Apple:
- Not the first smartphone
- Not the first touch phone
- Not the first MP3 player
- Not the first GUI
- Not the first All-In-One
- Not the first platform for media production
- Not the first selling media

Apple's strength was, under Jobs, an impeccable sense of timing to enter the market, and marketing. They were great at making people think they were innovating, and made hundreds of billions doing it. There's nothing wrong with that except that they fundamentally weren't innovating, and they're not so good at the timing or marketing sans Jobs.

Google, on the other hand, is a train wreck of a company in desperate need of Ritalin. They throw large sums of money at ideas, other companies, and markets and pretty much nothing sticks except the things that drive more ad revenue. Things wither and die on the vine, and eventually are shed when the next shift in upper-management power comes along.

The signature has never been intended to be a form of identification, which is why Visa and MC tell merchants not to require or ask for it for small purchases

Chip+PIN was never brought to the US for one simple reason -- it slows down transactions. That's why the major networks are all requiring *less* signatures, not more. They want it to be super fast to swipe your card and go.

Chip+Signature eliminates the vast majority of credit card fraud, without a change in people's behavior or experience. Skimming and cloning, or large scale theft like Target had are eliminated. There's very little real fraud that happens with people physically stealing a card.

Except the transition dates were laid out over a year ago. Has absolutely nothing to do with Target.

Which is okay, as US cards are going Chip+Signature, not Chip+PIN.

It also looks very different if you sort them by name:

Apache
Google
Microsoft
nginx

If Nest owners could only be so lucky.

More likely they'll go a couple years, realize its not of any use, and shut it down.

Does it matter, relative to the story?

The one thing it couldn't be is wind -- air is far too thin. Dust moves, but even in massive wind, bigger rocks wont.

Running wires is easy, and there's virtually nothing to go wrong.

When you're dealing with HVAC, simple is king.

Actually, it is... and even Nest can't manage to do it right. There's quite a large number of issues with the second generation Nest units failing -- and failing "on".

A thermostat should never, under any circumstances, be able to fail "on". That's a fundamental flaw.

The kid is 3. He's not a moviegoer. The GP said its a win for moviegoers, not for the guy's family.

As a moviegoer who has no relation in any form with the victim, by any calculus if it makes people who think its okay to act like dicks think twice about being dicks, then it is, in fact, a win for me.

Once you've crossed the "root" security boundary, its just as easy to access the raw memory in Linux as it is in Windows.

And its not hard to elevate to those rights on either platform. Vulnerabilities exist on everything.

That's completely unrelated to the Telco white pages. That's a data mining site like all the other people finders, aggregating public records with equally poor accuracy.

A quick search shows 90% of the info they have on me in their "teaser" is wrong, and they claim to have my phone number, which they definitely do not. There's a hundred other sites just like that.

White pages tended to be limited to your town, or a small part of your town. Not, you know, 500 million people.

That's a different ATT. This is talking about mobile data caps. They're sibling subsidiaries, but not the same company. If you don't like what ATT is doing, you can switch to Verizon or T-Mobile. They cover almost all the same areas.