It doesn't matter what the users want. It matters what the advertisers want. They want a big screen with room for ads.

This is especially true of Android, since Google gets their revenue from ads, not phones or phone software.

Over half the Bitcoin exchanges have gone bust. Entire Bitcoin "stock exchanges" disappeared with the money. Bitcoin "investments" promising substantial returns each month were, of course, Ponzi schemes.

Bitcoin is a scam magnet. Irrevocable, remote, anonymous money transfers are the scammer's dream. (Yes, there are people talking about cryptographic escrow schemes so you can buy something with Bitcoins and have some recourse if it doesn't show up. So far, that hasn't reached usability.)

That's why Bitcoin needs regulation. If you're going to hold other people's money, you have to be regulated. Deal with it.

Hollow out Nokia until its just a shell valuable only for its IP, transfer everything else worth keeping into Microsoft proper and discard the rest. Wouldn't be surprised if the "Nokia" brand gets sold onto to some Asian / Indian outfit in a few years hence.

If it's unreachable code then it is indicative of a bug - someone has written code which they *think* does something but doesn't do anything. Now perhaps the programmer deliberately commented something out or surrounded with an "if (false)" block but even so at the very least the compiler should generate a warning and in some cases an error.

Let's see this list of spyware. Will Google kick them out of the Android store? Will the FBI prosecute the developers for "exceeding authorized access" under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act? If not, why not?

When it's time for an asteroid mission, it will probably be robotic.

It's amazing how much money NASA can spend not going into space.

It's one of those "flexible funding" Indiegogo projects, where they get to keep the money even if they don't get enough money to make anything. Great scam; just come up with some popular idea, overprice the project, and keep the money.

If you want more servers like that, Wierd Stuff Warehouse in Sunnyvale, CA, has the same HP series G Xeon servers for $189. (2 3GHz quad-core Xeons per server! Hard drives are extra, but cheap.) Wierd Stuff has huge supplies of previous-generation data center equipment.

It's amazing how cheap computer hardware is now.

Reality check: space travel with chemical fuels just barely works. It takes huge rockets to launch dinky payloads, and that hasn't improved in 45 years. Satellites and probes are useful. Man in space has just been a boondoggle.

If fusion ever works, this may change, but with chemical rockets, it's not getting much better.

Right, that was when AdBlock sold out to Google.

That building complex was overhauled in 1997 by Inglett & Stubbs electrical contractors, who did $14 million of electrical work. This failure may or may not be their fault, but it's not because of neglected infrastructure.

Now, at last! Google People! In cooperation with the Venter Institute.

Amazon isn't out of expansion area. Their target is all of retail, and there's still a lot of non-Amazon retail. Most other big US companies with lots of cash have hit their natural limits.

Trying to go beyond those limits is tough. Google has not been successful in expanding beyond ads. (Android only makes money as an ad platform; Google's phone revenue is small.) Apple has a lot of cash, but can't find any way to use it that will yield the kind of margins Apple is used to. Facebook is still growing, but again, it's all ads.

There's only so much ad spending in the world, and the ad-based companies are all fighting over the same pot. There's more room to grow when your business model is "sell everything".

False security. If you're paranoid that Dropbox sends your password back then you shouldn't be using it at all. Period. It wouldn't be hard for them to infer that the frequently changing, fixed size random file they were stashing was a truecrypt volume and for them to enumerate the mount points to see what was in it.

Please read what I wrote. Dropbox could offer to encrypt a protected folder. By default that could be passphrase based encryption. The encryption could be pluggable to allow other forms of encryption. The passphrase based encryption source / algorithm could be submitted for review.