How could a software update fix a hardware problem with the antenna? Isn't basic physics involved?

I would genuinely like to know. Plenty of people here (who aren't me unfortunately) know how antennas work, anything that could be done without changing the hardware involved?

1) First, you have to protect your users. I'd say there are three things to worry about here:
  - SQL Injection. "Little Bobby Tables". This one is easy - use bind variables for all sql, and don't -ever- have dynamically interpreted sql with user inputs.
  - Cross Site Scripting ("XSS"). This one is harder. If you ever display something to one user that could have been entered by another user, user b can own user a with some html. It's very hard to check for bad html because it can be disguised in various ways. A whitelist filter of allowed html is safer than a blacklist, but you still have to manage to consistenly scrub input.
  - The fact that passwords are essentially inadequate, but it's hard and/or expensive to come up with anything better. So force decent passwords, remind your users not to give them to their friends, and anticipate there will be some level of "my angry ex boyfriend deleted all my stuff" support requests so history logs of important actions and the ability to roll stuff back will be useful.
  - There *are* more types of things that can be done ("clickjacking", "sidejacking", dns poisoning) but I think the above cover most problems you really need to plan on.

2) Next, you have to protect your game.
  - Malicious users. It's particularly easy to be a malicious user with HTML - the web app provides a nice form variable "itemid=12", I can change it to "itemid=1", poof I have your super wizard staff. You can't trust your users, ever, so write your app so that impossible things aren't permitted.
  - Bots - if there is any instance where user activity is rewarded, somebody will find a way to automate it. It's a problem from a purely technical server load perspective, and it's also a problem from an upsetting good users viewpoint. Good luck here.

What worked for me was my dad gave me a copy of Zork and a copy of Quick Basic.
My thought process went:
"This is fun, and doesn't seem so hard I can't even imagine where to start."

If text adventures hold insufficient appeal, some more modern versions of surmountable tasks are:
WoW mods
Neverwinter Nights module
Get the kid hooked on Eve and then make him learn VB to build profit & loss spreadsheets in Excel

Nope. Jquery isn't magic, it still follows the same rules under the hood, it is still using xmlhttprequest. The exception to the same origin policy for javascript code is you can load .js files from wherever, so the way around it is jsonp. See for example http://ecmanaut.blogspot.com/2006/01/jsonp-why-how.html

Well, in the anecdote game, my car was stolen. When it was recovered beat up and broken and abandoned out of gas on the side of the road, the cops didn't even bother to check for prints. They advised me to feel lucky I got it back and then went back about their business.
I get the general impression that your positive experience is the exception, not the rule.

This article is not 'reporting' and should not be presented as 'news', not even news for nerds, stuff that matters.

There are some very interesting details, things that might perhaps be facts, but after presenting a string of them they are always followed with utterly unsubstantiated wild ass guesses that claim to be absolute facts and firmly grounded in expert opinion etc etc. While the Wild Ass Guesses may actually be true, they aren't facts, and presenting them as facts makes it impossible to believe any of the other information presented. At the end of the article all of this much vaunted expertise that the guesses are based on turns out to be this guy is some random programmer with a pond in his back yard.

This topic definitely needs some real reporting, but this sort hysterical speculation (includes quoting Revelations and speculating on this being an "Earth Extinction" event under the general premise of "they said this couldn't happen but it did so this other thing that also can't happen is obviously worth speculating about now") is downright irresponsible. Even if the premise that the news is massively underreporting the size of the spill is true, this is not the way to correct it.

What's the big deal with scribd lately? Weren't they a worthless site that nobody ever used because it was such a pain to try to read anything there? Or am I completely missing something?

Easy. Section 13 - it says if people connect to your program, you have to let the clients connecting to your program get a copy of your source code.
This is significantly more copyleft than a normal gnu license, where you only need to make available a copy of your source code to anybody you give your program to, and thus not to the final end users in the case of web services. It addresses a real concern that software as a service ends up relying on source code you don't have access to or control over, but it does let any of your users read your code so grandparent is very correct about code audits.
That being said, if he's worried about people reading code, he should be scared of any open source license. Grandparent appears to have a philosophical objection to the 'open' part of open source a.

Unfortunately, a few months ago Playon's Hulu support became horrible.
Previously they had been directly loading video files, which worked great. Then they changed it to basically run an IE browser off-screen, and now you can't pause to buffer, it stutters and breaks a bunch more, and is somewhere between horribly disappointing and unusable. So good idea, but really flawed execution.
Naturally it was working fine during my free trial period and was only botched shortly after. I feel swindled.

* My laptop only does 2.4ghz n, and I thought that was par for the course? Are laptops with 5ghz N really that common?
* There is clearly a quality difference among access points, but how do you tell in advance which equipment will work and which won't?

Of course.

I think the best argument advantage is the ereader function, especially with most commercial ereaders still being fairly expensive. The entry level iPad is almost at a competitive price vs. buying a Kindle DX even at inflated 1st gen Apple product prices, and it inarguably does far more than a Kindle does. The Kindle absolutely does not do the majority of what this does; I think the netbook/media player aspects are less compelling, but certainly bolster the case.

I wish there was a +6 insightful for this.