• The first, is entirely possible, and is currently doable in a primative but semi-portable state with EEG.
• The second is a really bad idea; have you not seen/read the forbidden planet. Basicly, mind controlled technology is a monumentally bad idea.
• The third, perhaps in the sense of truth-saying. What the guys in the article will be reading is a limited set of words, and they can only do it because they have enough samples of each word to train their program in

But, yeah, the 21st century will be cool

Today it is games and toys. Tomorrow, it will be tools and necessities. We fight this battle over baubles in the hopes that we will not have to fight over the things that really matter.

Well, yes, there is always something; such as the risk of having your door broken down and said little box being carted off.

Did you have some specific examples in mind?

The only truly private cloud is the one you own, manage and host yourself. For most users this is of course not feasible; they lack the knowledge, time and inclination to set one up. For us tech types however it's getting to the feasible stage.

We have all seen the news about the Raspberry Pi, a dirt cheap mini computer that can run on a handful of AA batterys. Take a linux distro of your choice which runs on the Raspberry Pi, add some lovely open source software like Zarafa, sprinkle lightly with a dynamic DNS and bake for however long you want in a cool Raspberry Pi. Serves an entire household (or more).

For that extra security flavour you can garnish with an OpenVPN connection, and deny all other incomming traffic.

Et voila! Mobile, web accessable email, contacts and calendar (plus whatever else you want to set up on there) with the data being on your machine and in your control.

It depends on how you look at it. The act of sending a packet of data through their network doesn't cost them anything, or at least not noticably. The big cost is in installing and maintaining the equipment.

So what they are doing is converting their capital cost (the cost of equipment) into a marginal cost for the customer ($ per GB)

The other trick they are doing is using the pricing to influence customers to limit their usage. While there is no real cost of sending data which they do have capacity for, there is another big outlay for equipment if they have to increase their networks capacity to allow for more traffic.

So in summary, Netflix came to the mobile, AT&T saw their traffic jump up, needed more bandwidth and so chose to make people use less (caps & cost) rather than, or in addition to increasing capacity.

It probably boils down to ease and efficiency of manufacture. Certainly for the core of the cpu I would imagine it's because squares tesselate nicely on the silicon wafer.

This isn't so much an amendment, as a plan to think about amending it. From the article:

"...plans to offer an amendment that would require a study of the impact of the ISP provisions in the bill before they are implemented. If the study found negative impacts, it's likely the ISP provision would be killed."

The above is pretty much all of the article which is not political filibustering, back patting or stating things which won't change (the payment freezing, and search engine stuff).

TL;DR version: they're thinking about maybe possibly backing down on one point.

Security is only as strong as it's weakest password recovery method.

This whole idea completely forgets that the whole purpose of your password might be to stop you little-brother/offspring/tech-illiterate-housemate (ie: anyone who lives with you) from screwing up your device.

Perhaps I'm not thinking hard enough, but this seems to me to be an development from one of the $InternetSocialMediaOverlords that doesn't seem creepy.

I mean, this is a nice feature that will save time and be useful; but it doesn't go revealing yet more personal information, or infact anything that you couldn't do yourself by browsing streetview a bit.

So yeah, a new shiny that doesn't yet make things worse or closer to 1984.

I guess it's quite telling of my geekiness that my first thought on this isn't anything to do with stereotypes or the tragedy of young women being given unrealistic aspirations, but rather how the technology could be improved upon and put to better use.

I mean, they have the tech to computer generate a human form over the top of a mannequin wearing clothes right? So why not parameterize it so that people can customize the look to be them, like an avatar in $your-favourite-mmorpg-here?

Sure it'd take some work to adapt the tech and build some generative models, but suddenly you go from evil marketing tool to handy way to pick out a wardrobe and see what looks good on you.