As a user of several devices, I can tell you that the N900 was the only device that actually felt like a pocket computer.

For us computer geeks, the concept of N900 was the ideal device: quite open, based on Linux, accessible from the command line, with a nice keyboard you could use to program for, etc.

There are millions like me who are waiting for the successor of N900. It is a huge lost opportunity for Nokia. Bringing out tablets with Android is cool, but what they did with N900 was way cooler...

A statistic that floated around earlier in the year when Argentina was grumbling about the Falklands again: one of the battleships that the British were sending to the area could fire, in one minute, more munitions than were fired in the entire 1982 conflict. I'd imagine that the differences between 1945 and now are even more pronounced.

One constant trend has been that soldiers are less expendable. In the first world war, sending men to walk slowly towards machine guns and throw a grenade if they survived to get close enough was their patriotic duty. By Vietnam, having large numbers of soldiers come back in body bags was politically unacceptable.

In the 1940s, Japan was flying aircraft loaded with bombs into American warships. A few years later, people realised that you could design aircraft for this purpose and make them a lot lighter and able to accelerate more if you removed the human pilot. They called them anti-ship missiles.

The fighter screen that fleets needed to protect themselves from aircraft in the '40s is now replaced by anti-aircraft and interceptor missiles (and dumb projectiles). In the next generation of ships a lot of this will be replaced by lasers, which reduces some of the resupply need (you can't run out of laser ammunition on a nuclear carrier unless your ship is so badly damaged that it's not a good idea to be anywhere near it).

Gradually, a lot of the roles for aircraft are being replaced by drones, which means that you need smaller carriers. They don't need to house as many pilots, they don't need as many support staff.

Another part of this trend is to replace reusable vehicles with single-use munitions. Fighters are more expensive than missiles, so you spend a lot on maintaining them. Drones are a lot cheaper, so you can afford to fly them for a couple of missions and then scrap them (explosively, near someone you don't like).

Comparing numbers, as the grandparent did, is completely meaningless. You may as well compare the size of the air force to the number of soldiers Napoleon had.

Pretty much identical to what happened to 'Polaroid'. Every corpse has its maggots, I suppose.

There are basically only three decoders that cover most of the market: Microsoft's DirectShow filter, libavcodec / libavformat, and QuickTime. Hardware decode doesn't help much, because you still have the same software path as everyone else doing the de-encapsulation and file parsing, which is where the exploitable bugs often show up. If you have vulnerabilities in each of these then it's not generally hard to hide them all in the same file, as the codecs aim to be resilient to corrupted data so will usually just drop a frame or two for the exploits aimed at the other implementations.

Oh, and libavcodec / libavformat are used in Android (and in a lot of iOS apps, as AVFoundation doesn't always expose useful APIs), as well as in desktop browsers, so they're a pretty good target to aim for.

How does that prevent Facebook from building a profile of you? The only way to avoid that is block all Facebook like buttons, never visit the Facebook site, and make sure that your account has no friends.

People who think a fake name on Facebook protects them from any of the privacy invasion really haven't been paying attention to the last decade of data mining. The reason Facebook no longer cares if you register with a fake name is that they've been able, with very high accuracy, to get your real name and address without your providing it for a few years.

I don't know what barges think of 'blue water navy' work; but that's the sort of thing I had in mind: skip classy, skip seriously intimidating looking, stick a bunch of standardized modules together into a big floating airfield, with the aim of providing a lot of flight deck and very, very, deep stores of fuel and munitions for the 'yeah, we want another strike going out every half hour or so until further notice' style of air support/pounding that seems to crop up.

We've probably outsourced worse( at least assuming that any more modernized systems, ECM, radar, etc. are stripped from the hulk first); but yeah, I'm guessing that the breakers offering the best rates don't exactly have security clearances, in addition to their atrocious environmental record, nonexistent occupational safety, and so on.

I don't actually know, and so would be interested to, is there anything considered 'sensitive' about something as old as a (presumably modernized here and there) Forrestal class? I assume that, for economic as well as security reasons, you'd rip out all the modern electronics, CIWS, radar, air-traffic-control systems, etc.; but is the remainder of the ship itself still considered a bit touchy, or old news?

On the plus side, space construction probably doesn't demand a whole lot of really heroic fastener work(but the gloves make 'finger tight' pretty clumsy if you are outside). In absence of gravity, all sorts of comparatively feeble joints become acceptable, so long as you don't damage things trying to put them together("Yeah, I um, stripped the mounting hole for the habitat module...") and the assembly keeps things from floating away.

If anything, I'd imagine that space tools are more likely to emphasize being able to set maximum torque, to keep people from screwing up delicate, lightweight, functionally irreplaceable, parts, rather than emphasizing the sort of power you want when fighting with a rusted assembly or something binding under stress.

I'd be the first to make snide comments about some of the 3d printing hype (some of it, the sort that fails to answer "and we wouldn't do this with machine tools why exactly?", there are a number of genuinely impressive applications, albeit mostly involve additional finishing steps or the really expensive printers); but 'earth orbit' is one of those places where I can imagine being willing to wait for printing rather than ordering from harbor freight and waiting for shipping.

A problem better solved by standardizing fasteners, of course; but if somebody has already opened that can of worms for you, and you need an oddball tool in a space and shipping constrained environment, I can think of worse fates than using a plastic one.

Most currently active reactors were designed, built and certified in the sixties and seventies. All systems in those plants are 60's or 70's electronics. Most won't even have something as modern as a pdp-8 to control stuff. Go watch the China Syndrome if you need a reminder.

Interfacing 40 year old control electronics to modern computers is more than a 'airgap'. It's more like your kid trying to explain GTA4 to a stone age caveman without a computer present.

I suspect that a ~60 year old ship is probably a horrible mess in a number of respects, and might well not be the best starting point for the job; but given what we actually send aircraft carriers out to do at present(and to a substantial degree, have since WWII), it would be interesting to know if there's any room for a variant carrier design that emphasizes sheer capacity per unit cost, for all our aerial bombardment of stuff that can't really do much about it needs.

I understand the navy's enthusiasm for aircraft carriers that might not immediately become the involuntary flagships of the submarine navy upon contact with actual opposition; but they sure are expensive for situations where we are just beating on people with minimal retaliatory capabilities.

Isn't 'outage includes other gaming-related servers' ambiguous at best(an attacker hitting XBL and PSN wouldn't need to be a rocket surgeon to add a few other high profile gaming related services to the list, unlike an attacker hitting a single service using some tailored vulnerability) and actively evidence in favor of 'not really DDoS, just all the legitimate paying customers having a lot of new consoles and games and extra free time right now' at worst?

If the problem is under-provisioning, the expected symptoms would be broad-based DDoS-like outages among all popular gaming related infrastructure. If the problem is DDoS attacks, the expected symptoms would be comparatively dramatic havoc on targeted systems, no disruption elsewhere, with the number of targeted systems limited by the attacker's resources(and by how close to failure those target systems were running under holiday load).

That's crazy talk. We'll probably never master the time-machine technology required to go back a couple of decades and obtain samples of such systems for study!

There's probably a substantial amount of decent scrap metal to be had; but a ship of that age(and presumably designed with a particular eye to avoiding things like 'catching fire just because our job is to be covered in jet fuel and munitions near a war zone') is probably one hell of a party in terms of asbestos, lead, PCBs, and who knows what else.

There might be some additional cost because, unlike a lower-profile commercial contract, it will be at least somewhat harder to just beach it on some especially unscenic chunk of Chittagong or Alang and then shrug in innocent ignorance as impoverished locals with hand tools attempt to break the ship before it breaks them. There is a reason why much of the industry is located in places with effectively nonexistent environmental controls and expendable workforces; but it would certainly be embarrassing, and might be illegal for one reason or another, for a particularly iconic ex-military vessel to make an appearance in such a place(based on what happened when the French tried it with the Clemenceau a few years back I would certainly be nervous about trying it).