Virtual museums would be really cool, too. You could create an environment where artifacts were actually used/seen originally, then populate it with extra-high detail items scanned with this beast. Navigate the virtual world, highlight an artifact, rotate it, get info on it, links, etc. Heck, virtually smash it if you…

A technicality for sure, but I believe torrent apps prioritize by "most scarce blocks first" by default to maximize the overall health of the torrent, reducing the chance that a drop to 0 seeds brings the peers to a halt at some point.

^ This. For the things I have to store in-house, I love these drives. For everything else, there's FasterNet(tm).

*lick* *smack* *drool*

Indeed. That's how it shows up in the RSS feed, too. What can I say? It got me to click. =p

Could have been the bidder. I don't know about how eBay works in this regard, but there's probably nothing stopping the bidder from changing his address to something in the 48, bid on/win the auction, then change it back to his HI address, hoping you won't notice/care.

Cool... the dev has this planned for the next update, it seems.

Slightly concerned about the fact that it does a search+replace on the source code to swap hostnames with IP addresses. When a browser connects to a server, it typically tells the server what hostname it's referencing in an HTTP header. Without this, the server would have no clue which of the many sites it serves to…

Sam, please clarify. Your comment @Big Ern sounds as if you take issue with the SaaS model in general. I genuinely want to understand your viewpoint on with which of these you take issue:

Agreed. That's the big part I took issue with regarding CIQ, at least (the media reaction to it is a different story). Backgrounding that so hard that nobody even knows it's there — let alone choosing to opt in *or* out — is no bueno.

I know our clients prefer to have us host their data (I work for an SAAS company in data security/PCI compliance) for several reasons. The biggest is liability. Should the chips hit the fan and a data breach happen, a vast chunk of the liability would be ours, not theirs.

I see a reason for it to exist, that could be potentially valuable to the carrier.

As a developer that offers SAAS, I can confirm that it is possible to house someone's data, and maintain your software while retaining no rights to the data beyond what is necessary to fulfill the purpose of the software as expected by the client (and set forth in the contract). This is common, industry-accepted…

Dude, sometimes you have no control over it, especially when you don't have control over the code that's calling yours. This is very much so in the case of event handlers from the OS. For example, writing an even handler in .NET... Windows demands that you write a function for it to call that takes, say, two integers.…

It's probably there because Android gives them no other way to collect the aggregate, anonymized performance data that they *do* need. In essence, Android probably doesn't have an event for just "hey, an SMS arrived", only "hey, an SMS arrived, and here's the contents". If I need to know that an SMS arrived for my…

I... but I... but there's no proof that it sent anyth—...

Yes, you would have to sniff for awhile, I agree. I'm just not convinced that it's not sending aggregate data instead of everything that's passed to it.

You all raise very valid points, and I'm not denying any of them. Again, it does wig me out a little bit.

Untrue. It hasn't been done (that I've seen). The linked video shows *nothing* about it being *sent* to CIQ's servers, even though the Wired article *explicitly states* that is does! Amazing. Wired basically just made that up.

So... they actually could be right, here. Sorry to play Devil's Advocate, but bear with me, here...