I support Apple's initiatives and I'm glad they're setting a good example as an industry leader. However, I could not possibly care less that a given cell phone might be accessing a server that isn't "green". Yes, Amazon Fire will be running "on top of" AWS. This is an absolute given. It will also be leaning on servers from Google, Apple, Rackspace, and Joe's Server Shack.

Greenpeace, shoo. You're not involved in these discussions and you're not relevant to the task at hand. It's cute that you want to be a part of the conversation, but this is the adult table.

In March 1989 much of Quebec lost power for the same thing.

They lost power because the common-mode breakers tripped, not because their system was actually damaged.

And people get mad when I say NASA has devolved into a collection of risk adverse mid-managers loosely connected to a rusting theme park endlessly replaying clips of their glory days. Their best days are behind them and it's time to think about reorganizing the entire agency.

You're full of shit. I live in a wealthy suburb of San Francisco and have almost no Internet service options (which is what we're talking about in this article - Internet service). Any provider not hamstrung by regulations favoring incumbents would make an absolute killing here. Comcast has the monopoly (I don't care what you call it) on high speed Internet access in my area and has refused to do anything with it except raise prices through the roof while making my Netflix stream play like ass.

While I sympathize with my rural neighbors, I can't think of a single legitimate reason why their choice to live in difficult-to-serve areas means that I have to have shitty, expensive Internet in the heart of the world's high-tech capital.

I'd suspect that being hauled off the plane was a little more bothersome than being turned away from a theater.

No, you wouldn't have. You cannot win an argument with a flight crew; if they say "get off", you're getting off. There's absolutely no way to appeal that decision in the moment.

That's interesting, but irrelevant. You don't fix disgruntled paying customers by humiliating them in front of a crowd. He tweeted about his initial experience; you think he'll meekly shut up about the follow on treatment?

He might've been acting like a pompous, entitled ass. If your job is serving the public, you have to get used to dealing with pompous, entitled asses in ways that don't make your entire organization look bad.

Chromebooks have to be online to work, so remote into a debian/ubuntu vps and do your stuff there. SSH client app on chromebooks works great.

Why is everyone so uncomfortable with the idea that something can be lost forever? How is that a problem? I'm perfectly sanguine with the idea that information can be lost or irretrievable. I'm perfectly sanguine with the idea that the universe will die of heat death. I'm also down with the idea that the Big Rip will swallow everything up in several billion years - talk about information loss... It just strikes me as fatuous and arrogant that humans think the universe has to work a certain rational, logical, way - like the universe gives a shit one way or the other.

This story was not accepted for publication by Slashdot, and I am submitting it to another venue for consideration. - Bruce

If the drive's software were flashable (the device could be updated with different software) and the software were Free Software, there would be no reason to fear Intel's connection to the NSA. Users would have the freedoms they need to make sure the software does what they want it to do. Proprietary encryption, no matter who writes it or distributes it, is always untrustworthy for the same reason proprietary software is untrustworthy—you don't really know what it's doing and neither does anyone you can trust to help you understand what it's doing. Furthermore you can't make it do what you want and you can't help others by distributing improved versions that respect other user's freedoms.

That is flat freaking amazing. NASA does some pretty cool stuff, but I can't help but wonder how many billions it would have cost taxpayers for them to manage development of technology like that? It's hard not to see NASA as an organization with its best days well behind it.

They deliberately make this difficult to calculate, but by my reckoning the current version should probably be Firefox 7.6.

"Malware blocking" = yet another bad signature/reputation based scanner. If I wanted one, I would have one installed - and Firefox versions without this misfeature would still use it to scan, so in what universe was this worth doing?

If you really want to do something about malware, disable javascript by default.

"Automatic handling of pdf and ogg files" - I have a pdf reader already. I dont need another one, and I dont need one 'integrated' in my browser, period.

"loaded with new features for developers." Pretty sure that means for advertisers.