All their ads that I've seen for the surface just show people making a single swipe or the yellow pages walk on the screen to move some generic-looking boxes around. They haven't really shown what would set it apart from the less-expensive iPad, aside from it's irritating ability to attract hordes of annoying dancing teens and young adults (okay, that's not a difference at all) and the detachable keyboard.

I'm not going to be inclined to want to buy something if I don't see something about it that makes it better in SOME way than the less expensive competition (besides trying to outdo Apple in the insult-my-intelligence-through-advertising department). From the commercials I have no idea what the freaking thing does or is good for, besides switching keyboards (and STDs?) with strangers and making clicking sounds.

> (ex-patriot)

An ex-patriot is someone who no longer feels a strong support for his or her country.

An expatriate (in abbreviated form, expat) is a person temporarily or permanently residing in a country and culture other than that of the person's upbringing.

Spelling does matter.

You just need enough people to send several of their friends a text message of six random words picked from the dictionary every few hours. This will turn anything but plain admissions of guilt into meaningless drivel as far as law enforcement goes, and de-automates the codebreaking measures needed to make certain that some kind of code system isn't being used - since computers aren't good for extracting semantic information out of conversations. On top of that, it would cause a large increase in the amount of data that would need to be stored, making it an unjustifiable financial burden (as well as a nightmare for wholesale data mining).

That doesn't make you an asshole, it makes you my hero. Along with everyone else who rightly resists encroaching authoritarianism. We really need to teach people better about not making decisions based on fear - it tends to disable the critical thinking mechanisms.

try to live up to your expectations. Seriously, are they doing this because they think the kids are stupid, or because the adults running their programs ARE stupid?

don't forget shooting your lawyer friend in the face with a shotgun - and convincing him to apologize to you for it. That's a hobby that we really need politicians to do less of.

I seem to remember that the trade name Macintosh was in use by someone else before Apple's computer to follow the Lisa came out, and that didn't really stop them from steamrollering him. My recollection is a little hazy, but I think the guy that owned it was not willing to sell out - not that Jobs would let something like that stop him.

mainly all of the above with the exception of cowboyneal and anything with the word mild in it. Natural heat is great, but sometimes I just have to add some powdered ghost chilis to really give it a kick.

These devices need a difference in temperature, so in use they actually have heat sinks of their own on the cool end of them - they sit between a heat source and the heat sink, but I don't know that they'd conduct enough heat to the heat sink to be used on something like a processor. The use of thermoelectrics isn't new - much of the equipment the astronauts used on the moon were powered by RTGs, and the CIA lost some spy equipment in India that was spying on the Chinese back in '64 ( http://www.damninteresting.com/spies-on-the-roof-of-the-world/ ).

In my opinion, odds are better that you'll be screwed than that you'll get your goods. I tried buying a fan for an older laptop through that site, and 2 years later it still hasn't arrived. The site hasn't responded to any of my complaint emails, and their "escrow" procedures are a joke. I responded to their initial delivery confirmation request email by telling them the goods had not arrived and the tracking number they provided had never been heard of by the shipping company; and the following day I got a notification that since the delivery was confirmed, they were releasing payment to the vendor.

Plagiarism is representing someone else's writing as your own. By putting it in quotes or quote markup, you're indicating that you didn't write it. If slashdot was a reporting organization or a school instead of a discussion forum we might want to consider that, but since it's not - there's no good reason for it. We don't need to reproduce the effort of the work already done by the authors in TFA.

Likewise, how can a camera have a 1 in 1,000,000 false positive rate? That makes as much sense as "how many miles per gallon does your phone get?" This is probably the author including the processing software that analyzes the pictures taken by the camera?