Holbein

Why don't you talk to joshkaufman about that "not providing any links" business, huh? But you don't, because you have a selective perception - what you do agree with does not need verification, apparently.

Here's a link for you: http://www.spiegel.de/international/amazon-seeks-fifty-perce...

Now about "childish": calling things what they are is indeed the adult way. You've been childish. And in your last post, you've also been cynical ("At least have the decency…"). Both are very bad traits. Please grow up.

Well, I've read a few articles about that spat, and made up my mind. I suggest you read a few articles yourself, get ahold of the facts, and stop the way small kids argue ("monopschmopy").

Bullshit. Amazon told Hachette & Co "we are granting ourselves a big discount, from now on we will pay 20% less than before. Since this is nearly a monopsony, you can agree to these terms, or loose a lot more than half of your income. But hey it's your choice... (suppressed snickers)". Amazon is not playing fair at all.

How about "how the Snowden relevations changed the behaviour with online porn"?

Because I'm considering leaving all that behind. Some creepy organisation going all peeping tom on me? No thanks.

Sure this has been researched as well?

Thanks for the link. While it does indeed looks nice, it's not what I had in mind. This is basically isometric 2D. You're looking at a plane. Things that rise up, like pillars, are not shown. You could not see that dam the way it really looks like in my linked picture.

The funny thing is, Dwarf Fortress is simulated in 3D. With the 3D viewer, you can even look at your terrain in 3D:

http://i140.photobucket.com/albums/r21/khyron2k/Dwarves/Dwar...

If DF would look like that during gameplay, I'd immediately start playing.

What a load of bullcrap... "where told".

If you have a equipment to down planes, it's also your duty to have the proper radar equipment to reliably see what's up there, something that those Rebels did not have. They just stole equipment out of their league, did not know how to handle it and killed 300 innocent travelers.

Well, it was ambiguous to say the least, with all those "you"'s in it. If it was meant as an analogy, maybe you should have written it like this:

This is also silly. That's like people who walk into speeding traffic because they have the right-of-way. They won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from their grave.

Well, when you say

You won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from your grave

that's equally projecting something onto me, so... that's not a great way to have a productive discussion neither.

You won't get to hear about how the trial turns out from your grave.

Well, in contrast to you, I plan to enjoy my life instead of wasting it by worrying about some possible bad actor spying on me, which is what I'm must read is how you spend your life.

Sure, fight the NSA by engaging a little bit politically, and buying the right things. But apart from that, don't worry so much, man.

I think you're overestimating the NSA's capability to cross-reference your actions and compare them to "what people like me should typically do".

My point is, you should not change your behaviour to be a lesser target to the NSA. You'd just quickly become super paranoid. Instead you should live your live exactly the same, and if the NSA tries to make your live bad, that's the moment when you call them out on it - after all, it's the NSA that is behaving out of line. So they should change, not you.

Oh, and http://defundthensa.com/ , sure.

No. That's common sense. If you don't do something on the internet, there is no data. No data = nothing suspicious.

Yeah, and if you don't even have an internet connection, NSA is putting you on their most wanted list. Give me a break. Not doing something can't make you more suspicious.

The article failed to mention that the previous $199 ipod touch hasn't had a camera, but now it does.

Apple mentioned in a previous keynote that that $199 price point is kind of a magical barrier. If you can lower your price to <200, lots of people consider it that previously have not thought about buying it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfgyQcyDthw#t=425 (jump to 7:05)

So what they tried to communicate, badly, was: a product that is already a best-seller now also includes a camera. So now it has the potential to upend another category after music, communication and gaming: photography.

I agree.

Also, Steve Jobs was probably even more driven, perfectionist and hurtfully direct than Phil. But Steve was just growing up in a different era, and cleverly realized that when a lot of people are looking, you should try to keep the illusion of being kinda nice.

Phil is not hated by everybody. Me, I thought Fez was kinda neat. I don't care about his demeanor, great art survives all that.

Both the object detection and that 3D tracking seems to be focused on consumption. Consume more movies, more music, more books, more apps!

How sad. A phone is the most intimate piece of technology we have, and all Amazon can think about making it a machine of consumption.

I wish they would have focused more enabling people to create things. You know, help them be active. Help change the world.

There's just a slight hint here that Amazon considers its users more like mindless money-spending media consuming drones.

A new device very rarely push the human race forward. The Kindle Phone is clearly no such device.

What is speculation about this?

- wifi and celltower db query servers are indeed hosted outside EU

- Siri indeed uploads your whole address book - it even tells you about that beforehand!

- iCloud tabs must upload every URL to a central server, it would not work otherwise

- the mud puddle test* proves that iCloud backup is extractable from Apple servers by third parties.

*http://www.magnir.com/2012/08/how-secure-is-your-cloud-take-...

Of course, if you buy an iPhone in Europe, and you want to use it any significant manner, you're getting spied on by US agencies as well:

- GPS: the wifi and celltower db queries that optimize the service are transferred into a foreign country.

- use Siri: uploads your whole address book to US servers before use

- use iCloud tabs: every URL you visit it uploaded to Apple's US servers

- turn on the only cloud backup solution available on the device, and all your data, including every SMS, every call and all your most private notes and photos are also transferred into the foreign country of the US, with a chance of it being analyzed by certain agencies.

In other words, this might qualify as getting spied on as well.

Great site!

So how do you come up with the TripExpert score? Do you read every review, map it manually to a number, then get the average? Or is it more like Rotten Tomatoes where each review only gets a shot at a thumps up or thumps down, and then you average those?

Btw: Slight coding error: On city pages, hotel names are overlaid over the preview icon, which makes them very hard to read on Safari 5.1.

You did not understand me correctly. The problem is that this can be done remotely, over the air, even when you're not in the US.

Apple's sign looks very much like an exit sign to me:

http://www.designofsignage.com/application/symbol/railway/la...

https://encrypted.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=exit%20Pictog...

Indeed. Here's a screengrab:

http://i.imgur.com/b1edNBJ.png

She's clearly using something that looks like a phone.

No, flattr cannot be used for in-app purchases. The idea behind flattr is that you voluntarily honor a podcast (or some other work that somebody has created and put online) by putting them on your personal list of people that will get a fraction of some amount you decided to donate at the end of the month.

The key concepts being "voluntarily donate" and "not a fixed amount", which differentiates flattr completely from in-app-purchases.

Apple was apparently uncomfortable with such a strange concept that it could not bring into line with its capitalistic mindset, and promptly banned it.

Sad to hear that Apple hasn't changed its mind on this front.

Sure:

http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1736

"Further improvements to Touch ID fingerprint recognition".

TouchID was updated in system updates 7.0.1, 7.1 and 7.11:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IOS_7#7.0.1

Because those hashes, when leaked to an outside party with a big database of fingerprints (say, the NSA), can be easily be combined to find matches in that database and identify somebody. Hashes don't solve all the problems, cmelbye, the identifying info is still there!

So how do they internally aggregate an image of your fingerprint during actual usage, then?

Also, hash plus salt together is info that identifies a fingerprint. Why shouldn't it be possible to leak that info? Once you have it, you can apply it to your existing database of fingerprints to get matches - no actual fingerprint image needed...

Good to know, thanks!

I think there is reason to doubt that TouchID stores your fingerprint as a hash. Let me elaborate:

Even after the initial priming phase, TouchID continues to learn and adapt to your fingerprints. So during priming, you could always place your finger flat on the sensor, and then after that, during usage, you can continuously use different parts of your finger, and if at least a part of your finger overlaps with a previous image of your finger, TouchID unlocks the device and - crucially - it continues to learn those new angles of your finger.

This indicates that TouchID internally aggregates an image of your fingerprint during actual usage. Now to merge those images together, you have to compare previous images with the new image, to find a common section. And you can't do that if you have only got a hash of the previous image.

I think therefore just by looking at its operation from outside, we can infer TouchID stores a fingerprint in a way that it can reproduce the fingerprint itself.

I stand by my statement. Your feeble attempts and downvoting me into light grey can't silence me! Stupendous man will save the day again! :-P

Thanks for the link!

Apple sent out at least 1 update to TouchID as part of a regular iOS update. In my view, from a few miles up, the fact that you can update TouchID doesn't install a lot of confidence in this tech. Apple can change its workings, and it can also interface with TouchID from outside in order to update it.

Would you care to elaborate why you're still sure that Apple (or the NSA) couldn't change TouchID to send my fingerprints to an outside server?