I had a professor - an Emacs fan - who had a saying, "all software will eventually expand until it can send and receive email." It seems that needs to be amended to "all software will expand until it becomes an operating system."

Only over wifi, so this isn't much of a feature. And it's only to other Blackberry users who also happen to be on wifi, making it even less useful. And in general, voice is on the decline which is why some carriers are moving to unlimited voice & tiered data. Personally I've had over 4,000 rollover minutes from AT&T for 3-4 years, and that's with many expiring each month and with my wife and I sharing their smallest plan (500 shared minutes/month).

So this is cool, but I can't imagine this will sway anyone's opinion about buying a Blackberry or not.

How is there opposition to this? Shouldn't "don't track me" be the default for all browsers? How is the FTC against this? Chamber of Commerce I could see... but the FTC is supposed to protect consumers, no? Personally, I think the setting should be inverted to a checkbox that says "Allow advertisers to track my online activities," with it unchecked by default, and inviting people to check it if they want. Let's see how far THAT gets. Stupid.

I guess it's like the logic that US food sellers use to prevent "country of origin" information from being included on meat and other food products. If a pack of chicken breasts was labeled "grown in China" Americans wouldn't eat it, so they leave that information out, even though it's pretty important.

In summary: profit.

This is a clear instance where the right course of action is simply to go ahead and set up what you need. You don't need to ask permission. Just do it. Once it's done and all code has been moved into git/svn/whatever, you can either tell the supervisor what you've done, or not. If the supervisor isn't technical then there's no need for them to be troubled.

The closest analogy I can think of is: you started your job and found spilled milk on the floor. The correct course of action would be to clean up the spill, not to ask for permission to clean up the spill, or ask your supervisor how best to clean up the spill. You know what needs to be done, so just do it.

I always assumed the answer was something to the effect of:

boolean siriEnabled() {
    return (system.cpu.version >= 5.0);
}

Is anything else really needed? They don't want to support it on older models so you have to buy the new one. Conversely, if you really want the feature, buy the latest phone. Personally I find Siri an overhyped piece of junk. I have a 4S and I disabled it because it kept getting activated randomly and rarely understood my commands. Plus for the basic stuff like weather, I can just open the app. The anecdotal crap like "Will I need an umbrella today?" is just a dumb gimmick to me. But anyway, the fact is that the 4S is really an incremental improvement over the 4, and Siri is the one feature Apple can point to on the 4S as a differentiator, so they enforce that differentiation.

It seems like a major omission that the writeup doesn't mention that this is referring to kicking the TV network out of the NASDAQ TV studio, not the NASDAQ stock market.

I mean, why even have editors?

SOPA provides for deep packet inspection, so they can in fact block IP addresses.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-57342716-281/rep-issa-sopa-wont-be-approved-unless-fixed/

No, the first link, http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/11/16/1810231/experts-convinced-duqu-work-of-stuxnet-authors , talks about Duqu being related to Stuxnet, but offers no indication about what Duqu is or who it's affecting. Yes, I can google it and look it up on Wikipedia. The point is that an editor should do that. A simple sentence like "Duqu, the recently-discovered malware that's related to Stuxnet, which researchers believe is being used to log Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's porn collection...", or some other 10-word summary of what it is, is what editors are supposed to provide.

Editors, your job is not simply to click "post." Read the submission and see if it makes sense. I have no idea what Duqu is or what this is about. I had to dig down 2 links deep to see that this was related to an attack in India. Context: provide it.

Why didn't she simply limit the number of coupons that could be sold? I've seen other Groupons with limits. Sounds like she fucked up.

The thing that was demoed was not a "phone," but a bendable screen & chassis. They still need to develop bendable motherboards, processors, batteries, etc.

Was this app approved by the Android app store?

If you remember the late 90s and early 2000s there was an obsession with branding everything with an X. X-games, Gen X, Xbox. Also keep in mind XP was announced shortly after Mac OS X.

The point of currency in general isn't as a store of value, but as a way to facilitate transactions. Currencies are traded as a proxy for trading "stock" in a particular country's economy. When Japan does well and the USA does poorly, the dollar gets weaker against the yen. Bitcoin doesn't represent any country, so trading it seems even stranger. But until and unless there are merchants who accept Bitcoin for purchases, it doesn't seem like the system itself has much value, since as I said, the reason for the existence of currency is as a way to facilitate trade.