Don't worry, it doesn't seem like those devices were modified at all.

My Xperia Z Ultra is already waterproof and both has capacitive touch and resistive touch, so I can write on it with a standard pen or pencil. The only thing they seem to have added is an extra case, which is probably unnecessary as well, my Z Ultra doesn't look like it, but it's basically indestructible.

A pen and paper is nice, but you still need someone to enter that data into a database of some kind. Especially with Ebola, you don't want the notes to be left in a drawer somewhere in a foreign hospital waiting for someone to type up. Also with a tablet, you can annotate your notes with pictures and videos.

That being said, all of this is most likely a PR move from Sony. Undoubtedly, they gave those tablets to MSF for free. In exchange, MSF can say they're using it, which will be true initially, but in fact, most of those devices will be stolen, or will have disappeared, after a week or two. After all, it's not like these doctors from Medecins Sans Frontieres will be staying in five star hotels in Africa, they will have to go where the poor people are. And to a poor person in Africa, the value of an Xperia device is the equivalent of a couple years of wages.

I don't think anyone can accuse iOS's shrinking marketshare of being a monopoly. They're currently second and they will stay second for a long time.

How did you not know??? Seriously? It's a given that their own sites take precedence in the results.

This is a far cry from what Yahoo was doing ten years ago when they were ranking search results that were only tangentially related to your search because 3rd parties paid them to.

Hopefully, all your music is legal and your ebook titles don't sound suspicious.

This can be fully automated. In the UK, I recall they recorded the entire hard drive of your laptop. They said this was a measure against pedophiles, although this policy seems to only have affected a couple of reporters as far as I can tell. They never did this to me when I entered the UK.

This is in contrast with France.

At least, the French make a copy of your hard drive when you don't know they're doing it. Waiting until you've left your hotel room, or waiting until you've fallen asleep, is much less obtrusive.

Your calculation implies that everyone replaces their car within a 5 year period.

That may be true in Beverly Hills, but it's certainly not true in the rest of the US.

In any case, I find your optimism unjustified.

In the Bay Area for instance, we could already make BART trains fully automated, and it's been studied they would become safer to boot, but attempting to change that system to get rid of the operators would be absolute political suicide.

Does it really matter in this case?

Non-competes in other states are enforced by the government, and therefore are much more widespread and effective than a criminal conspiracy of some of the big players.

Youtube doesn't have ads when you watch Khan videos.

I suppose Youtube could still track you, but the same could be said of any video you watch on the internet.

If governments and institutions really wanted to slow down the fragmentation of the English language, then they would just standardize on American Los Angeles Hollywood English.

As it stands, most people are selfish and most people are the center of their own little worlds. They're perfectly willing to make their own dialect the new standard that everybody else has to abide to, especially to get jobs and government benefits, they're perfectly willing to make their language a marker of group identity and group pride, but they're unwilling to change their own language when it is found that another dialect is becoming the new standard.

A perfect manifestation of this kind selfishness is the British queen. Why can't she just learn proper Hollywood english like everybody else? She's just holding her own people back if she continues on this path.

The intent is not to prevent cheating. The intent is to only prevent the appearance of cheating. The intent is to prevent students from talking about the test after they've taken it and after they've gotten out of school already. Apparently, Pearson is cutting corners by selling the same test to all the schools no matter what time zone they're located in, or on what day the test is administered, which is the real problem here.

And so instead of revising its business model, it's spying on students and urging schools to penalize students when they're found to be talking about the test publicly online. Never mind, that they have no way to monitor private messages, or private emails, or other private communications, so their real intent here is to prevent the appearance of cheating, not the cheating itself -- which will continue underground because of the inherent flaw in their system.

Hopefully, your ISP isn't Comcast.

Comcast has blocked access to "HBO Go" on Amazon, Roku, and Sony Playstation. It's likely that they'll block "HBO Now" on Apple TV as well. That's actually one of the reasons HBO made this three-months exclusivity deal with Apple, because it's hoping that Comcast backs down against Apple.

If Comcast doesn't back down, I guess you'll be stuck watching Game of Thrones just like the rest of us through your TV screen via your computer, because Comcast doesn't block computers, it just blocks specialized TV devices.

You're implying that pilots are all commercial pilots, when in fact many pilots are actually just private pilots. Private pilots are not even allowed to charge passengers for their own expenses as pilots. The most they can do is an even split of direct expenses (not indirect ones) making sure that they can never make any money on a particular plane-pooling or a plane-sharing arrangement

Yes, but he is a registered ad affiliate of Youtube. In other words, he has given his name, his mailing address, and his social security number in the hope of one day, having enough subscribers and viewers to receive an actual check through the mail.

From his own attorney:

Granted, the number of video views hasn't met the minimum threshold to be cut an actual check yet, but his intent is there. And the fact that he hasn't cancelled his affiliate status with Youtube yet, which would solve the entire problem in one swoop without needing to delete his existing channel, just means that he's hoping to generate enough page views through an artificially created controversy.

Yes, Chelsea/Bradley Manning is having a great time of it.

It's really cool to be a journalistic martyr and have all the accolades. I'm told the suicide watch time period of his life was his/her favorite part.

And yet, leaks still happen.

Stopping wikileaks was about as successful as plugging a failed river damn with half a square of toilet paper.

The US may have gotten its childish revenge, but this kind of treatment only pushed a future whistleblower like Snowden to work for our enemies.

Assuming that research says one day that foot massages have the same effect as placebo, or have the same effect as just resting your feet, no more and no less, at least not anything that can be effectively measured objectively on the longterm health of people, I guess that you would consider therapeutic foot massage establishments unethical as well. Because obviously, the customer is not always right, the customer can't be trusted to evaluate his own feelings objectively, and that we should probably shut down all establishments that only make people feel better and do not *treat* anything else.

Here is an answer from someone on Quora.

If it still is the case that Dropbox uses S3 itself, then that wouldn't make business sense for them to pay more for storage than they're charging their own customers (even if they've decided not to offer a Service Level Agreement).

So my guess is that this has to do with the way they count the storage for customers. Assuming that their customers do not encrypt their data before they place it on DropBox (which would make sense because DropBox customers are rarely CIOs themselves), then DropBox is most likely hashing the content and only storing a single copy of a file even if there are thousand virtual instances of that same file throughout their system.

Also note that in the special case where a company is footing the bill and DropBox can't count the same file multiple times within that same company, otherwise the customer company would complain, then DropBox actually advertises a rate of $15 per 5 terabytes per month per user (with no Service Level Agreement of any kind even for business users).