You're missing the point. This was a tech demonstration, not an end-user finished product, you can see that in the end credits (VTFV replaces RTFA, I guess). Yes, the stitching is hackish, but that doesn't matter. The proof of concept is brilliant, and I could easily see this kind of thing taking off. Even without stitching, it gives you the ability to take pictures of the surrounding area from a reasonable height, anywhere. I could see this being really useful at concerts and events where you want a picture over the heads of the crowd. You could just stitch together the forward-facing three views to get a nice, standard-looking panorama without having to orient the device to "face" in that direction.

It's not something Slashdot invented. Google gives 2,450,000 hits on the terms "TSA smurf".

But let me say one thing that I'm sure some people will be unhappy with: bias doesn't matter in reporting.

I don't watch Fox News because their reporting sucks, not because they're biased. I don't watch most left-leaning shows for the same reason. Back in the day, before he decided that shock was better publicity than reporting, I watched Rush Limbaugh's TV show (yeah, I'm that old) because he occasionally did some excellent investigative journalism. It would have to be fact-checked, and you had to ignore the invective, but at its core were stories I wasn't seeing elsewhere, and which, on further investigation, proved to be valid and useful (sometimes leading me to conclusions that Rush would not have been pleased with).

So, bias doesn't matter. Is this story informative? Is it sensationalized beyond the point of having any value? Yes and close, but not quite is my take. The fact of the matter is that there's no evidence either way. The woman in question could have gone to an ER and requested a rape kit. There would be some evidence of the invasion. If she didn't, then she might well be lying, but that's not for us to decide. The important issue isn't the woman vs. the man, it's the fact that the TSA is in a position that elicits such concerns (and the rest is for a court to decide).

And if the market forced battery life to be a priority, then we'd get the same battery life we had on slower devices, but the big drains are high-contrast, high-resolution screens and fast processors; both of which continue to be the driving market forces.

It would be pretty hard to do this. You would have to find a way to control the virtualization layer from within a guest OS. That's been the holy grail of defeating desktop virtualization security for a long time, and while there are occasional bugs discovered, I'm not aware of anything that's been exploitable enough and pervasive enough (e.g. unpatched versions) that there's been an active exploit in the wild.

I admit, I haven't followed the topic for a while, so fill me in if there are examples of such.

Can you cite a source? I'm pretty sure I've never seen that comparison performed in the wild.

Billing isn't the issue. Typically, you see the two-phone thing in sales, IT and highly regulated environments. For example, if you work for a drug company, you must not allow users to store any corporate data on a hand-held device unless the company has complete control over it. This isn't the company's call, it's the FDA's. Why? Because that data is subject to retention policies that are related to drug testing rules, and you have to be able to guarantee that you can produce the information again on demand.

So, imagine the poor user who just wants to be able to control their own phone. They don't want to go through 2 layers of authentication just to tell Pandora to switch to a different station, but if they disable that authentication, their work email and contacts will all delete themselves.

Instead, you have isolated environments with something like this article's topic, and you toggle between them for work and personal use. Nice and easy, and IT doesn't get to tell you how to manage your personal phone.

Exactly correct. Could someone please mod parent up?

I thought we mocked Microsoft for the crap it pumped out that didn't make any sense and wasn't creative in the least, like Bob. I never mocked most of the cool things that came out of Microsoft Research.

Nope, this is simply not true. First off, reports are mixed. There was a widely publicized report of someone who claimed he got accounts blocked be reporting them, but then no one I know of who has tried to repeat this has had any success.

Further, the whole ID thing is blown out of proportion. IDs are one of several inputs that they'll accept, including links to competing social networking services and blogs where the name you're using (which must have a "first" and "last name") must have been in use prior to the establishment of your Google profile. In other words, you can't use your Google profile to establish a new pseudonym, but as the many authors and performers that use the service can attest, existing pseudonyms are just fine. In fact, some Google execs have pointed out that they use pseudonyms themselves, and have no problem with others doing so.

It will make zero difference. The 2 or three small hurricanes that I witnessed when I lived at my grandfather's cottage on the ocean, people were out sailboarding in the height of them. Media attention wasn't going to happen there, and yet there they were.

I had a similar experience in Boston one year. I was on the 40th floor of One Boston Place, near city hall, and there was a pretty bad wind storm moving through. We get those from time to time... just a freak burst of 60 mph winds with little or no storm associated. It's rare, but it happens.

Anyway, the building was swaying and during the course of the day two things happened which I found amusing. First, we had one of those big green LED signs with news tickers scrolling over it. It was suspended from the ceiling by two cables and it was swinging back and forth dramatically. A co-worker had been looking at it somewhat queasily, and asked, "why is it moving so much?" In retrospect, she was looking for a comforting answer. I just thought about it for a second and gave her the most logical answer I could think of: "It's not." That took her a second to process and then she looked very unhappy.

The other thing that happened was kind of unnerving to me. I was sitting in my chair, working on some code, and I stood up to get something. Next thing I knew, I was on the floor. I tried to get up again, and bang, I was on the floor again. My inner ear had just given up, but I had no idea until I tried to stand. It was odd because I'd spent years around the ocean, and never got sea sick or even a touch nauseous, but in this building I was incapacitated for a short time... no other symptoms, just the complete lack of balance.

And keep in mind that (and I'm speaking as someone who grew up in a house that was literally 5 feet from the ocean in southeastern Mass) the impact of any hurricane or tropical whatnot on the Northeast is almost entirely determined by the state of the tide when it hits. If they're predicting it will make landfall during high tide, then that could be serious even if it were a tropical depression by the time it arrived.

Have you met any humans? There's plenty of need for redemption.

That's because it doesn't need to be updated. No one with half a brain thinks that a 2,000 year old book that's been translated into the ground has a whole lot of literal truth in it. On the other hand, it represents a philosophy and a mythology which are quite real, and which should not be cast aside because we sequenced the human genome.

I think it really started when scientific thought in the late 17th century and into the 18th started to challenge the Church. That lead to a series of entrenchments from the Church where they felt that they had to defend the religion from these new questions. No longer were people asking, "why does the Sun rise," but, "why didn't religion tell us that the Sun rose because the Earth is rotating?"

Frankly, I think it was a mistake. Religion should never be in the business of trying to tell us what is. Rather it should seek to answer, why. That's a job that science is poorly suited to, and which religion is quite adept at.