How about a tariff on a per capita basis? Especially if we can tax on the amount of resources consumed per person per year. If the cost is not tied to each individual's life style, some people in some countries would continue burning through their huge SUV, while asking everyone else to live a caveman's life.

No thanks, wouldn't want a car that I can't manually override when shit happens.

Obama is a jerk, the whole administration keeps on making stupid decision. If you keep on doing things like this, just don't come crying when other people would do the same thing to you. It's not just China, it could be any country too.

WTF? Where is the geek spirit in this /. crowd? When a manufacturer releases a phone with battery soldered, everyone's complaining. When a laptop manufacturer releases a laptop that you can't upgrade, complaining again. Now that people are putting effort to allow you to custom your mobile device till your heart bleeds, you are complaining again.

I had enough of phones that I have to throw away because of one very small, and not even the most important, component went bad, and I can't do anything. And it's not worth repairing coz the repair cost is almost as high, or even higher, than buying a new phone. What a fucking waste of resources.

Give me this modular design anyday. I've been waiting for someone to do this for laptop and mobile phone for a decade. Can't come soon enough.

Just release the design, release the interface, make it so open that anyone on the planet can manufacture components without huge license cost, and let the market decide. I'm sure there will a lot of entrepreneurial folks who will set up shop to assemble this into a nice package for your customization. Just like the PC era. Bring it on. There will be a lot of new applications. Talk about wearables? Wait till you have all these components that you can assemble the way you like it.

Did something like this in 2005, with the data encrypted on the client side using the user's public key. The key pair is in a hardware USB token.

We also did something with this scheme for an electronic patient record project. Each doctor was issued a USB key with his/her own key pair, and when the doctor submitted any prescription to the system, the data were signed with his key, and the operation was logged into a central log database, each log record is linked to some previous log records in a Merkle tree so that we could detect if a log record has been tampered with or removed.

However, cryptography is hard to get right in applications, and clients are not willing to pay for it. Se stopped doing this after a while.

Which editor do you use on a daily basis? Emacs or Vi? :)

The first thing that came to my mind when I saw the title is, hmm, let's put a digital camera or an SD card full of digital pictures in Antartica for 100 years, and see if we can recover it :)

It's nice and all that Mikko Hypponen withdrew his support for the RSA conference, but I bet he didn't get refunded. That sucks big.

It's a game played by the Indian government. Nokia's handset division is to be sold to Microsoft, which has a ton of cash on hand. It's a game worth playing, as Nokia has no way of packing their bag and getting out tomorrow, so does Microsoft. Microsoft wants that handset division as part of its strategy, and the liability can be worked out by Nokia/Microsoft to transfer to Microsoft, which will then work out a deal with the government, which will promise to sweeten via some kind of tax break on the condition that Microsoft invest more in the country. At the end, they will make a join release, saying that each one has made a score, it is good for the consumer, for the shareholders, for the country, for Jesus, for Buhda, for Ganesha, for Annapurna, for Hanuman, and whatever deity you've got. Everyone would be happy, and it would be the end of the story.

It's the same kind of game governments play all over the world.

I never tried to convince anyone to save the planet. My arguments have always been it's good for your health, and it saves you a tons of money too. But when people have a "dream", they don't give a shit about other things, they "need" to fullfill their dream first, which is to live the american life.

Per capita wise, we probably should start with the USA. If the Americans eat less meat, drive less and consume less resources, I'm sure that's going to have a very positive impact on their health too, not just the environment of this planet.

Unfortunately, the american lifestyle is a model that most Chinese dream of right now. So this trend is a terrible one. But what do you expect people in other countries to do, when the Americans export their movies in which people are living in big houses, with gigantic backyard, and there are more cars than persons in a family, have a fun life with a lot of meat (fill in your favorite resources)? When people in other countries have the means, they will want the same thing. And they emulate. This is totally normal. That means, in China, people also want a big house, at least a car, or preferably, one car per person, and all the comfort in life that the Americans have been enjoying for so long.

I gave up driving 10 years ago, my wife and I each have a bike. We ride or take the public transit, set a quota on our own diet, watch closely our AC and heater to just have a minimum of comfort. We watch our carbon footprint carefully. But when we try to convince other people to at least try to do something, people think we are idiots. The planet belongs to everyone, if the Americans/Europeans can enjoy the resources, why can't we?

It would interesting if there was some kind of quota system on all countries in the world, based on the population size. And it would be even more interesting if we can control it at the individual level. You want to enjoy more resources? Pay for it. That money will go to those who have left over. So the rich people can have all the shit they want, as long as they pay for it.

Ok, are these robots going to run on battery or just some kind of diesel engine? If they are going to run on battery, is the technology available yet, or are we so optimistic that we can solve the issue in 10 years? I'm only interested in the battery technology, this is going to make it or break it. I'm not that optimistic, unless these guys have something in the pocket that we don't know about. Until we solve the battery (or fuel cell, or whatever portable energy pack) problem, we are not going to see much of autonomous robots (save the unmanned drone, or vehicle large enough to carry a big fuel tank).

Why closing them? They should outsource/rent to the Americans, I'm sure they could make some money and create more jobs at the same time.

Don't hold your breath, this is not going to happen. There is little profit margin in selling components like this, why would the phone manufacturers get into low-margin business and abandon their high-profit business? Selling replaceable components means that users are going to hold on to their longer, and replace it less. Where's the profit in that the manufacturers? Their job is to dump a new phone model on the market every 3 months, rinse and repeat.

Dave Feldman, please speak for yourself only, ok? Please continue to use your fruity device, choice is good for us, I like it that way, thank you.