So, you have this boxy thing mounted in the middle of the park bench. The promo photo has two attractive people awkwardly trying to look chic sitting next to something about he size of an old-school VCR bolted to the middle of the bench. Of course, you'd naturally stick your 32 oz triple malt latte on it, and any 9 year old with angry daddy issues will beat it with the nearest rock. Meanwhile, it provides no shade at all.

Great idea, utter failure in implementation. Instead:

1) Put the solar panel (even if small) on a pole OUT OF THE WAY so it lets you sit on the !@# seat, and provides at least a modicum of shade. Better yet, made the overhead cover the length of the bench so the shade is usable and you get some protection from light rain.

2) Put the USB charge port under the seat. This provides automatic protection from accidental strikes and also doesn't provide an automatic target for 9 year olds with angry daddy issues.

As it sits now, it's practically a show case example of some bad engineering product a la Dilbert.

One thing I know about the Googlites is that when they make a public statement like this, it's usually pretty conservative. Self-driving cars seemed like a pipe dream, but they're just about here, and it's for real.

In fact, Google has been working for years to use their information for predicting disease breakouts in a more general sense. If he says 100,000 lives, they've probably already done the math to support that statement.

It is true that landfills are often usable afterwards for parks and even houses!

It is also true that landfill locations have to be carefully surveyed for issues such as water runoff and geological stability in order to ensure that land fills don't pollute groundwater or leak toxic chemicals, etc. Nobody wants to live next to a landfill for the 10-40 years that they are open. They aren't pretty. They smell bad, and attract vermin. As we learn more about the real effects of land fills, we often find that even years after being closed, they are causing ongoing environmental damage that is very expensive. Many toxic "super fund" environmental disasters are previous dump sites.

And, if it's actually profitable recycle instead of dumping, are you really arguing that we should dump anyway?

Makes perfect sense why the passwords would suck. These are the same doofus types that put IPMI on the public Internet.

there's no way to tell if this is significant, or if it's a problem the average person is likely to run into.

I spent approximately 5-10 seconds typing phone theft statistics into Google and it led me to the Office of National Statistics, which says that 4% of 14-24 year-olds were victims of phone theft in the 2011/12 year.

It seems pretty obvious that this is being pursued because it gives the semblance of government helping consumers while at the same time giving government one more tool they can use to control the population.

It seems pretty obvious that people carrying small, expensive gadgets around with them are a prime target for thieves, that this is a legitimate, pervasive problem, and that this solution is effective in combating this crime.

Stop making excuses for a shitty UX. Android development is an utter pain in the arse in a lot of ways and as long as people like you make excuses instead of complaining about it, it's going to continue to be an utter pain the arse for years to come.

Consistent experiences across mobile platforms is not useful. You want consistency across the applications on the platform that the user actually uses. Normal iPhone users aren't going to care if Android users get a different UI to them, and normal Android users aren't going to care if iPhone users get a different UI to them. But both groups of users do care if the application they are using works differently to the other applications they use on their phone.

IMHO:

1) Backups that don't get done automatically often don't get done regularly, so they should be automatically performed via scripts.

2) Offline isn't as important as offsite. Buildings catch fire, get flooded, disappear into sink holes, get hit by falling jet airplanes.

3) Security matters. Paranoia should be the order of the day.

I'm a fan of foldable bikes. Think: Dahon and/or Bike Friday. They solve one of the biggest problems with bikes in conjunction with an automotive culture: getting "stuck" with a bike that you rode to work but won't be driving home with.

So, I've spent a lot of time on a 16" wheel on a Dahon Stowaway with performance tires, and a finely tuned internal 3-speed hub that made it into a surprisingly fast speed demon. I loved it - it was fast, casual, and convenient. Sadly, it was stolen.

The small, 16" wheels are surprisingly effective on commuter bike! No, you don't go off road on 16" wheels - but ask yourself: do you really do that much anyway?

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

BTW: I'm a Comcast Internet-only customer. I ditched our AT&T landline years ago and replaced it with a MagicJack for $20/year/unlimited.

I get about 20 Mbit for $65/month. I'd pay $100 for Gb fiber in a flat second.

The point of the web is not so that resources are dynamically loaded from servers every time you access them. The point of the web is that you have a decentralised set of resources that are linked together.

Article I, Section 4, Clause 1. Don't like the way primaries are handled? Go talk to your state legislators. Odds are the incumbents like it or they would have changed it already.

And it's not like the majorities in the Virginia General Assembly are hostile to Republicans.

Why would they want to? Even after the purge of the so-called "Blue Dogs" in recent years, Democrats haven't drunken the Kool-Aid in anywhere near the same way that the Tea Party folks have.

Most of the die-hard "radicals" of the left find Obama to be milquetoast at best and are more impassioned by the likes of Al Franken and Elizabeth Warren. But they still voted for Obama in '12 because the Tea Party was the alternative.

It's gotten to the point that the only real definition of a Democrat is "not a Teabagger." So why go after "Washington insiders" for its own sake when said insiders are doing things like keeping the Civil Rights Act on the books and not defaulting on federal debts?