That said, this isn't meant to be industrial grade security. Compared to no security at all, this is a big step up. The likelihood that I loose my phone in the parking lot and someone who finds it has a picture of me to unlock the phone with seems extremely slim. More likely, this would be vulnerable to attack from people I know, but even then, it's better than nothing.

This is what I got my 6 year old daughter (the Duo-Scope). While not a professional quality instrument, it is quite capable. The inclusion of the top-down lighting has allowed us to view numerous opaque objects (pennies, all manner of insects, etc) and a prepared slide set has provided plenty of opportunity to explore. I'm in about $100 for the scope and the slides and it's been very much worth the cost. My daughter finds new things she wants to look at with the microscope every week.

While you can surely see more detail in astronomy (as well as microscopy) photos, the experience just isn't the same. For me and my family, watching the transit through my safely filtered binoculars is much more exciting that simply browsing through the results of a Google image search for '2004 Venus Transit.' For my kids especially, who live in a world full of digital experiences, seeing something significant in person is not to be missed.

You go into a hospital and say 'my insurance is paying for this'. You get costs that are 2-10x what they should be plus whatever other procedure they can think of that seems legit.

Actually, this is backwards. In almost all cases I've seen, the insurance company has a "negociated rate" which is much lower than what I would pay on my own. Looking at my bills I see, for example, that the insurance company has negociated a rate several hundred dollars less than what I'd pay for a blood test. Scan your EOBs and look for contract adjustments to see what I mean. It pretty crazy when you think about it since it means those least likely to afford the care (folks who are w/o employer provided insurance) will pay the highest rates.

"If we're going to require employers to provide health insurance to their employees" You're on the right track. This wouldn't have been an issue if we hadn't started mixing healthcare coverage up with employment.

So, obviously, we need to rework the system so that the incentive so that rejection is the most rewarding/path of least resistance. A simple idea might be to double application fees and refund 1/2 if the patent is granted. Perhaps the patent examiner should be compelled to testify in IP cases where the patent is questioned. In today's world the barrier to getting a new patent should be much higher (with regards to prior art, not an impossibly high application cost). The PO's default answer should start with no, and take a very compelling argument to make it yes.

John Huntsman may be the wealthiest candidate in the race. Not that that would make him less acceptable, particularly in the primaries.

You're kidding right? All the upper tier Android tablets offer similar processor and memory specs, but with better screens (1280x800 vs 1024x768). Also, most have at least micro SD and USB slots, some have full size. Most can be had for at least $100 less than a competing iPad. And that's before the quad core Transformer Prime drops next month, which should pretty much mop the floor with the iPad 2 (similar price/size/weight, substantially better processor/batter life). Keep drinking the kool-aid.

Ugh, wish I had mod points. I work in the e-learning industry, and feel the same way. HTML5, while promising, just isn't ready to be an alternative for making interactive training. Simple things like synching multiple audio files to animation events is easy in Flash, but overly complicated in HTML/JS. "Leading edge" animation tools like Adobe Edge and Sencha Animatior don't support audio and run poorly on IE8. Audio and video codecs are not supported universally across browsers, so files have to encoded multiple times to ensure playback works. Flash made these things just work, cross platform, new and old hardware. For e-learning, it was the right tool for the job. Now it's hard to look at the current state of HTML5 and not view it as a step back. Obviously the situation will improve, but efforts like this and the total cluster fck that was Adobe's press about discontinuing mobile Flassh Player developments just confuse our clients and customers.

Uh, there are several sub $500 android tablets already on the market. In fact, the Asus Transformer can be had for $350, and if you shop carefully you'll find standard spec tablets (e.g. the Acer Iconia) for ~$300. These are pretty competitive power wise with the iPads, but cost hundreds less. They only lack in mindshare.

Wish I hadn't already spent my mod points, I'd mod you up. Marshall's essay is one of the better pieces I've read on this topic. I've thought back to it several times the last few months as topics like structural unemployment and income inequality are suddenly getting an increase in mindshare.

I work in e-learning, an industry which relies heavily on Flash. We keep looking at HTML 5 to replace our Flash content but there are still several areas where it falls short. The biggest for us today is the lack of a robust audio events framework in Javascript. We rely heavily on photos cued up in a narrated slideshow, other events may be linked as well. AFAICT, there's no easy way to ensure that when audio track hits point x, fire Javascript event y. Same goes for video. Most other things are reasonably well covered by modern browser HTML5 implementations, but many of our clients use lagging spec hardware (training computers rarely get high end updates, instead they're often the final resting place for machines unable to any serve other business purposes). I'd love to abandon Flash for more open HTML standards, but in my industry that means some significant tradeoffs today. In the mean time, Adobe appears to be experimenting with making Flash output HTML5 anyway (see Adobe Edge). Long term I think Flash player fades away as HTML5 becomes an output option from the Adobe suite.

This! Users should be able to set their default search algorithm preference (or better still, apply weighting to several) and swap between them to see how it changes results.