Over at The Verge, Nilay Patel does a nice job of debunking the recent controversy over whether Gmail users can have an expectation of privacy. Fueled by the revelations of governmental spying programs, media sites smell blood, but have largely misinterpreted a statement in Google’s motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit alleging that Gmail violates wiretapping laws. As Patel says — and goes on to show — “there’s just nothing here.”

 

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UNDANTAGSTILLSTÅND ElBaradei avgår i protest.

Samtliga kontrollerade cyklister bröt mot lagen.

chicksdaddy writes "ITWorld has an interesting opinion piece on the next privacy battleground, which they say will be over citizens' rights to use jamming technology to (forcibly) opt-out of ubiquitous surveillance, as sensors pop up in more and more public spaces and private homes alike. 'Given the rapid pace of technological change, we don't know exactly what the future holds for us. But one thing is certain: personal privacy is going to turn from a "right" to a "fight" in the next decade, as individuals take up arms against government and private sector snooping on their personal lives.' The article mentions some skirmishes that have already occurred: employees using GPS jamming hardware to prevent employers from tracking their every movement, and the crush of new business for encrypted voice, video and texting services like SilentCircle (up 400% in the last two months). 'Absent the protection of the law, citizens should be expected to do what they do elsewhere: take matters into their own hands: latching onto tools and technology to give them the privacy that they aren't afforded by the legal system. However, there may not be an easy technology fix for ubiquitous, unregulated surveillance. Writing in Wired this week, Jathan Sadowski warns that the tendency for individuals to focus on securing their own data and communications and using technology to do may be misleading. 'The problem is that focusing on one or both of these approaches distracts from the much-needed political reform and societal pushback necessary to dig up a surveillance state at its root,' Sadowski writes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

jones_supa writes "Bloomberg, the WSJ and the NYT cheered to report that the Euro Zone's economy has showed signs of recovery after two years of decline. They're all based on the news that Eurostat, the keeper of economic statistics for the European Union, says GDP grew 0.3 percent within the EU's borders from the end of March through June. As Olli Rehn, Eurostat's vice president, writes on his blog: 'I hope there will be no premature, self-congratulatory statements suggesting "the crisis is over."' He calls the GDP report only another sign of 'a potential turning point in the EU economy.' The quick conclusion by some economists and some in the news media that a slight rise in one quarter's GDP means a recession is over ignores how experts figure out when an economy is either in a significant downturn (a recession) or enjoying steady growth (an expansion)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bradley Manning, som dömts för spionage då han lämnat ut hemligstämplade dokument till Wikileaks, sade i dag i militärdomstolen vid Fort Meade att han är ledsen för den skada han åsamkat USA genom sina handlingar.

Consider this sentence:

I went to the moon, it has low gravity.

Or this one:

We drove 30 miles, the car ran out of gas.

If those look okay to you, then read on. (Otherwise, scram. You’ve got work to do.)

If your writing — in tweets and especially on your blog and product pages — is full of misspellings and improper capitalization and other errors, I will lose trust in you and your product. If you’re careless with language, are you also careless with software development?

There’s a simple rule you’re missing: you can’t join independent clauses with a comma.

The “independent clauses” part sounds all grammar-police-y. I can hear your eyes rolling. (They sound like toothpicks.) So I’ll give you an easier way to remember this rule: you can’t join two separate sentences with a comma.

In the example sentences above, you can almost be forgiven for thinking that they’re not independent clauses. (Almost.) But they are independent. The easy way to test is just by replacing the comma with a period. You’d get:

I went to the moon. It has low gravity.

We drove 30 miles. The car ran out of gas.

You might also rewrite them in other ways:

I went to the moon, which has low gravity.

We drove 30 miles and the car ran out of gas.

You have an array of options: semicolons, colons, dashes, and words such as “and” and “but.” You can turn independent clauses into dependent clauses. But you can’t jam two sentences together with a comma.

When you do, my opinion of and trust in your work goes down.

This is not, by the way, some prissy thing about proper manners. Fuck that shit. I’m not trying to squash your voice. This is about quality and trust.

(For more information, see Comma splice on Wikipedia.)