People have to wait for their vendor or carrier to release an update, or use an alternative ROM like Cyanogenmod. In the case of the latter, Cyanogenmod only started releasing official nightlies for a limited range of devices 2 days ago. Prior to that, it has been a case of scouring forums to obtain unofficial releases of alternative ROMs.

Even after the upgrade has been released, people actually need a chance to perform the update. For some people, that may be several months down the road -- e.g. when they know that they'll have a chance to perform the update and get used to the changes. It isn't a matter of being good enough. It is a matter of giving people an opportunity to perform the upgrade.

Sony is extending memberships to account for the downtime and offering a discount on top of that, for a type of "hacking" that they can only marginally protect themselves from. Yeah, it inconvenienced *some* PSN members by reducing their enjoyment of the service over the holidays. On the other hand, I suspect that many Sony employees had a much less pleasurable time of cleaning up the mess.

Quite frankly, I don't care about small single-purpose apps. The UI on phones and tablets aren't designed to help us find one app among dozens. In most cases, you bump into limitations as soon as you start using it. In many cases, you'll use it a handful of times then never use it again.

If you are looking for anything that is even moderately sophisticated, chances are that no one has made an app for it. There will already be an app in many software categories, but they provide basic functionality at best. Consider what passes for word processors and spreadsheets, or even web browsers and email clients these days.

If you are looking for anything that doesn't lock your data into an unsupported proprietary file format that is hidden in some unfathomable directory on your device, or forces you to use a network service to access your data -- well, good luck. While there are usually options for content consumption, content creation is hit-and-miss.

There are a number of reasons for this, but the biggest one is profitability. Very few people want to make a cheap app that takes a lot of time to develop. A lot of people want to translate the sale of cheap apps into more profitable online services. So what we tend to end up with are a bunch of apps that go after the low hanging fruit and sound revolutionary, when in reality they are little more than toys that you could easily accomplish with a single generic application.

There is a chance that the Whitehouse is using obsolete technologies because that's the way that things were always done. Yet there can be other reasons behind it.

Consider that floppy diskette. Assuming the OS is properly configured, a disk is a disk. Contrast that to a USB flash drive: is it behaving as a flash drive, or is the firmware causing it to behave as something else? Contrast that to a network connection: properly handled physical media has a clear chain of responsibility, while network connections (even internal ones) may be managed by many more people and have more access points. Yes, there are ways to deal with security in such situations. No, they are not foolproof. That's particularly true with high-stakes institutions like the Whitehouse.

Another consideration is the providence of the technology. It is bad enough when you have to go through a single vendor (e.g. Blackberry or Microsoft) or are dealing with contractors. Many modern technologies make things worse by being a service. Products become property of the government when purchased. Contractors can be replaced when contracts come up for renewal, or in the intervening period if terms are violated or appropriate clauses are added. Services are a different issue though, and that's exactly what a lot of modern "technologies" are. Does the Whitehouse want to create a situation where another party has control over their data. Even if they could guarantee the security and portability of the data, it could be difficult to find or create a replacement. Businesses take advantage of this difficulty all of the time, and literally milk the government because of it. In most cases it is because of the cost of complying with government regulations. In the case of services, it could simply be because there is no alternative.

I did go vinyl for a short time, when both record players and records were dirt cheap. That is the big benefit of being trailing edge. But when the hipsters entered the scene and drove prices up, there were no benefits.

Oddly enough, some restaurants force customers to share meals. That is to say, customers can only order separate dishes and serve themselves according to their own tastes. Even more traditional American establishments will offer at least a few dishes in this fashion.

As for those that forbid it, I honestly don't see what their problem is as long as people don't bring in outside food. It is quite antisocial to suggest that people should not be able to accompany their friends in a restaurant just because they are sharing a dish.

I understand why the airlines price flights this way, and it benefits some consumers by reducing the cost of some flights. Yet the easily exploited flaw is a flaw of the business practice, not the consumer. If some consumers exploit it, there is no good reason to hold them accountable. It was the business' decision after all to use this practice, not the consumer's. If too many consumers exploit the practice, then the business should change the practice.

Put in other terms, using the courts to enforce the practice places too much control of a product or service that the consumer paid for into the hands of the vendor. Consumer's wouldn't be very happy if business told them they couldn't resell a product at a profit just because they bought it when there was a good sale, or if they couldn't split a meal because they bought the larger dish instead of two smaller ones. Why should they be happy about being told that they must use all of the tickets for a flight?

Different ways of looking at it:

The space program has been, on average, 1.15% of the US budget. Giving it a proportional share of the debt means that it contributed 204 billion.

Even if you consider space exploration as entirely frivolous, it has only contributed 508 billion to the debt (before interest). That amounts to 2.85% of the debt.

Yes, the US needs to get its "house in order". Yes, NASA needs to produce better results in order to justify its existing budget. On the other hand, attacking the space program will do very little to address the debt problem. Actually, it will do very little to address the deficit. (Again assuming that space exploration is completely frivolous, it only accounted for 2.48% of the deficit in 2013.)

It's a symbolic gesture. I doubt that many people expect the president to learn programming while in office. They have many other affairs to take care of.

First of all, those older jets are upgraded while the F-35 is being delivered according to a contract. That's not government incompetence. That's contract law, and no respectable contractor is going to write an agreement where the specifications can change at the last minute. In all probability, the military has already accounted for this and has planned upgrades.

Second, very few people are saying that government should control healthcare. They are saying that the government should control health insurance. Other countries already do this and have had very positive outcomes.

I never said that they were a sport, and stuck the quotation marks around "sport" in the comment subject to imply they aren't. Video games do have certain elements of sports which may make them an interesting element as a demonstration sport.

I think it would be good as a demonstration sport for one of the games, if they select the game carefully to align with what the games are.

The thing is, the games are mostly about physical competition along with physical factors that have a strong psychological element such as endurance and reaction time. Video games are poor at the former but rely heavily upon the latter, which is why I think they would be excellent as a demonstration sport but not as an ongoing element of the games.

This study doesn't really address that since it is based upon a very narrow selection of devices (i.e. the iPad). Indeed, none of the studies that I have encountered have addressed that because they are based upon a narrow range of technologies. I have seen anecdotes suggesting that eink based devices are less disruptive to sleep cycles, but my opinion on that is: if it works for you, great, but don't attribute it to anything more than wishful thinking and selection bias.

A study like this doesn't apply to eink based readers because it doesn't isolate the cause. Is it the intensity or spectrum of the light? Is it our response to the type of device in question (e.g. iPads are more exciting than ereaders)? Is it the difference between the screen brightness and ambient light? For all we know it has something to do with polarization or how the screen is refreshed. While some of the variables that I mentioned are dubious, they are still unexamined variables so we cannot make a comparison across a broader range of devices than those studied. (Then there is the sample size ...)

Reading the article may help: they are talking about small buses which often have a dedicated lane. There is, of course, a desire to use this for regular buses.

As for the difficulties presented by public transportation, I can assure you that there are many problems presented by private vehicles. Even if you ignore the need for high capacity roads to handle an a large number of vehicles, you also have to dedicate a large amount of infrastructure to parking (may that be straight out land use or parkades). Large numbers of vehicles being operated by people with different skill levels and motivations also make roads very unpredictable places, which increases the probability of accidents. A dependence upon vehicles also radically changes the social environment.

It sounds like you're more interested in having a gaming machine than you are in enjoying the games, thus the presumably high spec machine that needs to shed excess heat. Well, most games don't actually need that. Just tone down the settings, reenable your PC's power management settings, and enjoy the bloody games for their entertainment value.

If that's not enough, then it's time to consider other things. It may be a purely technical problem, such as cleaning out the system or replacing noisy fans. It may also be a social problem, i.e. your wife is trying to find time to spend with you when may be spending your time gaming.