I have not studied the specs, but in my experience a) images or movies beyond a certain size cannot be sent using MMS. So...apple devices sending me a nice 30-second full HD video? I get a horrible down-sampled blurry thing like my cell phone would create in 1997. I tell my family to use email, they laugh and say THEY don't have any trouble (most have iphones...).

Same with vids I send from android to iphone users.

b) when an iphone user 'likes' or 'loves' something in messages, I get a message "XXX loved an image". Annoying.

Here's a completely unsatisfactory info page from Verizon, my carrier. It does not even mention iphones. https://www.verizon.com/suppor...

ok, wait. your /. id is past 10 MILLION and you're saying "you kids"? Methinks you're pretending, or retired and just came to technology.

Please. You can't file a class-action lawsuit. Only the federal government can do this. You can file a complaint, and hope the federal government decides it's actionable. IBM has been doing things like this for years, and they likely have armor-plated their butts.

You should see this: http://www.salon.com/2015/03/1... If you don't trust salon, take your pick of the many other sites that have covered this. Those articles all make the assessment that Hillary's email 'furor' was not a legal matter. Yet the haters and the political organizations keep the ball in the air, hoping for a miracle before November. I don't know if you are among them, but from your rhetoric, it seems likely. Not going to touch the rest of your pro-conspiracy rant here. Just wanted to shed a little light.

And after, will you also google "what is the EU" just as the many brexiters did in the UK? "I voted for trump but I didn't think he'd win!". It's times like this AC should be forbidden. If you're going to speak up, identify yourself.

First it was having an 'indicator light' when the camera was in operation, and we were assured it was absolutey secure - until this came to light. (<URL:http://gizmodo.com/fbi-can-secretly-activate-laptop-cameras-without-the-in-1478371370/>) I read about someone who overcame a physical switch but have lost the link.

Nonetheless, I would not assume any physical switch on a computer. It's read and execution based on the sensor is still software (or firmware, or microcode).

It's not just the camera you need to protect. I used to carry a small audio adapter - plug it into the laptop and the built-in microphone is disabled. I got out of the habit, but the tape is always there.

Wish I had mod points today. Thank you.

I can find no workarounds for Chrome - posted in the chrome forum. Just wondered if anyone else was concerned enough to figure out how to disable it in Chrome until the library is updated.
From ldd output of /opt/google/chrome/chrome:
libgraphite2.so.3 => /usr/lib64/libgraphite2.so.3 (0x00007fb69a34e000)

O/T: There was no Fed before 1913. However, we've had one form or another of a national bank for much longer; the story of how Andrew Jackson stared down Nicholas Biddle and put a leash on the Second Bank of the United States is quite a different story. Perhaps it was this which you attempted to reference...but even then, the BUS lost.

I had cataract surgery in my left eye (which is the dominant eye) four years ago, at age 49. I had cataract surgery in the right eye 18 months later.

Simply put--as your eyes cloud over, your brain has to work substantially harder to compensate. Your brain has to decipher blurred vision, compensate for the "halo" effect cataracts give you around bright lights (the reason why older people don't drive at night is the halo effect of oncoming headlights--completely blinding them).

All of that changes with cataract surgery--you don't just see better. (And you see MUCH better--if you wore corrective lenses beforehand they implant a custom-fit lens that corrects your vision to 20/20 or better.) All of the "clock cycles" that your brain was devoting to countering the effects of cataracts (even things like keeping your balance) are all of a sudden freed up. The change is dramatic--it really is life-transforming.

My mother-in-law is 90--she had cataract surgery last fall. Last summer, before the surgery, her daughters were wondering about "what are we going to do about Mom"--at the time I suggested that they wait till after the cataract surgery; I was sure it would have a big impact. Boy, did it--my mother-in-law is active, alert, far more capable, and busy with plans for an expanded vegetable garden this summer.

Until you go through the experience, you can't really understand how much effort your brain puts into interpreting what you see. The impact of cataract surgery is unbelievable.

Digitizing music has been going on for quite some time--the best of the apps is PhotoScore:

Neuratron PhotoScore

You can find tons of public domain music at the Werner Icking Music Archive, save the PDFs, and open the PDFs in PhotoScore. You can then open them in Sibelius or another music editing application.

The overwhelming majority of lawsuits never go to trial. But the cost of simply responding to a lawsuit can be staggering. Prior to the enactment of the SPEECH Act, the owners of TechDirt could ignore Jeffrey Morris and his U.K. attorney, and not respond to their lawsuit. However, were Morris to actually file suit in a U.K. court, and TechDirt did not respond, the court would more or less automatically find for the plaintiff by "default judgment."

You got that part--the question you're asking is, "so what?"

Read the letter from the lawyer at the TechDirt article: Addlestone (the lawyer) makes plain that he will litigate in the U.K., win a judgment--and then promises to pursue "relief" in the U.S. courts. That's the threat.

Once they win in the U.K., they can file suit in the U.S. to collect on a judgment issued by a court in the U.K. Before the SPEECH Act, a U.S. court would, at the least, hold a hearing to determine whether the suit has merit. That--by itself--would involve major legal fees. Large enough fees that TechDirt would probably be wiser to offer a settlement, paying Morris (and his attorney) cash to go away.

The SPEECH Act changes that: Morris and his attorney can go into court in the U.K., get a judgment, and bring their judgment to the U.S. Where a judge will simply throw them out of court--potentially awarding attorney's fees to TechDirt.

In addition to encouraging you to RTFA, let me strongly encourage you to consider the political position consistently advocated by the paper that published the FA. The Guardian makes no pretense at all of being balanced, centrist, unbiased, or apolitical. This is the British newspaper (and web site) that developed a web site with the names and addresses of registered voters in Ohio, and encouraged their readers to write to them to exhort them to vote for John Kerry rather than George Bush. (Bush won Ohio by a handful of votes--which Ohio politicos attributed to the furious backlash the Guardian created, but that's another story.)

In other words, the Guardian article is an advocacy piece meant to alarm, rather than enlighten. If you're a Brit, this will come as no surprise--if you're as Internet-savvy as a SlashDot reader should be, you shouldn't be surprised, either.

The sun will come up tomorrow, even in Texas...
Despite the panicked anxiety of the writer (and the New York Times, here), it's not terribly controversial to emphasize the strong Christian views of many of America's founders. Which is not to say that America's Constitution is a statement of Christian faith--which is often how this argument is misconstrued. (A standard freshman year American History exam question is to compare and contrast the Christian and Deist views expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.) But it is interesting to know that in most U.S. states you had to be a professing Christian in order to run for political office--it provides a perspective on our First Amendment that is all-too-often missing when discussing what the "separation of church and state" means. (What it meant, then, was that no state could "establish" a church--in the way that the Church of England is established in the U.K., or the Lutheran Church is established in Denmark. They're supported by taxes, their leadership is appointed by government, etc.--they are state religions. Jefferson wrote about a "vast wall separating church and state" to reassure Baptists in New England that they would not face oppression by Congregationalists.).

Isaac Newton vs. military technology:
Well gosh--I can see the insidious hand of Sarah Palin here, too. Or...perhaps, it might be worthwhile to consider that the intentional pursuit of military technology as a means of achieving battlefield superiority has been a hallmark of U.S. strategy since the Civil War. Especially in Texas, home to Ft. Hood, Ft. Sam Houston, Lackland AFB, and most U.S. Air Force pilot training. To me (who majored in Economics and American History) that sounds like a pretty perceptive point to make. I'd include Isaac Newton, too--but presumably they decided something had to give. Oh, well.

Guns
TFA breathlessly tells Brit readers that:

The new curriculum asserts that "the right to keep and bear arms" is an important element of a democratic society.

One can understand that this would so shock a Brit that he might drop his second or third pint of Guinness Stout that he'd swilled that day. Which is to say, what a Brit might find commonplace (down two or three pints of Guinness Stout in the U.S. and you're a de facto alcoholic) in the U.S. is seen as entirely normative. Again--given that the entire point of the Second Amendment was a direct reaction to the abuses of British occupation forces prior to American independence--this is a pretty welcome emphasis on the impact of early American history on our constitution and present-day policy. Not to mention, of course, that in Texas even self-avowed liberals emphasize their support for "Second Amendment Rights".

Think critically--read critically
I'm far less bothered by this article (it's the Guardian, for heaven's sake, what would you expect?) than I am by the fact that SlashDot's editors included it. If they had read this with any perception of the source, or any sense of critical examination of what the writer was saying, they would have concluded that TFA failed the "news for nerds, stuff that matters" test. TFA simply doesn't matter--it's red-meat propaganda for a Brit paper that still proudly waves a red flag.

dAzED1, You're quite right in your facts. This is not something that your average techno-geek (or slashdot nerd) is going to grok or espouse, as you're seeing here. It something that will save enterprises (the larger the better) huge piles of money, while providing all the benefits you cite (and a few you have missed).

I'm riding this wave, too, but from the other side of the table. And Cloud - as an enabler - is bringing fantastic (in a business sense) and fascinating (in a technical sense) technologies to the realm of possibility.

The reason I'm replying, though, is to cast a bit of a cautionary note: not everything is cloud-ready or even cloud-friendly. Regulatory issues like BASEL II will make some information/applications impossible for public cloud. SPI (sensitive personal information) and 'classified' or 'confidential' information may never be put into a public cloud. And that's as it should be.

However, having said that, there are private cloud solutions and hybrid solutions that can be brought to bear.

"Cloud" is the foundation technology, the infrastructure enabler, as I see it, that will allow and even encourage this 'entirely new paradigm' to grow and flourish into an entirely new generation of technologies.

And the rate of adoption is just terrific; the interest is, as someone described it to me recently, so exciting it's scary. It will be some time before the field settles, but my money's on the global players who can bring virtually limitless resources to the problem.

This is pretty simple. North Carolina is bluffing, hoping that Amazon will not take this to the federal appellate courts.

There is longstanding legal precedent banning government authorities from requiring bookstores or libraries to disclose information about a customer's interests. This has been litigated repeatedly, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; the rulings have subsequently been applied to videotape/CD rentals as well. There is related case law pertaining to the subscription lists of magazines and newspapers--but that's a slightly different subject.

Brief synopsis of legal history:
A brief synopsis of bookstore and library privacy issues can be found at ReaderPrivacy.org.

But there's a bit more
As the Reader Privacy article notes, the PATRIOT Act (rushed into law immediately after the 9/11 tragedy) specifically gives the FBI the ability to subpoena purchase records from bookstores, as well as borrowing records from libraries. However--that power is limited to the FBI (although it can probably be exercised by other federal law enforcement agencies)--but it requires a federal judge to sign the warrant, based on probable cause, naming a specific individual. That gives no support at all to a state sales tax authority asking for a complete data dump of 7 years worth of purchase transactions.

In short--this will annoy Amazon's management, provide hefty fees for a bunch of lawyers, and produce a grand total of zero revenue for the state of North Carolina.