It's how much is funneled back into the DOD.
I worked at a government research center and ~40% of all our funding that was awarded to us for research went back to the DoD in the form of non-lab associated salaries and renting space.

How? Extremely high facilities payments (you wouldn't believe how much it costs for space in an 80 year old research facility), administration (you pay for secretaries, their supervisors, anyone within a mile of your lab, it doesn't matter if you need them or not), soldiers (you can request not to have a solider, but then you might not get all your funding - and while a soldier gets 22k a year, the government takes ~80k for their 22k)

Sorry. But in Korea, Firefox 7.0 is already only for old people...

No, I think OPK did that with years of mismanagement.

Ericsson and Sony formed a 50/50 partnership: Sony-Ericsson. That's in regards to cell phones. Ericsson still manufactures hardware for cell phone companies (just as Nokia does).
SE did pretty good for a while but 2006-2009-ish were pretty bad years for them. Although, they've seemed to turn it around this past year. They're introducing several more Android handsets and it's rumored that they have a WP7 phone in the works.

Have any fixes been backported and have any of those fixes been released from the manufacturer?

The Xperia X10 *just* received 2.1. There's a pretty common bug in 2.1 where it can't connect to Cisco routers with a self-signed security certificate on their enterprise hardware. You wouldn't believe the number of hospitals, research institutions, and hotels have this same setup. The problem is that you cannot connect to any of these wifi networks.

From what I've read online on google's forums is that the fix was in 2.2 but supposedly backported to 2.1 several months ago. Yet, the latest entry utilizing the 2.1 OS still doesn't work.

I can see why major developers are frustrated at Android. They have to deal with phones that range from 1.6 to 2.3 (by next week) and then deal with all the variations between all the major versions. If Google is serious about a mobile platform, they need to pressure the manufacturers into updating their dev cycle and get them *all* on 2.3. It's a shame that you have dumbphone manufacturers trying to pass off their terrible OS update cycle to smartphone customers.

They're hacked quickly because of 2 reasons. They're really popular (ego) and have capabilities suppressed on purpose (do more with them). It doesn't bother me that they're so quickly hacked - it's more of an annoyance to the people who fall into 1 of those 2 reasons and doesn't really effect those who don't.
So yeah, I agree with you.

But look at it on the flipside. SE's X10 is looking damn near impossible to hack and the need is there. To paraphrase your question; Does it bother anyone else that SE's X10 is so hard to crack? That bothers me more than Apple making it easy to hack.

Has Apple been unsuccessful in marketing their products lately? Did the next iphone need more hype?
As far as I know, Apple is one of the best companies when it comes to creating demand for their next products.

The iphone 2g, 3g, 3gs all weren't leaked like this a couple months in advance to create hype. They were immensely popular just because of Apple's fanbase. So with everyone anticipating the next iphone, why would Apple need to hype up the 4g like this?

I'll usually check out what Apple brings to the phone arena (I'm an SE fan) but now that I know what it is, I won't really make any effort to see what goes on at their expo.

I think they were Mike & Ike's strawberries and cream. They don't make that flavor anymore :(

LOL!
Oh man... Back in high school, I routinely grabbed a box of mike & ike (pink and white flavor/version) from a vending machine and kept it in my backpack to snack on. One day in class, a kid that sat next to me in the row over saw that I kept putting my hand in my backpack and eating something. So he asked what I was eating.
Being a jackass, I replied secretly ... "I'm popping steroids"
Big white and pink pills... huge effin steroids!
He started yelling in class "Steroids! Steroids! He's popping steroids!!!!" Everyone looks over and I didn't expect that kind of reaction from something pretty comical. Luckily nothing came of it, I just replied really quickly that they're just Mike and Ikes... a few laughs later - everything was fine.

I would expect a high school student to do something like this. However, a principle of a high school should know better and this mess reeks of incompetence on his part.

This is just my idea why more children exhibit issues with anxiety and other mental issues.
I believe it's because of the overparenting kids have had in the last 20-30 years. Kids don't learn disappointment, they don't learn failure. We tell them that they are all special. These kids are growing up so afraid to fail and take risks that when they inevitably fail; their ego, psyche, whatever just crashes. Their just so overloaded with these emotions that would have been dealt with if they had failed before. They've grown up with their parents/government/teachers/anyone elder caring for them to the point where they can't do anything for themselves. There are lucky ones who reject this over coddling but they are the exception.

Sony Ericsson's upcoming X3 is running Android and has an 8 megapixel camera. And it being SE, I'm sure the camera will be quite good (maybe not as good as the N86 - f 2.4 is really nice for a 'phone'). biggest issue so far is when is video recording going to improve on Android? (I think it's 320x240)

Well, I think it's a really great move.
It doesn't bring down usability. Well, it does if that's what you are use to - there's a learning curve when dealing with a new UI.

When I began programming, I released a shareware document word processor program. It was nifty for its time. I kept on adding more and more features. I emphasized menus because that's what I found the best in regards to screen real estate. When I started hearing back from users, they were confused with the software and disliked it. The much preferred the font/etc bar (you know, says font size, type, etc). Looking back on it, I realized that the whole menu emphasis made me a lazy programmer with no consideration for UI. The majority of users don't want to have to go through menus in order to go to a different screen or more submenus to alter options. A ribbon style interface updates software from its DOS stylized days. Hardware and Operating systems have changed so much in the past 25 years, why should we keep the software running on these new operating systems the same (ie. DOS days - when resolution was an issue)?

It's also a fallacy that the people at Mozilla will be ignoring other issues when designing their new UI. Why does a new UI mean that they wouldn't improve "UI responsiveness, fast drawing of loading websites and better & smoother scrolling".

You use Opera as an example of a company who values usability and simple things. Really? Opera? I mean, I like Opera - mouse gestures, built in torrent handling, etc. Even their newer Opera Mini 5 with their new UI. Howerver, Opera has added so much to their browser that to call it "simple" is perplexing... Not to be mean here - but there's a difference between efficiency and simpleness. Being simple doesn't mean it's inherently efficient.

It's headed for T-Mobile. It cleared all the FCC requirements a few weeks ago and the specs list the 1700/2100 band that T-Mobie USA uses.

No offense, but the whole excessive improvements in technology over the course of a show has really started me turning away from lots of sci-fi. Kind of similar to the obsession with always going back in time.

For example, how many times have shows found new technology in order to deal with their imminent problem(s)?
"We can't make it in time" "Eureka! I found a way to increase our warp speed!"
"We don't know what's causing this phenomena" "Eureka! I found a new particle that explains it perfectly!"
"We have no way of providing enough power" "Eureka! Our scientists have developed a Naquida generator!"
etc.

It screams of lazy writing.

Reboots usually are good because they do away with this. However, if a reboot is popular enough and runs for a long enough time, the writers start running out of ideas and you begin getting incredible advances in technology to write around dealing with problems.