I've actually got a Gen 1, bought long after the Gen 2 came out, specifically because the keyboard is sane. It is a *really* nice laptop, as long as you don't make the mistake of getting a Gen 2.

You're right. Initially I thought it was up in the uselss-wank row of keys that vendors like to put above the function keys, but it does appear to be replacing the Esc key. Assuming they then follow the Lenovo Carbon Gen 2 model of keyboard braindamage which is... well it's hard to describe in words, see for yourself (yes, someone actually did that on purpose, which is why you can buy Gen 2's on eBay for much less than the older Gen 1's), there'll be a quick subsequent release of a Model n+1 that undoes it all again.

You've asked all of them, I suppose?

I use Skype on a tablet, and I want it as a background app so I can chat while I'm doing other stuff. I don't want it taking over the entire screen, or doing anything else more significant than a notification area icon to tell me it's still running.

That's because China sees a trade agreement as being about trade and making money, not a means of furthering the global agendas of whichever megacorporations pay the people writing it the most money. I'm from a country that has a free trade agreement with China, negotiated openly and available for anyone to check (heck, there's even a web site set up to tell you all you need to know), that basically says "you sell us your stuff, we sell you ours, the rest is up to you". That's a free trade agreement, not the stuff US corporations are trying to force on the world.

I think it's a sign that there's something seriously wrong when people are requesting a regular release cadence to fix all the security holes in the software that's supposed to be protecting them from security problems...

ObXKCD.

That's Wellington's secondary wind farm. The primary wind farm is called The Beehive.

"No! Shut them *all* down, hurry! Listen to them, they're dying R2! Curse my metal body, I wasn't fast enough, it's all my fault!"

From TFA:

Actually it's very like Mozilla, at least the Mozilla from the last five years or so. You sit there, you take what we give you, and you LIKE IT, dammit!

Well yeah, that one's simple, but what about the unicorn farts mentioned by a previous poster? Just the torque converters for that alone would be enormous, not to mention the extra whangle drums and sliding paff gongbudgers.

Nowadays we do it with drones and remote cameras.

I've seen the exact opposite, most openers are built using shitty Princeton 2262s, which sounds like what this guy hacked. Oh, and if you've been sold a fancy "rolling-code remote", open it up and look at the hardware, if it says 2262 on the chip (or one of the many derivatives) then you've been had (many so-called rolling-code remotes aren't, the vendors just claim they are).

In practice it's even worse than the article points out, the switches are tri-state not binary but most vendors of remotes forget that so you go from 3^n to 2^n, and then they only use 8 of the 12 pins you can toggle on because they're on one side of the chip and they forget there's more around the other side. So you go from 3^12 to 2^8 combinations, meaning you'll hit the right one after 128 tries on average. The receivers have no rate-limiting, so you can run them far faster than the vendor specifies and scan the code space in seconds. The novel thing in this case is the use of de Bruijn sequences, and the fact that he scans the entire code space in the same time a standard scanner takes for the (admittedly far too common) badly-designed ones.

Hey, forcing a mobile-phone interface onto an inherently desktop system worked so well for Microsoft in Windows 8 that I guess Google had to give it a go too,

More seriously, this is beyond braindamaged. Our product is mainframe middleware. Exactly zero percent of our users access our site from a phone or tablet. However, Google now wants us to optimise it for a platform that none of our users will ever use, just because, hey, Google says so. Cretins.

Across two totally different (Lenovo and Toshiba) laptops, and that's only ever triggered by Skype and nothing else? Sounds a bit unlikely...

I'll say. Skype fairly consistently blue-screens my laptops after about an hour of voice chat with it, first the whole system freezes, then after about half a minute it bluescreens, and that's on two different laptops. That's pretty impressive amount of fail for a fscking Internet phone app.

That's a pretty desperate plan, I realise that single event upsets in space are a non-uncommon event, but man, this is really last-resort stuff, the terrestrial equivalent of which would be "there may be a lightning strike in the vicinity which would glitch the electronics and cause a reboot". Sure, or there may not, in which case you're screwed. As the OP said, how was this not caught in testing?