I've stopped going to theaters the day that a single ticket (in Germany where I live) starting costing 9 Euros. About 15 Euros if the movie lasts more than two and half hours. All was in favour for home theater, which was more comfortable, cheaper, and convenient. But when my old big CRT screen died two years ago, I also stopped watching movies and TV at home altogether. Why?

- DVD are not HD. Blue rays cost about 25 Euros in Germany. All with the classical FBI don't pirate message crap and unskippable commercials for old movies, as a mean of thanking you for buying the film
- Open channels suck really big time. It is basically Christian TV and buy-your-crappy-as-seen-on-TV channels
- Cable TV already charges you for non-HD crap. If you want, then pay more for HD crap
- Things start to become watchable after folding about 50-60 Euros per month. But you need to use *their* receiver if you want to record movies that you can keep for just one day. Have fun with 3 remote controls by you couch, and explaining your wife *every time* how to use it, while she laughs at you. Oh, and you can't skip commercials for the *paid* channels.
- Pay more if you want 3D movies.
- Google Movies: in Germany, they cost like a DVD and *only* come with German tone. So let me get this straight: Google sells you something that cost as a 10-year old technology. They benefit from the digital era by cutting cost, but they don't transfer a single cent to you. In return, they give you a cripple experience much worse than the old one. No original tone, no subtitles, no director comments, and usually worse quality. No thanks.

In short, I'm sick of these new technologies that are only meant to give more profits to media producers, and they don't care at all about what the customer wants. I vote with my money, by not having a TV anymore, and spending more time outside with my family. It was tough for the first 6 months, but now I don't miss it at all, really. And my kids don't even know what they are *missing*.

This explains why SAP is such a horrendous piece of crap. And if you are gonna say that I'm trolling, please first go and use it yourself.
My request to this asshole: please get someone *above* 40, someone with more than 20 years of experience behind his back in GUI design and software ergonomics and code optimization, so that he can fix what your cheap workforce has pulled out of its butt.

Anyone who believes that machines can replace learning a language has clearly never left his country or spent more than a week abroad. There are technical and cultural issues that render such statements nonsense.

Technical:
- you need to speak like another machine for these systems to recognize what you say. Start putting some accent (like the different Latin-Spanish versions), or dialects (like in Germany or China), slang, and the model breaks quickly.
- no system is able to mix languages. And you need this. It is common to mix languages with certain words, street names, person names, etc. from other languages.
- street language. Even if the sound recognition were perfect, no machine translator can possibly translate what you hear on the street.

Cultural:
- go to a sales meeting and you are trying to sell your business services to a customer using your voice as translation. Your competitor speaks the language fluently, using idioms and other tricks. Guess who gets the deal.
- pick-up a girl in Italy using a phone/voice translation and I will aplaud you.
- attend university abroad using your tech-device.
- tell a Joke to your phone, hoping that its translation will make your foreign friends laugh.

the list is endless. So is this a good invention? Yes. Will it work? Maybe in the future for some limited purposes. Will it replace learning languages? Heck no.

just say that we use version control to do what we want:

- using Git/Mercurial is like walking naked on the beach
- using svn is walking naked at home
- using Clear Case is going through airport scanning and being detained 30 min for having a nail cutter, followed by anal examination
- using Visual Source Safe is terrorism. It's lie having your balls hit repeatedly, by something like the door of a submarine.

In Europe it is common for people to get contracts to just subsidise the phone, but not the data and calls. You often hear people saying "I've bought my high-end phone for 50 Euros", but then pay 20 Euros per month on 24 hour contract, and 40 cents/minute and 20c/SMS. So it is not like in the US that you only get a full package. You can also get full packages in Europe, but once again this is not the rule.

A more economical approach at the moment, at least in Germany, is to buy your own phone at full price and use pre-paid. It is funny, but pre-paid is way cheaper than the contracts and you are not tight to a carrier for two years. This is for me crucial because ALL carriers claim that you can't use your phone for VoIP, and sometimes even for IM. None of them block them that I know (I think the European Laws would hunt them), but I don't wanna have my Whatsapp block one day and be stucked with 12 more months to go.

You can also get pretty good deals for full packages through your employer. If you can live with 24 month contracts, these are sometimes better then pre-paid+full priced phone deals.

Yes, you do. What you are describing is a different way to accomplish the attack. As an end user, I don't care if the underlying exploit is similar, I only care about how I can be affected by it. This leads to the next point.

No, they've chosen NFC because now more phones have it, but mostly because it allows accomplishing the attack without any user intervention at all. People could avoid getting hacked from visiting malicious websites, simply by limiting themselves to trusted sites. Most people only frequent their usual places. But the NFC is a hidden vector that many users are not even aware of.

As I've mentioned in my first post, I could live with an NFC or browser vulnerability, but not with a tethering one. Other people will think the opposite. At the end of the day, these news make wish you didn't depend on your cell phone so much, because there are always security holes in there.

I find it funny when automotive industry push to connect their cars to the network, as if they could do any better.

you also need to have NFC enabled on your Galaxy for this to work. NFC is enabled by default, sure. But it can be disabled easily. I also find myself living happily without NFC, but not without tethering, which I use daily during my bus commute.

So my point is that both vulnerabilities suck, and which one sucks the most depends solely on your use-case. There is no point in saying that one device is more secure than the other, both Apple and Google seem to suck big time here. You should not store any sensitive data on your phone.

As I've posted above, you have a valid point and I won't argue whether this was fair or not. What I was trying to convey is that if teachers are gonna grade like computers without a human factor in there, then I might as well just take online classes for a fraction of the price.

All valid points. And I'm not arguing either that I didn't deserve that D, I'm trying to not judge myself here. What I'm arguing is that if the human/fuzzy/sensitive factor can't be used for teaching, then you can replace teachers with computers. So my point here is: either be different from a computer, or let me take online classes from home for a fraction of the price.

everyone in Argentina is proud about the Hand of God. It showed two things:
- If he wanted, Maradona was able to fool the referee and make fun of the brits, despite them having stolen their island shortly before.
- If he wanted, Maradona could just a few minutes later make one of the best goals in history. Of course the brits don't acknowledge it and just whine about the first one.

I don't wanna mix technology, sports, and politics here. I just wanted to point out that no one in Argentina is ashamed of the hand of god.

Mod parent up, he's key on. I remember an issue with a professor in one of my C++ classes, which happened to include a large programming project. The project took about four weeks of intensive programming, and I was really proud of the quality of my code, comments, structure, etc. Only problem was that in one section we had to determine the actual type of an object using dynamic_cast after having received a base type object. We had like 10 derived objects and I've used copy paste to make life easier, but forgot to modify one entry with the appropriate type. That is, ONE word was wrong. My mistake failed in one of their tests (which I didn't have in advance), which cascaded four output missmatches. This ONE word cost me 40 points out of 100, ending up with a D for this project. One word, lots of effort. I've talked to the professor and his answer was a lame "if I fix your grade, I need to fix everyone's".

When I was a TA during grad school, I always looked at the work flow. If a student made a mistake in part (a) of a problem, I didn't simply give him zero points for parts (b) (c) and (d) that used it as a base. Instead, I've assumed that part (a) was right and looked at the process. It took me more time to grade, sure. But it is fair and if a teacher can't contribute with some human touch, let's just replace them with computers.

Natvteq has actually very good maps, particularly in Europe. The reason why your map looks bad is most likely due to your particular gear vendor. Garmin, Becker, Blaupunkt, Falk, etc. they buy maps from Navteq or Teleatlas, and they compile it for whatever their main goal and budget. In order to reduce the map size and save money, they compress the data using a battery of techniques. One common technique is decimation, where they simply remove geometry points to save space, leaving mostly the ones that represent intersections and a few in the middle. POI suffer as well.

So please don't be too fast in blaming a map vendor, where the fault is almost certainly from your navigation system vendor.

awesome and thanks for the clarification. Now what puzzles me here: if you really care about people using it: why is the only supported Ubuntu Version 10.04? Wouldn't it be meaninfull to support a later release?

I'm glad that Microsoft is working on Linux, but I was just wondering whether I want to update. I use Skype on both Linux and Windows and to be honest, I prefer the old version from Linux. Sure: it crashes more often, and has somehow less features. But for what I mostly do, it works ok. And the interface is much less cluttered, I can quit the app without having to read a manual, no ads, really slick.

I haven't looked at the new Skyp 4 yet, but I don't find it unlikely that I switch back to the old version at some point. One nice thing about Skype being so closed and proprietary is that the chances of seeing a Linux exploit based on Skype are extremely low.

Ubuntu gives you Skype through Canonical partners repository. I think you are asked whether you want it there during the installation, in the same window where they ask about multimedia support and updates during installation. Downside is that we will probably not see the new version for while.