Some flat panel displays being made today have modestly thin edges, and people like using them for multi-monitor systems with a desktop that spans one or more monitors.
There are a lot of popular programming languages out there, each popular for being good at a particular thing. The C family languages are fastest and have a giant legacy. Perl is a favoured choice for text manipulations. Today's darling is Ruby, leader of the agile movement. Python is a cleaner, high-level language. PHP aims at the quick web/HTML scripter language and has a simpler access to SQL databases than most. Java's a common choice for large projects, with lots of class libraries, slower than C but faster than interpreted languages.
Tom Selleck narrates:
Have you ever arranged a wiretap in Las Vegas without leaving your office in Fort Meade?
Or listened in on a mother tucking in her baby from a phone booth, all without the bother of a warrant?
Or data mined the call records of millions of Americans with no oversight?
You will.
And the company that will bring it to you... AT&T
A big announcement today from those of us at the EFF regarding the NSA illegal wiretap scandal. We have filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T because we have reason to believe they have provided the NSA and possibly other agencies with access to not only their lines but also their "Daytona" database, which contains the call and internet records of AT&T customers, and probably the customers of other carriers who outsource database services to Daytona.
Last week I spoke at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony (ETEL) conference about CALEA and other telecom regulations that are coming to VoIP. CALEA is a law requiring telecom equipment to have digital wiretap hooks, so police (with a warrant, in theory) can come and request a user's audio streams. It's their attempt to bring alligator clips into the digital world.
With too many people defending the new levels of surveillance, I thought I would introduce a new word: Panoptopia -- a world made wonderful by having so much surveillance that we can catch all the bad guys.
David Brin introduced the concept to many in The Transparent Society, though he doesn't claim it's a utopia, just better than the alternative as he sees it.
It used to be that "If you are innocent you have nothing to hide" was supposed to be a statement whose irony was obvious to all. Today, I see people saying it seriously.
In playing with a few firefox extensions that display things like my cellular minutes used, I realized they were really performing a limited part of something that could be really useful -- deep bookmarks which can go past login screens and other forms to go directly to a web page.
We're always coming up with new technologies that affect privacy and surveillance. We've seen court cases over infrared heat detectors seeing people move inside a house. We've seen parabolic microphones and lasers that can measure the vibration of the windows from the sound in a room. We've seen massive computers that can scan a billion emails in a short time, and estimates of speech recognition tools that can listen to millions of phone calls.
Last night I was thinking to myself that we would probably see a big political todo when the war military death toll reaches 2749 -- the number of people killed (not including the 10 suicide attackers) in the WTC on 9/11.
Here's an idea to try -- Scrabble played with Google as the base, rather than the dictionary. Ie. you can play any word you can find in Google (sort of.)
This obviously vastly expands the set of words, perhaps too vastly, and it brings in all foreign languages to boot. It includes vast numbers of joinedwords, and zillions of other things. As such you would want to consider the following limits:
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