It's the good ones. The bad ones can't set up a back door, or subtly corrupt data, and haven't frobbed any SSL keys.

Smaller, lighter cars would be perfectly safe if they didn't have to share the road with freight. Put it back on trains, river barges or even delta dirigibles, and we could lower the safety standards for cars. Of course the next step is to get rid of the Canyonero-class (http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/Canyonero) SUVs, and how do mobile homes, boat trailers, etc. get around?

... only put 1000 of these on newsstands in NY and LA. Nothing in flyover country, nothing for subscribers.
I've been looking all over for one of these for tinkering -- should be possible to sideload an app at the very least, and it looks like a spare BB trackball might make navigation of menus possible (I think I have an old Crackberry floating around here somewhere).

If nothing else, this looks like a fun device to hack: break it, and you've lost a few bucks at worst, and the LiON battery alone is worth the magazine cost.

Go watch Robot and Frank, great movie, even if it's pretty obvious that the assistance robot is a person in a robot suit.
http://robotandfrank-film.com/

As a customer needing support, using the live chat depends on what I need.
If I have to convince someone that something is wrong, like a service level not being met, or anything that I expect to escalate to a supervisor, I'm going to want a live person on a phone.
If I have to explicitly spell something out, like my name, I'm happier to use the live chat... but I seem to be able to type about eight or nine times faster than most support staff. Waiting for a reply from the point when it says "Bob is typing..." can be painful.

A game of solitaire tends to be required accompaniment to any live chat support session.

Whoops, forgot Garth Nix: Sabriel is one of the best fantasies I've read, and treats its magic very seriously, very technological. The Keys to the Kingdom is a series my wife loved (I haven't gotten to it).

Some of the classics of SF are awfully dated: theirs are futures which didn't happen. Because of that, Asimov, Heinlein, Andre Norton, Williams and Abrashkin's "Danny Dunn" and other juveniles of that time may be hard to swallow. I'd say that CS Lewis falls in the same category.

Daniel Pinkwater is a genius, with books for all ages:Tooth-Gnasher Superflash is a picture book about test-driving a car, and hopefully it flies and eats other cars; Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy from Mars is about the strangeness of growing up. You can't go wrong with one of his books.
Roald Dahl, while written half a century ago, hold up pretty well: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a good gateway drug, and Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is a little more SFnal
Orson Scott Card's "Ender's Game" is a tough read for a youngster -- be available for the reader, answer questions, help them along. Some object to Card's politics, and his psychology of cruelty, but it's still a darn good read.
Lois McMaster Bujold's "The Warrior's Apprentice" may be a little old for an 8-year-old, but not by much. It's a modern space opera, about someone older but not bigger than an 8-year-old.
Scott Westerfeld's "Leviathan", "Peeps" and "Uglies" series are perhaps aimed more at teens, but don't get too adult. His wife, Justine Larbalester, writes great fantasy (How to Ditch your Fairy, Liar).
Clive Barker's "Abarat" is sort of an Oz/Wonderland inside-out. Yes, the creator of Pinhead can write kid-safe stuff too. But oops, that's fantasy too.
China Mieville's "Railsea" is getting great press, but I haven't had a chance to read.
Paulo Bacigalupi's "Shipbreaker" is another I haven't read yet
Adam Rex's "The True Meaning of Smekday" is one my wife enjoyed a lot
Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother" might work well, if you don't mind your 8-year-old becoming an activist ;^)

Well, selling what you design might be a little tough.
First off, like cell phones, these things are going to be tied up in all sorts of patents (sure, not as many, but yes, there's going to be license fees).
Second, and the biggie, depending on the type of hearing aid, it requires either a simple 510K filing or a whole Premarket Authorization (PMA), which means clinical trials, proof of efficacy, etc. These are medical devices, and subject to regulation. It's what stops people from selling snake-oil medicines and smartphone apps that cure acne.

Read the FDA regulations: http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/DeviceRegulationandGuidance/GuidanceDocuments/ucm127086.htm
It's not cheap to get those done -- there are user fees of $500K and higher for FDA filings.

If all you learn is computer programming, that's all you can do. And you can learn computer science and programming on the net at least as effectively and swiftly on the net. So don't waste your time and precious tuition on that. Join an open-source project and prove you have skills and experience instead of book learning.

Learn a subject matter: biology/pharmacology, and you'll be of interest to the pharmaceutical industry; physics and you'll be useful for games; business and project management and you're useful to everybody; some other form of engineering so you can make the engineers more effective.

If all you know is computer science, you're only useful as a grunt that I'm going to work hard, and never will advance to analysis, subject matter expertise, etc.

Length is still a problem: Did I put spaces between each word? Did I capitalize some of the words?
A reasonable compromise, which still defeats most dictionary attacks is to acronymize your phrase:

"Purple Elephants make for a rough Work Day" becomes PEmfarWD. It sill has problems with caps -- make a rule like adjectives and nouns get capitalized, and you may be OK.

It beats the living snot out of the standard soft keyboard, and may be faster than the slider keyboard on my Moto Droid, except that I can use *two* thumbs on the slider.
I haven't yet gotten used to the right actions to say, "no, it's not one of those eight words" without having to reswype the whole word -- annoying on lengthy words. It's accuracy is pretty darn good anyway, even if I swerve because I'm going the wrong way toward a letter, it often gets the right word.

Only app I haven't gotten it to work on is Twisty, an interactive fiction interpreter -- it would be a big help there.

If DRM tools read these signatures properly, it should be possible to avoid some of the issues now where you can't copy your own videos, or play a DVD you made of your own band on a DVD player, etc.
I'm hopeful there is a signature type of "unsigned" or "Creative Commons" or other ways of saying, "Yes, darn it! Copy me!"

On the other hand, it's more likely that media players will be created that won't play anything that doesn't have a valid signature

I don't see this -- in the long run -- increasing the (cough) security of the media providers. Re-encoding an entire vid with new signatures, after pirating, bowdlerizing, excising, parodying, etc. will just be an annoying step in the process.
Here's the fun part: wait until a network finds they can't trim language, nudity, blood, etc. out of a movie they want to air in prime time, and half the TVs refuse to air it because it's been edited!

The original models of the TiVo used a (cludgy) IR repeater to drive sat and cable boxes, and knew how to work with DirecTV.
The first HD DVRs for DirecTV were TiVo units, and were wonderful (but slow. Then again, the DirecTV boxes they're still leasing aren't much faster at GUI).

Then the two companies feuded, probably not just because TiVo signed a deal to provide cable HD boxes.

HD DirecTiVos still get a decent price on eBay, although they no longer can receive premium channels such as HBO, since D* moved them to a different sattelite frequency band and codec.

Everything points to a new DirecTV TiVo box coming this year (but they said that last year too), but reports are that it'll be a premium over the current DirecTV DVR fee. It'll have to be spectacular to be worth it -- I get most of my entertainment on Netflix streaming through my Blurry player anyway.

Oh, I'm _very_ good at it.
I usually meet or beat my estimates to accomiplish the specifications listed.
It's two things that can screw up a schedule:
1) The specifications are just not enough, and more really needs to be done to make it usable, and I want to do the right thing
2) The specifications are exactly what the customer asked for, but not what they want *now*
3) Documentation
4) Bad math

On the other hand, the UI for the setup program for iBaby is a [u]lot[/ul] more fun than the iBaby app itself.
Just click cancel before installation completes, or make sure that Wife 1.0 has a firewall.