Hold up a ball. Which side points to the earth? What happens when you drop it? Will it always fall towards the earth? Now, go to Australia. Which side of the ball faces the earth? What happens when you drop it? If you drop the ball, will it fall towards the earth? If so, that's why they haven't fallen off. Now of course, move a larger-than-earth, as-dense-as-earth object near the Earth on the side of Australia and your answer will differ. Of course, the Earth is more likely to be destroyed by gravitational tidal forces due to that before you are able to 'fall off' Australia but at least you'd have your tired old joke. :-P

Nice idea and I hope the implementation is well thought out -- designing pictograms that make sense to many cultures is difficult. The other usual concerns also apply -- speaking of which, one issue I see right off the bat is that they're using color as a sole designator in the icon set. For people with red/green color blindness, this makes the set of icons unusable for its intended purpose.

Indeed, from the man who says he won't let his kids use an iPod, comes an appraisal of a product he's probably never really used. And of course, Google isn't allowed either, so, perhaps Android follows naturally. (iPod/Google reference: http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2006/04/03/8373041/index.htm )

"Is This MITM Attack to Gmail's SSL ? Mozilla makes a public statement about the fraudulent *.google.com certificate Been seeing this on twitter for a few hours now.

It's more like we can't not do something, that is to say, it is directly required.

In a world where communications media allow only one person with $5000 worth of equipment to share that equipment with people who have all the spare time (and there are lots, just look at us for an example) it'll be pretty much the same as before (visit a website, here's your data).

They're not just listening to it. There are a lot of recovery techniques that must be performed very carefully and with strict controls to recover every last bit of intelligible information from those media.

"He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." .. seems oddly apt, but possibly a little late for the mainstream news.

It's kind of awesome when real physical devices start to sound like technobabble isn't it?

You look more like a meat popsicle to me.

Who also often have no technical expertise in the field of the case in which they are supposed to be making decisions. One week a rubber tyre manufacturer, and the next a microcomputer chip manufacturer debating about the minutiae of their patents which are almost all >10 pages long and filled with hundreds upon hundreds of "whereas"s and conditions, I'd imagine it'd be enough to make any tenured lawyer pull out their hair.

As they say, "A cat in any state is fine too."