emhs

This is an example of what I love about the open source community. Some argue that signed boot was an attempt to force the open source community out by holding the keys to the ability to boot, as it were. Some think it's just relentless advancement of the forces of centralization and the establishment's view on security. Regardless of all of that, we can now take advantage of it to ensure our machines can only boot our trusted, linux/bsd/home-built OSes. I'm reminded of the car dealer crossroads from "In the beginning was the command line".

Open Source FTW.

This is something I've seen happen phone networks from time to time. A call will get routed into an echo, rather than to its destination. Not sure why it happens, though. There seems to be enough delay that it's getting out into the towers before coming back.

Absent any evidence of abuse, true neglect (homeschooling doesn't count, regardless of Germany's laws on the matter), or other violation of a worthwhile law, this can only be considered further evidence of consolidation of power in the hands of the State and governmental overreach.

As some have mentioned, this is essentially spamming the markets with shallow copies of your apps, which is typically verboten by major app stores. What's really necessary to truly take advantage of this concept without being spammy is a better form of keyword association for apps, allowing you to associate a gift app with "birthday", "holiday", "diwali", "christmas", "hannukah", and all the other holidays and occasions I can't think of at the moment. Of course this would need some sort of check to prevent people from spamming keywords you're not really relevant to (maybe a means of downvoting one of the keywords that brought you to the app on the app's page?), but assuming you can enforce a degree of responsible usage, this would allow app makers to build out the semantic associations of what their app can provide to people. Google in particular ought to be interested in something like this, as it would allow them to further build out their sematic trees, and associate holiday gift apps with specific holiday keywords more easily, enhancing their search results and ensuring they stay ahead in the app-market game.

Let's enumerate how wrong this is:

1. This was done by the British for a slight against the American government.

2. This is against a member of the media, who are typically considered noncombatants in political conflicts.

3. It's really against a family member; doubly noncombatant.

4. The supposed slight is only the truthful announcement of a criminal act by the government in question.

5. This comes after the government recently argued that they could be trusted with such powers.

Blackmail is a worthwhile consideration. Considering how many politicians today are dethroned by some scandal or another, any scandalous data captured by the NSA would make for excellent leverage. Further, however, this simply highlights again the need for a restructured communications layer atop the internet capable of mixnet-style encryption. It's past time for there to be an affordable and simple way to onboard large numbers of people into Tor, I2P, Secushare, Bitmessage, and other such systems.

And the world took a step closer to the promise of the tricorder.

"Please do all the work while I act like a diva about the vision."

> The people who shape our society will know what they need to know. I'm not sure a great understanding of a desktop PC is going to change this.

If you define "what they need to know" as "what's necessary for vaguely close to optimal job performance", then no, they won't. They will know the minimum they can get away with. They will know as little as we let them know. It has always been this way. The USA was founded by some of the brightest men of its day because the prevailing view demanded that this be so. Today, we do not demand that our leaders be our best and brightest. We have no idea how we would go about measuring such a thing. Instead, we've been taught to support the candidate that fits our preset ideological subset. This leads to parrot leaders who do not think strategically about the management of a country as much as they think strategically about the appeasement of their sources of votes and campaign contributions.

It comes back to understanding the basics of asking good questions and thinking about one's surroundings. This process is what humans did well to succeed: we should be encouraging it as much as possible. I do not ask that the average person, or even our decision-makers, already know how to re-install an operating system. I ask that they know how to find out, and think about the problem well enough to gather information and come to a conclusion about what's wrong. I ask that they look at the world rationally and scientifically. This is the failure of our educational system. Because we have not taught basic thinking and reasoning skills, because we have not taught that this is fundamentally necessary as a basic part of being a human, our leaders will say things like "The internet is a system of tubes". Because we do not expect or teach our citizens to think rationally, because we do not expect and verify that our leaders are informed about the mechanics and consequences of the decisions they make, bad laws are passed with great frequency.

This is our cultural, educational, and societal failure. No, I don't expect everyone to know how to re-install Windows. I expect them to look around them and see if they have any resources to get closer to a solution before expecting a free fix. And if they decide it's not worth their time to do it on the regular, I expect them to conceptually understand it on a basic enough level to provide information when asked probing questions by the person they're paying to fix it. Think, then act. It's not hard, we just gave up on teaching it.

Yes, unchecked sharing of untouched smartphone pictures is a privacy risk. But a little sanity about your friend lists on social media, and your privacy and sharing settings, and then even if you don't know how to strip geolocation data out of an image you can feel relatively safe. Especially if images of your kids go in an album with closely restriced visibility settings.

Further, is it really that hard to strip out geolocation data? I'm pretty sure both Android and iOS make it possible to not include that data in the photo to begin with. Yep, a quick search reveals easily a dozen or more sites explaining how to do it, and how to strip those geotags back out if you've already got photos that include them.

The real headline sounds more like "Willful ignorance poses health, safety, and privacy risks". This isn't worth panicking about.

I'd hoped so too, at first, but since this is just to build a non-orbital mid-scale demonstration, I figure building this one doesn't ensure that the orbital one will get built, and thus they couldn't guarantee that a full-size slingatron would ever exist to deliver the promised launch. Would've been nice, though. They'll probably offer that if they kickstarter the first orbit-capable one.

Alternative Internet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6006393 Prism Break: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6010803

I agree that demand pricing has a valuable role in our economy. On the other hand, notable kindness and lack thereof can easily have significant reputation and PR effects, both positive and negative. The "Don't Be An Asshole Rule" does not seem to be about preventing demand pricing in general, but instead about the PR value and cost of such actions in the wake of a disaster. Clearly Hailo is reaping a PR payout for leveraging its infrastructure to assist Toronto residents.

The point is that Uber does not appear to have included the PR cost of surge pricing in their calculus, and subsequently tried to deny that it happened in order to recoup some of the PR losses. Perhaps they should have included an earlier human intervention option.

Comments regarding the risks drivers bear going out in a storm also merit some attention. Possible responses that come to mind easily:

* Cut the margin the company takes off the fee * Allow drivers to enable some form of hazard rate when things get dicey * Providing additional advice and hotlines and such things has nothing at all to do with rates, and gets PR points, if Hailo's experience is any indication

I'm sure the rest of y'all can come up with more suggestions. The point is that demand pricing is not evil, but PR costs matter.

No reason you can't "save" and transfer your game by moving your cookie. You just need to get at your iPad cookies.

The difference here is that the Euros you're working with can't be held digitally as actual stored value. You can't carry them with you, and they must at all times be tied to an identity. With true digital currency, you're not tied to someone else's server for transactions. You can make the exchange in person, no trusted third party required. Your Euros require a trusted bank to hold your Euros, and a trusted country issuing them.