Korean crash test safety is a joke, they only hold up in the specific crash orientations tested.

new shiny bites you in the ass with the unexpected.

BS, we have new shiny at work, the biting in the ass was entirely expected, as was the catastrophic loss in functionality and performance. It's all about some stupid fuck justifying his salary to his superiors

if I had to guess the light is probably damaging a particular protein in these species, with fruit flies and mosquitoes being on the more delicate side i suspect this will not work for more solidly built species such as roaches or bedbugs.

I'm assuming O.P. is of the opinion that Bluetooth was massively over-hyped when it was first introduced to the masses (c. 2001/2002... I seem to remember seeing a ridiculous billboard promising that it would change the world, etc.). However, nobody really used it for a long time. At this point in history, USB had firmly displaced PS/2 (while slowly encroaching on other ports--audio, ethernet, etc.) and WiFi had just gotten fast with the draft g spec. BT was the new kid on the block that everybody ignored... I mean, perhaps you could get a BT-enabled wireless mouse at CompUSA, if you we were willing to pay a $15 premium over a non-BT wireless mouse.

At some point, it gained traction with high-end cellphone users (giving rise to the now-absent earbud) and slowly started appearing in other products (speakers, laptops, etc). However, I think it took the rise of smartphones (starting with Apple's iPhone in 2007) to really establish the importance and permanence of BT. Now everyone has a host device that can talk BT and its myriad of task-specific protocols (audio, HID, etc.). So now you have a real ecosystem going.

But even now it's flaky. Devices from different manufacturers don't always work well. My wife's car talk with her iphone, but loses the pairing every few days. My laptop can talk to one pair of BT headphones, but not the other. And new standards are encroaching from both ends... NFC's and QR codes for extremely short distances, MiraCast/Wi-Fi Direct for longer distances and greater volumes of data.

Don't get me wrong... Bluetooth is secure and can confidently call itself a worldbeater. But maybe not the same type of worldbeater that USB turned out to be.

until one gets fidgity and you are plugging in and removing dongles all day, or just downloading a patch from cracks.am

To beat the glut... if you wait to abandon a sinking ship, you'll be competing with your former coworkers for a new job in the local marketplace.

Of course, each situation is different, but that's one possible reason.

they already discontinued the ipod. closest thing you can get now is a Fiio and a 128 gig micro sd card

I'd forgotten what my sig was, but I'll say that my current amusement and replacement website is mostly Ello. Already becoming concerned about their lack of any apparently viable financial model... I'm sure you've all been invited already, right?

Not sure I can really claim to be a non-coder, since I was a professional database programmer for some years, but I can definitely say that I would like to contribute to Open Source and the reason I mostly don't is basically the same as why I dropped off of /. some years ago: Bad financial models. (Today's visit is too long a story.)

Let me try to clarify the problem. Microsoft produces gawdawful software. Apple is against freedom of choice. Google is blossoming as an EVIL tyrant under the new motto "All your attentions is belonging to us." However, they all have viable financial models and they are kicking the hiney of little OSS.

Constructive suggestion for you to ignore (of course): Charity share brokerage (AKA reverse auction charity shares). Sort of like Kickstarter or IndieGoGo, but with project management and clear SUCCESS criteria. If the slashdot people wanted to act as the charity brokerage, the donors would trust them to hold the money and provide lists of possible OSS projects to be implemented. If enough donors buy the shares to fund a project, then the funds would be released. (By the way, the same basic mechanism could be used for funding solution projects for problems that don't call for software solutions.)

The broker would earn a percentage mostly by making sure the project proposals are clear and complete. How many people are required and how much will they be paid? How much testing will be adequate? How will non-core contributors be rewarded? What is the schedule? What are the most likely problems and how can they be dealt with? That's to help potential donors assess the real risks. And, to my way of thinking, most important: What will success look like?

The donors (possibly even including yours truly) would basically get nothing but recognition for their donations on a project funder page. However, as minor doggie treats they should be the first people invited to use the completed software and their reviews might receive extra weight in evaluating the success (or even failure) of the project.

microsoft should buy blackberry.

MS has lots of marketing ability but shit for phone development. Blackberry's management couldn't sell crack to an addict

Sigh... if only. Unfortunately, the libertarian brand of freedom is in effect more about shifting federal power to wealthy corporations, religious institutions, and state-level control than it is about empowering individuals to have control over their own lives. There's no emphasis on education, healthcare reform, consumer protection, or intellectual property reform; there's very inconsistent support for the broad field of civil rights (including digital rights, women's rights, LGBT rights, worker's rights, immigration policy, police accountability, civil asset forfeiture reform, etc.).

They've got some good points: supporting gun rights, legalizing/decriminalizing marijuana, limiting federal power, challenging the DOD budget, and opposing pointless wars in the middle east. I give them points for wanting to confront reality on social security/medicare, even if their solution is to tear down most of the safety nets. When it comes to taxes or the environment, they seem to live in some far off fantasyland that wants to entrust our air/water/infrastructure/dignity to profit-focused institutions.

It's tainted even more by plutocrat backers that want power over others (without the pesky need to get elected) and zero taxes. But yeah, there is a core to their message that might be worth redeeming. It seems to me like they should seek out moderate democrats and try to establish a new liberalism. Maybe some progressives could acknowledge that life is just going to have some unhappy stories sometimes, and you don't need to pass a law or start a new government program everytime something on the news make you sad. Ultimately, we need both individual liberty and social responsibility.

More volatile climate in the short term as Artic Ice recedes faster. In the longer run, warmer winters than by Global Warming alone due.

Radius made for the Macintosh in the long, long ago.

They're not in the biz anymore, but you can find plenty of pivoting monitors sold by the major brands. Some of my coworkers really like having one monitor in landscape (for spreadsheets, coding, etc.) and one in portrait (for documentation, web pages, etc). If you want one, do your research: portrait mode may not support wide viewing angles well, and font rendering may be screwy (because sub-pixel rendering assumes horizontal sub-pixels, not vertical ones). Also, unlike your smartphone, pivoting monitors don't necessarily contain a sensor to automatically detect changes in orientation: you have to tell the OS to display output for you, then physically rotate the display.

Parent's exactly right.... HTML5 is significant because it's an application development platform that runs almost everywhere. Yes, there are a lot of problems with standardization, security, semantics, etc., as others in this thread have pointed out, but none of this answers the question posed by OP... you can publish an HTML5 application today and it's instantly available to be run on hundreds of millions of phones, tablets, and PC's worldwide. That's a killer feature that no other development platform provides. (No, JWS doesn't count.)