All the plastic helps with the incremental increments in fuel economy: approximately 2X better over the past 57 years. I also neglected to mention safety, which has improved a good deal more than fuel economy. That's all OK, but it's nothing like the dramatic changes that happened previous to the 707. After nearly six decades, today's planes still look very similar to a 707, are about the same size, and go the same speed.

I don't think that it's necessarily "inevitable". Take aviation, for example. There was arguably exponential increases in the capability of aircraft for 55 years from 1903 to 1958, when the Boeing 707 was introduced. Ever since, further progress on economically viable aircraft has been pretty much limited to incremental increases in fuel economy and marketing strategies to keep costs down by keeping planes full.

Someone on this topic need to mention, "Timecube." There, I've fulfilled my duty.

The fight choreography is wonderfully deliberate and brutal. They ramped up the audible component of it as might befit a character with super-human hearing while eschewing the shaky-cam (e.g. Bourne Ultimatum) style and using the excuse of poor lighting. I got a sense that most of the people doing the fighting we actually reacting instead of responding in some programmatic fashion and I very much liked that evidence of injuries sustained remained, even several episodes later.

I did take exception to the idea that Daredevil said that he did not kill. I saw a lot of things that would result in pretty serious head trauma or internal injuries and I'm thinking not everybody made it to the nearest E.R.

Perhaps the advantage found in the garden with lower walls is the ability to do something outside the plans of the people in charge of the platform. One of my biggest turn-offs with iOS is its keyboard. The screen doesn't change to indicate upper or lower case characters. I have no idea who thinks that's a good idea, but on iOS there wasn't until very recently any ability to charge that. In the Android world, there are of great on screen keyboards. The idea that someone might want something else was simply outside Apple's vision.
There are all kinds of tools that exist on Android because the whole thing is open to development. There are plenty of things that can't be done on iOS and Windows Mobile because no one considered the possibility that someone might want to do them. I believe that Android is the primary place where innovation is occurring in mobile devices at this point and most of that is because everything is open to be changed.

Lastpass and Roboform both seem pretty straightforward to me. I'm not a daily user of either, but one or the other of them seem to solve problems for the people who couldn't remember more than one password unless they were tattooed on their forehead.

There's a Windows tool called adwcleaner that takes less than five minutes to run and does a marvelous job of cleaning crap out of browser installations. It's usually the first step I take in cleaning off a Windows machine, but it works beautifully for getting irritating but not genuinely malicious stuff out of the way.

I've actually made a document that I print out and hand to people whose machines I clean off. Probably 90% of the people I talk to have no idea that there's any such thing as a browser add-on or search extension.

I've found that configuring Adblock+ with a decent set of subscription lists and Spybot's Immunizations (basically hosts file entries) do more to stop problems than probably any other steps I could take to stop problems on Windows machines.

Waiting to hear "stories" would be of no use if, for example, attackers choose to wait until a nationwide cold-snap and then simultaneously brick one million thermostats.

If there's a public safety concern about people hacking code in cars, then copyright is not the way to address it. The purpose of copyrights is purportedly to encourage the production of more works. It is certainly not intended to be a tool for ensuring public safety.

Ideally, hacking safety-related code (and then driving it on a public highway) should be legal only if the hacker got the appropriate certifications to work on that area, along with insurance riders to go with it. This would be completely unrelated to the copyright status of the original code.

Anyone for a one-way ticket to Mars, now?