Yeah, but you could use the collected electricity to power your light bulbs!

(Just kidding.)

Windows let light in, which you'd otherwise use electricity to generate. Although the film is see-through, it must reduce the amount of incoming light. I'm not an expert, but wouldn't the effectiveness of the film increase proportionately to the amount of light it absorbed without passing through? It seems like a window is not the best place to put a solar collector, even if it is easier than installing on a roof or other surfaces.

You know that sounds like a solid idea, but I scratch my head at the specific implementation of it. If you say that internet connections for ads are a separate permission, then would Google maintain a white list of ad providers? And then for ad providers, there'd need to be some policing to check that info going to the ad servers doesn't contain personal info.

Maybe the way to handle it is to have a separate Android OS advertising API that manages the request sent to an ad provider, disallowing any possibility of sending app-specified info to the server. And then any ad provider that follows the protocol can be accessed via the advertising API with no risk of sending private info like what HTC is exposing.

For grumpy HTC owners that want to bitch a little or get them to fix things... http://www.htc.com/us/about/contact-by-email

Your point is mostly true, but I think there are legitimate cases to call out internet permissions. I have installed a password manager that doesn't have internet permissions. If it did have it, then it could send the passwords to an internet server someplace. So I honestly checked that the program did not have internet permissions, and would not have installed it if it did have them.

Yeah, there is a quote in the article "Doctors at the Edinburgh Sleep Center can't even determine what stage of sleep Hadwin is in when his creative impulses kick in." Is this just a tricky way of saying "Doctors at the Edinburgh Sleep Center didn't actually see anything matching the claim?" The dude could be faking.

I would be happier to learn that I had less choices in browsers. But that is the developer bias. Still, it seems to me that you really have to raise the bar if you want to be taken seriously, not just be Chrome+1. And I'm resistant to features which are tied in to services offered by certain companies (Facebook, Twitter) instead of just standardized services (RSS, FTP).

Larger question... would we not be better served if we started treating the browser more like a commodity item? Basic, standard features in an unglamorous browser, and... that's it. And then with a nice stable development platform that doesn't change around every 2 weeks, the real interesting features can start arriving at the web application layer. Standardize the browsers so we can forget about their individual features.

It seems like a mistake to go to some place and look for the absence of an anomaly. The burden of proof is on the one who makes the claim. You will never prove that ghosts don't exists in a house. Maybe they will be there tomorrow when you aren't around. Maybe you don't have the proper equipment to detect one.

Oh, come on. The point of doing this can only be geek joy. To say that it is a good idea to replace a musician with this is stupid. It's not about technical prowess in the end. The robot is metal (or at least comprised of it, in part). Yet it does not rock.

Uh, go get the open source and build it yourself. Why should Netflix be obliged to implement a Linux port? Not doing something is not the same as preventing it from happening.

The electric utility providers are just positioning themselves in the best possible way when they make press statements like this. They will be happy to supply the needed power and make lots of money from it. But of course, they will go on about the infrastructure investments they'll need to make. Because that makes it easier for them to benefit from government help (deregulation, tax credits, etc) and for specialized services to be sold to EV customers. I'm all for the power companies recouping their costs--I'm just not even slightly worried about them being successful here.

If you scramble the cell frequencies, that effectively means no networking capabilities for in-vehicle systems. These all go over SMS, GPRS, 3G+ packet data, and for really old crap, the voice channel with a wonky modem. So that means...

• No way for the car to report break-ins.
• No OnStar-style accident reports sending an ambulance to pick you up.
• For electric vehicles, no battery-related warnings, i.e. you forgot to plug in your car.
• No traffic data added to your route-finding.
• Lots and lots of other useful things, some of which haven't been invented yet. That driverless vehicle stuff Google's been playing with? Look for it in some other country first.

I respect the paranoia about privacy issues, and to a lesser extent, the concern over safety. But this is a big baby getting thrown out with the bathwater. Cars sold in America will suck.

Have we not yet reached a point where everyone that wants and is infrastructurally able to have access to e-mail, has got it? Are there a bunch of people that Google hasn't reached yet? Better start another GMail invite campaign, I guess.

Note that the operation was shut down and the people involved are likely going to have problems starting up a new scam now that they've got this record. And now that one group of people has been successfully stopped, it should at least push other thieves to think of a slightly different way to screw people over. I wrote a complaint to the FTC about these dicks a year ago when I got my first letter from ILS. I got angry every time I saw a letter from them. They didn't get what they deserved, but this FTC action represents progress.

"That aims to dispel the myth that some languages will guarantee that an application will be more or less secure than other languages."

Whoever said, besides your 16-year-old cousin that just figured out how to add a flaming skull animation to his MySpace page, that there is any web application programming language that will guarantee security. Sheesh.