No revenue stream now; no revenue stream until 2012.

This seems to be pretty much parallel to most of the business plans of dot-coms. "We have cool new technology! What, we also need sales?"

It really depends on how well they can market the roadsters... which they have not shown to be one of their strong suits yet. Time will tell. Opening day will not.

It's entirely possible that the reason they're complaining is that they want a smaller government with less things they're responsible for, so they'll have fewer things they're capable of screwing up, and want the things that government does taken over by private industry. Having a larger government does not necessarily mean having a more prepared government - it generally means having more layers of bureaucracy and more people who's jobs are not directly tied to their performance.

While I don't promote handing over the control of our jails over to private industry, you could certainly hand over the server management to people who actually know what they're doing and have a vested interest in making sure that there's a stable, solid datacenter behind the servers. You could get rid of some government sysadmins, and it'd be cheaper than buying a brand new datacenter as well.

Because it sounds like 'pornographic'. That makes every single marketing degree person perk up their ears. And everybody knows management loves the info-porn.

I graduated about ten years ago from my college with a BA in Computer Science the knowledge to design, from transistors, a minimal-instruction processor, program it in assembly, and design a high-level language for it, in that assembly. I also never learned to code from a library, work with a modern language, or function in a team.

To date, I have used my knowledge from my degree precisely twice - once to take an overly-long Excel IF(IF(IF... statement and reduce it via a binary tree because Excel limited you to 7 nested IF statements, and the other time ... I forget exactly what, but it was about as earth-shatteringly important. My current job consists largely of doing (or generating) paperwork to prove to our clients that my company is complying with its contractual obligations, with the occasional system administration bit thrown in. Usually to generate more paperwork.

The reason CS students aren't learning what companies need is because the schools aren't teaching it. The most valuable thing you take away from the university is proof that you'll put up with four years of crap for an award you can hang on your wall.

A friend of mine has one that I got a chance to try out. It's an interesting little device - I'm not going to get one, but then, it's not meant for me.

The iPad does notably excel in one simple thing that I have been missing for the past few years. It has no interface lag. My phone? When I'm switching screens, it lags for a couple seconds. My two year old laptop I got fed up with and threw out because the power jack kept breaking? Opening a directory took a noticable amount of time. Even my streamlined, power-user, performance gaming desktop has moments where its trying to access things and it chugs along before giving me any feedback.

The iPad's interface is responsive. It does what you want it to, when you want it to. When you drag an icon around, it responds immediately. When you poke at a link, it responds instantly with feedback - the webpage might take a moment to load, but it lets you know it's heard you immediately. And everything else in the environment remains responsive. You access the dropdowns, they come right down. You hit the 'menu' button, and you don't get 'the application is waiting to close' hourglass or anything like that, you get MENU.

I can see how that would appeal to many consumers in a world of stuttering, jerky computers.

This was actually predicted some time ago, in a Cyberpunk 2020 supplement. I forget which one exactly, I think it was 'Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads!'

"Back in the late twentieth century, the average short term loan's length was 30 days. In 2060, the average term is 30 seconds. What can you do in 30 seconds? If you hop on a fast bike, you might make it part of the way down the street. But I can take that thirty-second loan and make enough money to buy a South Sea island, complete with mansion and Playboy bunnies to serve my every whim through a little miracle called currency arbitrage."

Quote is approximate.

Second Life. Except both parties have to click on the little ball labelled 'RAPE POSE', so...

Yeah. My eyes bugged out when I saw that, too.

This is why Statistics should be taught to anyone attempting to do scientific research. If you don't understand why this is happening and how to prevent it, please turn in your PhD now.

The key message here is that simply testing your web site with a vulnerability scanner doesn't make it secure. Well, duh.

PCI is still important because before the guidelines, most people weren't scanning their web sites at all. Even when they knew how - they couldn't convince management it was worth the trouble, time, dollars, and so on. And without scans, the number of discovered web vulnerabilities approaches 0%.

PCI isn't just about scanning your website, either. There's hundreds of things you have to do to secure everything from the physical layer up to the application layer. And having PCI be required to process credit cards makes everything much more secure. I'm talking about small businesses so cheap they don't want to put LOCKS on the doors between the outside world and the servers holding your plain-text, unencrypted credit card numbers, and who don't have the expertise to set up a web camera on their own building.

You might not like PCI, it might be inconvenient, but it's necessary to protect the general public.

Disclaimer: I am an information security professional.

Didn't Car and Driver do a very similar test and report that Ford Explorers categorically don't roll over when there's a tire failure unless the driver panics and starts steering like a madman? http://www.caranddriver.com/features/01q1/why_are_ford_explorers_crashing_-column

That said - there's a reason I drive a manual. Even if my (non-recalled) Yaris suffers some kind of acceleration problem, I can disable it by... pushing the clutch, taking it out of gear, turning off the engine. I have many failure-safe modes.

Still getting 40 MPG, too.

No, it's more like the CEPA investigating WHO. Which I agree, is a horrible acronym. They should change their name to the World Health Accountability Trust to look into the fearmongering accusations regarding the pandemic.

Yes! WHAT should investigate WHO!

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For more fun facts around the swine flu epidemic, read The H1N1 Survival Guide.