You must be too young to remember J#.

What's the problem?

You see, there was once a company called Apple, and they made these iPhone like things, except they couldn't make phone calls and couldn't text, they just played music (and the early ones couldn't even play Breakout!).

I agree - the stream was terrible. I eventually gave up and just followed Engadget's live blog.

However I'm pretty sure the "audio tracks on top of one another" issue was a low-tech issue where a Japanese translator was standing too close to the a microphone - her voice was almost as loud as Phil Shiller's. I'd be curious to hear from someone actually at the event if that was the case.

The Kindle Fire was a well-marketed, cheap tablet launched at a time most people were just starting to hear how fun and useful tablets could be. Many people wanted a tablet, but were unwilling to drop $500 on an iPad - those folks bought a Kindle Fire. (Yeah there were other cheap tablets, but frankly the average Joe didn't ever hear about them)

The Fire Phone comes at a time when iOS and Android phones are already entrenched. The majority of people who want a smartphone already own one. Worse, there's not an obvious price gap between the Fire and it's erstwhile competition. Free Prime shipping isn't going to sell the phone, since the types of people who know about Prime are the type of people that already bought into a phone platform years ago.

So when do we get the pneumatic people movers, a la Futurama?

I'm also wondering if the guys who came up with this got the idea from the show.

None of the above

Facebook slurps up all your personal information and sells it to advertisers. It also slurps up all your friends' and family members' information - even if they aren't on Facebook themselves - keeps it in so-called "shadow profiles", and sells that to advertisers as well. Facebook also routinely changes its privacy controls without notice, and the new versions of the controls default to the most permissive settings - so you have to continually monitor them to "minimize" (in quotes because it's still a lot) how much of your personally identifiable information leaks out to the world at large. And they occasionally make policy changes that force you to share stuff that you'd previously tried to keep confined to within a small group.

And what you're worried about is they might use more of your data plan?

The article implies this incident was already known to some people for quite some time, but had been kept from higher ups in the government. It recently came out because a newspaper did some digging (the timing of which isn't too surprising).

Maybe the victim is a cat.

Quite frankly - if someone is getting shot every year, I would have no problem telling him he's probably not making the best choices.

And yet, somehow, the city still stands...

Make damn sure your clients are aware of exactly what you're doing. They probably don't care about the specifics (e.g. openvpn, reverse ssh); but they need to know you can remotely access the boxes.

It's probably a good idea to have some sort of document to give them that does spell out all the specifics - something they need to acknowledge/sign, with both of you keeping copies.

It'd be faster for the NSA too - it's a win-win!

Everybody needs a hobby...