The most compelling reason for blocking child porn is not that it depicts the victim of a crime or has been produced by a crime, but that the very existence and distribution of the material can arguably be considered abuse and harm the victim. Considering the strong desire expressed from some to be able to remove embarrassing private history off facebook and other places, I would imagine the psychological impact of such materials being widely spread to be several orders of magnitude worse.

Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps as well and the capability was even commercially available before Elop took over. An android track at Nokia could have had a decent chance competing with Samsung. Having an OS that there are actually people who want would have put Nokia at least in a better position.

Considering Nokia was selling 10 times as many phones as Apple in 2010 they certainly were utterly crushing iphones.

So, Nokia certainly had a future and Elop certainly ran one of the greatest destructions of value in history. Hopefully he'll go on doing the same and finish what Ballmer's started at Microsoft.

Right. The NSA is very picky about getting good data so they're not interested in just dragnetting the whole internet and dumping it all in a huge database... No, wait, that was the NSA in that fantasy land I made up the other day that wasn't run by asshats.

This is the NSA in this reality and yes they will store any quality data on any users fingerprint, not because it might actually be good for stopping terrorists but because they can use it as a selling point to up their budget. Or sell it to governments they can trick into thinking it's useful. So of course the NSA will get a copy, pre-hash, of the fingerprints and they'll store it together with the rest of the useless crap they have stored. They won't stop any terrorists with it, but they'll claim they did and maybe they'll nail one or two false positives for fun.

One sort of wonders if the bids to host the Olympics are drying up. If the choice is between one country that will massively riot at Olympic spending while the economy is crap, another country that might very well be in civil disorder due to conflict between a repressive religious government and a significant secular population and a third that has significant problems with radioactive materials in the hands of idiots then I suspect the events surrounding the games will be far more exciting than the actual games.

Well, on the bright side there are few things that work as well for collapsing profitability as mass producing expensive hardware that nobody actually wants. While Nokia shareholders certainly and deservedly (for hiring someone with the profile of Elop with the similarities to such as Richard Beluzzo) got thoroughly screwed, this may become a significant lodestone that sinks Microsoft faster than it would risk otherwise.

Perhaps he will replace Ballmer. He does appear to have the desired 'consumers should just shut the fsck up and buy what we tell them to' attitude to consumer relations and seems as adept at handling employees and morale to make the shift in leadership seamless.

Somehow I suspect the problem at Microsoft is the board. They aquired the stock while liking the mindset of the management and having kept Ballmer for so long they obviously want that. They'll keep running it the same way, all the way into the eventual crash into the ground.

I think it's more like 'cars will drive themselves before people accept bullshit like that'.

They want the car to make the decisions on how to drive, I'm fine with that, as long as it's smart enough to do it safely. Which basically means smart enough to drive better than me. But if the car's driving, I'm going to sit in it humming along after several pints at a pub after work.

Actually, considering tests such as this where chimps will rationalize away useless steps while human children will follow instructions, the chimps could be considered 'smarter' but 'education' the difference.

Wether they want to see opinions they agree with or not is up to them; if they up moderate both things they agree with and those they don't they'll get connected to people who moderate the same way.

Trying to force people to moderate without bias doesn't work very well, a significant portion will always downmod things they disagree with and things like metamoderation only affect the most excessive raters. This way you limit the damage so the subjective moderations only affect those who want it to affect them.

Perhaps you will end up with most discussions containing people who barely ever even see eachother. Much like real life. Or networks of groups who like having meaningful conversations will form. But which one you'd be part of would depend upon your preferences, not on what random people you have nothing in common with think about a specific conversation.

And, perhaps, just perhaps, there'd be a bit less of screaming for censorship anytime anyone gets offended by idiots if the easily offended got separated from the rest.

Opinions vary wildly on what is good moderation so personally I think a social moderation system would be the ultimate in moderation. Make it exceptionally easy to rate comments, then create a connection network where users get connected to and trust each others moderation based on how similarly they rated various comments.

You'll have an incentive to moderate and you bypass the entire problem of trying to objectively rate comments; each user gets to see what they prefer. Don't want the utter crap deleted? Then don't downmod it and you'll start trusting the moderation of others who enjoy the utter crap. Hate racist comments and don't want to see them at all? Eventually you'll build up enough connections to people who always downmod them to have them rapidly filtered out.

The difficult part will be building enough of a user base that most people get decent amounts of close matches.

Self driving is the single feature that would ever get me to shell out for a new car. Nothing like having your own car drive you home after a couple of beers after work.

Ultimately, the huge capacity to save lives and the economic advantages of self-driving cars and trucks are going to drive this step very fast. Tens of thousands of lives every year, hundreds of thousands of injuries, tens to hundreds of billions in insurance costs, tens to hundreds of billions in savings on transportation, etc. In the face of the possible gains I think the regulatory aspects will get resolved faster than most people think.

Well, unless you actually act on the tool and treat those 150085 people as terrorists, in which case 10% of them will actually become terrorists and each will drag at least one other person into it through loyalty and/or family ties. In which case you now have more than 30k terrorists of which only half is believed to possibly be a terrorist.

Not a solution, no, but part of the problem.

According to TFA and the blog post it's server side encryption. Which, of course, does absolutely nothing for security as the NSA will just get the data before it's encrypted.

If you don't want your data read you encrypt it before sending it to someone else.

And forward any interesting business intelligence or gossip to anyone who might want to know.

Of course, the part that the NSA et al seems most interested in is the source and destinations of your mails to map your associations. By sending via your ISP smarthost you're still handing them that info, so if you want to cut them out of the loop you need to vpn the mail relaying outside their grasp and ensure encrypted smtp/tls direct between endpoints.

Your random mail idea does screw with them in a nice way tho as it'd mess up their social graph and probably get yourself classified as an uninteresting spammer after which you can freely inform islamic insurgents how they can enlarge their manhood and obtain large fortunes from Africa by sending a small upfront payment.

But for actual secure comms it's probably better to use i2p or some other darknet. And traffic on that screws with the snoops as well.