I don't get the feeling malware authors are going to be negatively affected in any way.

So... If both Murdoch and the Church of Scientology sue Slashdot for publishing that comment, will they next sue each other for implying that they are like each other?

And the sheer mass of stupid collected in that one courtroom would be enough to create a black hole.

But Darwin approved . . .

Your mind doesn't care about the laws of physics. It only cares about how it perceives them. While a splash screen will always increase the load time of any application, the user will perceive the application as being more responsive and faster to start than without the splash-feedback. To your imperfect, biological sensors and reasoning, that is all that matters.

The iPad is proving that people are willing to buy a limited device that doesn't run Windows and has set functionality. While on paper, I would personally prefer something like Android with an app store and additional functionality, I think there is a niche for a dedicated device.

How many of us have friends and family members who basically live out of their browser, and don't really use any other apps? How many of these friends and family members complain about updates, security, anti-virus, spyware, etc?

The niche market for this dedicated device might just be the majority of individual users.

Who the fuck said multiplayer only? Mass Effect 2 did this for single player. Charge $20 if you want the full single player campaign. (Pirates get it all free). They even put a sleazy used-game salesman on the Citadel who laughs about how the developers don't get a cent of his sales. But those files weren't on the disk, they were an additional 1GB (!) you had to download separately. They could have been on the disk, since they were available at launch. But they weren't. There were some single-player "DLC" packs that came free, recently, that were revealed to be on the disk already, when somebody noticed that this huge "DLC" pack was only a couple of KB. I don't remember the game, though.

> Google should instead build upon its already successful Android platform
> and provide a system that offers local applications.

Google doesn't want anyone to run local applications.

I'm still holding out for 1-way glass/mirrors that actually WORK AS EXPECTED.

An ex-gf's father, who is an architect, told me about this super-modern house in the town where he studied that was clad with one-way mirrors. However, after dark, the inside lights would turn them quite see-through. Favourite hang-out for students was by the bedroom wall, no x-ray glasses needed.

I'd like to see these tests run around 6pm, not at 3am, which is the typical time of day when a genius such as this would be performing such diabolical experiments.

The flaw with your argument is that there is a much smaller pool of road construction workers to draw from than from the general population, which all of your other statistics represent. I don't know how many road construction workers there are, but I can guarantee it's significantly smaller than 300 million. If we make the assumption that there are 1 million road construction workers, which seems overly generous, the likelyhood of being struck by a car and dying while doing road construction work is roughly equivalent to the likelyhood of being murdered.

A quick look at the bureau of labor statistics here suggests that in 2008, in the US, there were approximately 83,000 road, bridge, and highway construction workers. Extrapolated to a risk for the general US population, you would expect to lose about 220,000 people to being struck by a car in a workzone, about 5.5 times as likely as dying in a car accident in general, and an order of magnitude more likely than being murdered.

The speed has gone way up, due to improvements in technology, but I'm not so sure about the quality.

"Now factor in that it's almost exclusively among people who have contracts with carriers that don't offer iPhones."

Or to put it another way, in the US only AT&T offers iPhones. How did an iPhone limitation become a feature?

Well, I would believe Nintendo from their platinum clad for..... ohhhhhhhhh, rhetorical. right.

So was it above or below the curve?

Um, that's definately a false comment. Intel controlled (and still does) effectively control USB, but Apple was probably the biggest manufacturer to "push" USB when they released the iMac - long BEFORE they had switched from PowerPC to Intel processors.