But what if it does leave a residue? And what if that residue - chemically inert, apparently - remains in the body indefinitely? And what if you then go outside in a cold day, and that residue drops below 29 C in your extremities?

When's the last time you saw a 747 with that totally swank wood trim on the outside?

You forgot to factor in the cost of the microscope you'll need to see any additional detail at 4k on a 39" screen.

Yeah, those old arcade games did always have a lot of problems with burn-in.

Obligatory Spaceballs

I'm sure Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) doesn't get her news from Fox, and she's plenty afraid. So while Fox likely amplifies the prompting for panic, I think its origin is somewhere else.

This is true - their clever acronym isn't that clever, because the point of this is as a password replacement, not as a human/computer distinguisher. They explain this down in the text, but the title throws you off because it's so poorly chosen.

Presumably, in a real-world scenario, you give your own labels when you register for an account. This would hopefully mean you would form a persistent correlation between the labels and the images. But their multicolor inkblots are so indistinct from each other that I think I would have difficulty labeling each image in the first place.

Same on my HTC Evo 4G LTE. Some of the Sprint crapware is also undisableable.

Worse, in my opinion, is the stupid Facebook for HTC Sense app. You can't uninstall it without rooting, and even disabling it won't let you install the stock Facebook app, which means that you perpetually have this stupid notification icon that harasses you to sync Facebook with Sense (so it can update your contacts with all your random Facebook friends).

I don't care if it was the worst contracting company in the world, the best contracting company in the world, or just CGI Federal. When your customer refuses to release to you in a reasonable time frame the finalized spec for a huge multisystem programming and integration project with a fixed completion date, things are going to go horribly wrong.

I think a better system would be one where the USPTO took an active role in managing certain aspects of litigation. Initial issuance of patents could remain similar to how it is now (although anything that can be done to improve quality is still a good thing). But during litigation, the first two things that should be done are (1) a focused PTO re-exam complete with a Request for Comments to solicit possible prior art from the public, and (2) a PTO determination of the proper scope of the claims, rather than leave this up to the push-and-pull of the plaintiff and defendant.

In a lot of cases, the applicants/attorneys don't actually do a search, because doing a search means that if they fail to tell the Office about something they find, they could be on the hook for it later. So it's safer to be willfully blind.

As for the USPTO, we do what we can in the time given. There's only so much searching we can do, and if we can't find and present evidence that something was already known publicly, we can't just send out rejections based on how many Slashdotters think it's obvious. Issued patents aren't perfect, but when you compare the claims that get issued with what was originally filed, you'll see just how much worse the system could be if we actually did just rubber stamp everything.

Just the fact that there were 55 different contractors working on healthcare.gov is reason enough to suspect that major security flaws crept in.

The fact that the website was opened before any appreciable amount of testing was done is reason enough to suspect that most of those flaws are still undiscovered and uncorrected.

The government's project managers didn't even come up with a full specification for the largest contractor until this past Spring, with the expectation that everything would be done and ready for business on 1 October. It's a total clusterfuck, the true scope of which likely won't be discovered for several months.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/10/why-the-healthcaregov-train-wreck-happened-in-slow-motion.html

You had to look this up? Now I feel old. Also, get off my lawn!

The problem isn't that you have a bunch of squabbling engineers who can't even figure out how to split a lunch check. It's that you have a bunch of executives and attorneys that want to get as much of their company's IP piled into the standard as possible.