Linux x86 64
Linux PowerPC
Linux i386

And they still can't claim to support Linux as the superset, since they keep the source closed and don't have the resources to port it to other platforms.

When will they learn that Firefox is kicking their ass just by virtue of being open source? Firefox is probably inferior in many ways, but at least they don't get THE most obvious marketing move wrong.

it's REALLY difficult to prevent snarls during retraction

Couldn't they just use a winch with the cable fed through a pair of rollers with brakes on them to keep the cable from piling up in the winch?

Or reel it in from both ends while its still spinning (to keep some small amount of tension on it) and apply counter-spin thrust to keep the RPMs constant as radius decreases?

Granted none of this seems trivial, but not does it seem that difficult.

Or gyros to eat up the momentum?

Try telling that to The Tetris Company, which claims that it owns trade dress on "Geometric playing pieces formed by four equally-sized, delineated blocks" plus eight items that appear in Nintendo's Dr. Mario.

Opera still doesn't support border-radius or box-shadow, probably the two most important properties that make web designers life's easier. Safari (or really Webkit) seems to be doing all the innovating lately when it comes to CSS3 features with Firefox and Opera battling it out for 2nd place. Either way, as a developer I still prefer to use Firefox with all its useful developer tools and addons.

I have run into at least three situations where capturing analog video isn't a joke:

• Recording the video from a video game for a review.
• Capturing part of a VHS movie for a review.
• Migrating old VHS-C or Video8/Hi8 home movies.

Should people in situations like these just run the camcorder's or game console's composite output into a stand-alone DVD recorder?

Then again.... maybe this is just QA.

Put in your malbug, send the laptops out in a high profile way... see what happens. Do they investigate? Do they even find what you did? That, in and of itself, could be valuable information, and possibly worth 5 laptops.

Though I do enjoy the double standard. Someone breaks into your systems, with evidence. Think the FBI is going to care unless they can be shown to have done massive damage or stolen real money?

Here someone does something that is, on its face, perfectly legal and straight up, but the suspicion of potential wrongdoing and the FBI are all over it. I am pretty sure that if someone sent me a free laptop and I called the FBI, they would just laugh at me.

-Steve

So what if the laptops where HP's with onboard maybe even modified 3G cards. How are you going to prevent a KVM calling home?

With this type of Balloting the minor parties are almost always puppets of the major parties as they pass their preferences to them for favors or in some cases eventually joining the major party

Replace and save the hard drive for legal analysis, with a good chain of ownership in case of lawsuits.

I'd also be concerned about electromechanical key loggers. Governors handle some very sensitive data, and should not have their keystrokes logged. But scrubbing the drives with a good Linux live CD makes them safe enough for casual use.

You wipe the OS and install a new one. You clean it up from the default bloatware and hook it to the network. You analyze the connection and if there is no communication the devices are safe.

For what do you need multitasking on a phone? How would multitasking be different from how iPhone does things (you switch between apps)? Only use I could think of it is audio-streaming or something like that. Multitasking might make sense on normal computers, where you can have several app-windows open, and you could move stuff between them. But that is not possible on a phone. Phones display one app at a time.

Hell, you don't really multitask on a computer either. Or do you edit spreadsheet and presentations at the same time? No you do not. You do your tasks one at a time, switching between different apps. And you can do that just fine on the iPhone as well.

That might be nifty, but hardly a major shortcoming.

I remember a recent review of a phone that had a "full flash-support". Flash was so slow on the phone that it was useless. Why waste resources on supporting features that would be useless in actual usage? Just so you would have a useless paper-spec?

Trust me, just about nobody does baseball at this point. :) Even if you watch ESPN highlights of baseball, which is the only way to tolerably watch baseball, you see just how empty the majority of the teams stadiums are. Most of them seldom even have a few thousand people in them.

I'm sorry, but i still don't think school is about learning how the technical details of a computer works. In higher education, yes, certainly. But school is about teaching the very basics, and most schools i've known aren't exactly swimming in cash - hiring enough personnel that can maintain a completely heterogenous network is going to be quite expensive.

Standardizing the environment in a school on a single platform will make deployment, hardware procurement and maintenance cheaper and simpler, this way the school will need less budget and less personnel.

And the basics of using the Internet, safe browsing habits can be done on Linux, Mac or Windows. Usually, the school's administration is already using Windows, making it the logical choice in order to streamline procurement and deployment.

You have higher cognitive ability, you realize how the world runs, you get depressed. Not the other way 'round.

Maybe that's part of the reason for the push to medicate - dumb, happy people tend not to revolt. Especially if they have food on the table and blather on the telescreen. (Slashdot works well too.)

Obviously, it was the REAL Joker. He didn't want his reputation damaged by association with BHO.