 2: Mandate it.
Step 3: Make password authentication online illegal.

Seriously. That's what it's going to take. The HUGE, HUGE downside is that this will make us universally and easily traceable on the net. So there may not be a solution after all.

Yknow, a hat (or similar) with a built-in GPS and a short-range radar might in fact be a killer app(liance) for the blind. Maybe for the earplug-zombies too. It's just a matter of detecting the walking pace of the hat-wearer by the GPS lock, and then fetching the buildings from google maps. With that information, detecting anything massive enough to be dangerous and getting dangerously close would be a cakewalk.

Anyhow, you make an excellent point regarding losing an opportunity to quiet our cities. Maybe the cars can have a built-in mic that detects when to start making noise? It's simple enough: If there is noise in the area, the car needs to make some noise as well to be heard. (Up to a certain level, of course, we'd rather not have our cars engage in shouting matches)

Indeed. The worrisome bit is that the newspapers in question are not pulling their apps. That would really put Apple in a tough spot. But they are not standing up for freedom of speech. They should.

We know that CO2 traps energy. We have confirmed this information from experiments.

We know that the CO2 increase is mainly from fossil fuels. We have this information from isotope analysis.

The vast majority of the scientists who involve themselves in studies also agree that we are causing an increase of CO2. And that the CO2 increase causes the climate to become warmer on a global scale. Of course, this is additive to (and to some extent interacts with) normal cycles, but many alternative theories for the increase of CO2 and it's non-harmfulness have been tried and found false.

It's looking like we have a real problem on our hands. Unfortunately.

Hey, hey, hey, don't assign stagnated to slashdot! You mean slashdot == stagnated. (Unless you're writing Ada, then you're right)

It is assumed the artist had such a wild and crazy life that the offspring is traumatized for life, perhaps? I dunno. 30 years would be an appropriate time before releasing a work into the public domain, methinks. It will open up for a whole lot of insightful and interesting derivative works. And the artist would be a grown-up person (or old), fairly well-off and ready to see their works being mutilated and/or re-imagined into new amazing works by the combined forces of teh internets and art schools and artists. I think it sounds pretty darned nice!

Well - those statistics you cite include combatants as victims of terrorism. I'm not so sure that killing soldiers can be defined as act of terrorism, as terrorism is the act of targeting (perhaps also scaring) civilians with the intent of creating terror in the population.

So, let's discuss fatalities of the conflict as that's a less emotional and more rational term. Between 1987 and 2010, Israel has killed 7506 Palestinians of which 69% were civilians, the Palestinian side has killed 1540 people people within Israel's borders, of which 59% were civilians.

Your experience with the AirPort base station is unique, AFAIK. However, your charge that the "only times Apple admit(ted) something outright" is flat-out false. The iBook G3 logic board, certain iMac power supplies, and iMac/eMac problems directly analogous to the Dell situation were all acknowledged and addressed aggressively by Apple.

I've been an Apple Authorized Service provider since 2005. Apple had the "capacitor plague" problem with certain iMac and eMac models. Apple acknowledged the problem, and customers were authorized to come to me for a free repair for as long as three years after date-of-purchase if the warranty had run out. Those repairs constituted a good part of my work from 2005 through the middle of 2008. Every customer--especially the ones out-of-warranty, were grateful. I made a point of telling them that the problem wasn't restricted to Apple machines, and I directed them to the Wikipedia entry on "capacitor plague."

I was on the AirPort team from 1999-2001. I heard not one word about thermal problems with graphite base stations. I did the build acceptance and functional testing on AirPort in the first version of Mac OS X. I also performed automated and manual usability testing with dial-up, my own Earthlink account, and a Graphite base station. That base station worked constantly--day and night--for over a year. It was still working when I left.

This would be interesting if it was the whole truth.

But it's not.

The packets are indeed non-material, but the infrastructure used to transport those packets is not non-material. It is very material, and it cost money to both expand and maintain that infrastructure.

Consider this:

Had we paid for our packets, having insufficient infrastructure would mean lost revenue for the ISP. Consequently, they would ensure they rarely saw a line go beyond 90-90% of capacity.

Currently, they rather put caps on the lines - since there's no profit for them to keep expanding the capacity. We pay them the same no matter how much or how little we use of their capacity.

It's pretty darned simple: We should pay for bytes not bandwidth.

Really. Max speed for everyone. Trigger emails or SMS'es whenever a configurable threshold is passed for this month, optionally throttle the connection until the end-user approves of the extra bill. Also,the ISP contacts you if they suspect you're a node in some bot-net (e.g. excessive traffic on SMTP).

The internet is infrastructure, analogous to electricity. We'd destroy the earth even quicker if power hogs paid the same price for electricity as those who are environmentally conscious and save electricity whenever they can. Indeed, the power hogs would in effect be sponsored by those who are environmentally conscious. That's pretty much what's going on right now on the internet: We have perverse rewards in place.

Disclaimer: I've never used OpenBSD.

However, there are two angles to securing the system, and that is:

1. Fixing the code so that it does only what it is supposed to do. This includes security fixes.
2. Designing the code so that you can restrict access to resources (data etc) in a reliable way.

3. 1. Both must be addressed for a system to be both secure and usable.

      As far as I understand from the links and the discussion, OpenBSD is best-in-class at point nr 1, and pretty terrible at point nr 2. A system is no more secure than point 1 dictates (what use is there in access restrictions and services if they are full of holes?!), but the system is only as useful as point 2 allows without compromising security. It's a hard problem. And it sorta seems like OpenBSD is avoiding touching point nr 2? Am I wrong here?