toki5

I'm not sure I'd call this Ford's fault.

>Lopez said the smuggling organization was able to get a duplicate key from a locksmith in El Paso, who got the codes after calling up a Ford dealership.

>An FBI affidavit says someone at a Dallas auto dealer accessed the codes in Ford's database, giving out more than 2,300 codes over an 18-month period.

I think dealerships, of all places, would be (should be) allowed to have codes for cars in their lot. I trust dealerships to have these codes. If they do nefarious things with them, they should be punished, but I don't think Ford should be punished for having a dealership-accessible database of key codes. Whoever was cooperating with the criminals is, to me, the person to blame here (along with the criminals).

I'd have sued that dealership, not Ford itself.

I have to admit, I don't use Gmail for just e-mail. It's more or less my home page -- it's a portal to the people I chat with, the documents I access (on Drive) daily, and just so happens to be where I send e-mails from.

These days, (to me anyway) the fact that Gmail is an e-mail service is a little incidental.

There is (or was, at least) a group of blind mountain bikers who used echolocation to estimate obstacles in their path. I was floored when I read the article[1] about them; that ability always sounded like a superpower to me.

[1]: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sensory-superpowers/2009...

SSH is an interesting set of solutions that appear on the surface to be horribly inefficient but after a tiny amount of digging are actually okay.

I had to write an SSH terminal inside a browser, and it was full of "why the heck did they"s followed ten minutes later by "oh, that's why"s.

>I don't understand how people even get it into their heads to immediately ask potential users for direct access to my private information?

Either it's private to you, in which case this service is very likely not going to provide you a great deal of value, which puts you outside their market, or it isn't private, in which case you're in their market.

>Seriously, would anyone approach potential clients with that kind of attitude in real life?

This is real life. I don't like the implication that "it's an internet service" means "it isn't real life." This is a service that's trying to land you with real people, doing real things, in a personal way.

The attitude here is "you're looking to be social, so sign up with your social network." If you don't like that, then I'd warrant that you aren't the type of person this is aimed at.

It'd be nice to have alternatives -- others here have suggested a survey, for example -- but let's be honest: Facebook collates a lot of really useful information that is directly helpful to a service such as this. It's a no-brainer from their point of view.

Quick question -- why is SSL encryption only offered on the top two tiers?

Articles like these are inspiring to me.

We see acquisition articles and startup success stories on this site that frequently range in the millions, and they're sort of like the rock stars of the bunch, where your chances of success have to do with a creative idea, hard work, and not a small amount of luck.

But cases like this, where Jon's managed to make (at least ramen) profitability off of a product he's made and shipped to people who enjoy it -- small scale stories like this -- are great.

Reading things like this makes me think, if you have some idea and you want it to come to fruition, then DO IT.

To be totally fair, I hadn't heard of Bits & Bytes before now, so that's a little value I didn't have before. It's not quite accurate to say we get nothing out of linking to them instead of the youtube clip.

>Why would he lose his right to free speech just because he has been convicted of a crime?

Inmates have restricted free speech. See here for some info om that: http://civilrights.findlaw.com/other-constitutional-rights/r...

>I have to agree. It didn't really turn out as well as I wanted. The talk is really good, but I could never make this read smoothly.

Props for stepping forward and saying this :-)

I think it has to do with that you're trying to capture the content of a talk largely by presenting the bullet points from that talk's slide deck, but in doing so miss a lot of context that came from the presentation.

Your summary at the bottom is great -- I think it should be the whole article. This would offer viewers a snapshot of what they can expect out of the video so that they don't miss anything (for example, a very common takeaway I'm seeing from this and from people I show it to is that this is "just" a network stack hack -- no mention of his proposal for multi-core optimization, etc).

If you have one specialized need (i.e. one specific path for packets to travel), then it is just as valid an approach to trash every other path.

To turn your own question around: Why bother trying to optimize a stack that contains a lot of stuff you don't strictly need? The talk doesn't deal with general-purpose servers that perform multiple roles; it says "if you have a singular role, here is how you hyper-optimize to support that role at a huge scale."

>With Glass everything I do I'll do with compromise

This is a choice you make. You're making it for the sake of your argument, then presenting the argument as if everyone will make the same choice.

You shouldn't; I won't.

This is absolutely a fair point regarding the total cost over time, but I'm referring to the first cost, where I don't have the product and am considering purchasing it.

A one-time $1200 fee is a non-starter. There's no way I'm paying that much money for a product that I'm not even sure I'll use next month.

$50 (or, as I've been corrected by others -- thanks) $20 to try it out? That's a much easier decision.

I have to admit, the subscription model is way more attractive to me than the one-time model. I'm not someone who uses Photoshop every day, so if I sit down and think "it'd be really handy to use it right now, just this once, for this one thing" ... I'm not going to shell out hundreds to do it. I'm just not. I'll use GIMP if I can or I'll pirate Photoshop if I can't.

I might shell out $50, though, and if I find I'm using it often, great. If not, I'll cancel and I'll have only spent $50 for a legitimate use case.

That sounds interesting as hell. I'll look, thanks!

Not necessarily.

Take the "soccer moms" example. Foursquare can say "we have X soccer moms checking in." A third party says "Here's an ad we'd like you to serve to soccer moms." Foursquare does it and returns usage data -- how many soccer moms clicked, etc.

Not saying that's how they'd do it, just saying that it's possible, feasible, even easy to provide ad retargeting without any data visibility at all. It's a little early to cry foul, imo.

I'm looking forward to Glass, but man, I wouldn't touch smart contact lenses with a 10-foot pole.

Maybe -- maybe if they couldn't connect to the Internet. I know I'm playing paranoid devil's advocate here, but if they have any sort of connectivity, I'm going to be terrified (maybe irrationally so) of the prospect of someone figuring out how to intercept them and blind me.

I'll reply to you and 'abecedarius in the same spot:

The problem arises when critical evidence exists only in the infrastructure of some private company. If a case hinges on a fact that is proven only by information that is in the hands of, e.g., Verizon, then yes, law enforcement requires the cooperation of that tech company to gather evidence.

>but the police did a fine enough job beforehand

Beforehand? The police did a fine enough job gathering evidence before technology leapfrogged ahead of them? Sure, they did. Then they sought to adapt our laws to the advancements that we've made. You see power creep in law enforcement; I see power creep in everybody.

Jumping through hoops -- a system of checks and balances -- is fine and good.

When those checks and balances check out, so to speak, I want my law enforcement agencies able to do their job efficiently. This is a case of making that process -- the post-warrant process, after checks and balances have played out -- easier.

That's a fairly extreme and frankly unrealistic generalization. Warrants (of any form) exist because of the need to gather evidence in cases; the existence of evidence isn't always a crime in and of itself but is used to support a case that a crime has occurred (or is going to occur).

That's really cool -- certainly very nifty for Zapier users.

The title, though, implies a service (or hack) that isn't dependent on any other system -- maybe it might be better titled "Turn Gtalk into a Command Line for the Web using Zapier" or something?

That's a little disingenuous here -- "compliance" in this context means "able to comply." Currently, if a company is "unable to comply," that means they can't forward along whatever information is required by the warrant, and usually law enforcement backs off. The change here is that now they're starting to say "too bad, make it happen."

Law enforcement doesn't have a hand in the tech stacks of private companies. This isn't "making their job easier" -- in a lot of cases it's making their job possible.

Cars are two-ton hunks of metal barrelling down the road at life-threatening speeds. There is an inherent risk that comes with using them; that risk is so high (comparative to other every-day activities) that we have megalo-insurance companies covering them and laws demanding we wear seat belts.

I'm uncomfortable with agreeing with this analogy, because it implies that, where seat belts address the risk of operating a car, these bulletproof backpacks address an everyday risk of being shot while attending school.

I'm not versed in statistics on either; my uneducated gut says that the risk of getting in a car crash is huge compared to the risk of being shot in a school. If I'm wrong, that's troubling, terribly so.

I get the need to address fears in every way possible, but I think calling these products "no different than seat belts" is possibly maximizing fear where it's not necessary.

There's a large difference in my mind between a newsletter a company only sends out to its subscribers and unsolicited e-mail advertisements.

What part of what mistermann said had anything to do with Mz being a woman?

I grok frustration, anger -- nobody is perfect. Nobody is nice all the time. But reading something like this (from your blog):

>Just when I was about ready to go on a real tear and swear off niceness forever, the guy in line ahead of me at lunch behaved like just enough of an overprivileged dick that my relatively better mannered behavior resulted in the girl loading up my plate. I had trouble finishing it. So I think I will continue to be polite to folks who handle my food.

... rubs me the wrong way.

>I am nice because I believe in it as an ethic, not merely a manipulative thing to do.

Being successful and being nice shouldn't be the same effort -- they are two efforts, unrelated, that sometimes incidentally intertwine, hopefully for the better.

You should be courteous and respectful of human beings -- if you feel that this very concept is somehow detracting from your life in a meaningful way, I suspect that you're misattributing your lack of success. But it's hard to speak on it without any real specific examples.

What if you include the value of not having to pay for airport parking? (in cases where e.g. you couldn't find a ride to the airport)

Great article, but one thing that's sort of glossed over here, and that I half-disagree with, is this:

>But we also get to think and operate at a higher level, up in the clouds of what we want to happen, and not down in the dirty of how it should happen.

The author mentions this at the end, but I feel it should be stressed more strongly: The dirty of how is important. The author presents a big "if" here, which is: if the function we've built to abstract away some ugliness performs in the best, most efficient way possible, with no drawbacks, then, yes, abstracting that functionality away and forgetting it is okay.

But to me that's a big if. It is just as important to me to understand and recognize that map is fast, efficient, and to understand why it's fast and efficient, so that someday, if you come across a situation where map does not apply, you will know why, and you'll be able to use something better.

Being up in the clouds all the time is, to me, a pipe dream -- we must always be cognisant of the ground on which we built this tower of abstraction layers.

The answers are there, but I agree that it could be quite a bit clearer.

> Can I keep a planet if I didn't roll a sun with it?

No - suns make planets habitable (see the Sun section); you can only keep habitable planets and black holes.

>What's the difference between orange and yellow space debris?

There is no difference between red and orange space debris (there are no yellow -- the colors in the instructions are slightly off from what the dice actually show). There's also no difference between yellow and green planets/suns -- take a look at the image in the article that shows all the dice laid out. I think it'll clear that question up.

>but don't I also keep stars so that my planets stay habitable?

That makes logical sense, but since the instructions specifically state to keep only planets and black holes, no, suns go back in the tube. I think the logic behind this is two-fold: One, since planets and black holes are the only metric for score, any planet that you keep has a star in its imaginary galaxy, so a planet that is by a player actually represents not just a planet but also "at least one star." Two, a green/orange die going back into the tube helps keep the game points flowing.