It took the US government to end enforced landline phone rentals and open up the analog telephone network in 13 F.C.C.2d 420.

With today's moves towards "deregulation" I don't think we'll see the cell industry being forced to do anything similar in the near future.

Another funny point is if you were to disassemble PhysX's "GPU acceleration," you'd find that it runs very few kernels on the GPU, and that they're quite simple. What you'd also find is that there are two CPU codepaths: a non-optimized CPU codepath, and an optimized CPU codepath. The optimized CPU codepath is only taken when using the nVidia "GPU" code (which really hardly uses the GPU) - the performance improvement gained from "using the GPU" is really gained from using a non-gimped codepath!

"Standard HTML" is sort of an oxymoron.

Yes, you can do a lot of what's done on the web in "standard" HTML - but then you have to wrangle it into every "standard" browser, which turns out to be subtly different and full of bugs compared to the next.

It's not even possible to point the finger straight at Microsoft any more - Firefox has its fair share of bugs and an awful lot of non-standard DOM extensions, and every browser disables and enables a certain feature which the next supports. Support is even added and removed in certain browser sub-patchlevels and revisions - for example Safari suddenly started supporting certain DOM load events in a random security patch due to a merge of upstream WebKit.

Flash provides a common platform on which layout, interpretation, and feature support is similar (nearly identical) across all browsers on most platforms, something no other web programming solution can do.

Unfortunately that common platform isn't very good, but the homogeneity it allows is the continuing, and probably lasting appeal.

Many old datacenters have a pond and a fountain out front - and the pond isn't just to be pretty. They run the water into the fountain, and its trip thru the air cools it as it heads back into the pond.

Throwing in a shameless plug for a game I worked on - Powder Toy ( http://powder.unaligned.org/ ) - it may not be physically accurate (at all) but it's a lot of fun and would introduce them to pressure and velocity in a fun way.

Uhh... that's assuming the feds can't reverse-engineer worth a crap when they want to get a conviction. Seeing as how I know feds who can, this is wrong.

Once they've siezed the laptop (which I guess they've decided they can do now), they can do whatever they want with the drive image, including disassembling whatever boot code you had "hiding" your "hidden" partition. You need something that only -you- know, that's in your head, somewhere they can't yet reverse-engineer legally - we generally call this thing a password.

And therefore guaranteed to never receive a response!
I don't think I -ever- check my voicemail unless I've accidentally missed a call I know is important, and almost nobody I know checks theirs on their personal cell either.
Text messaging has replaced leaving voicemail for reminders and invitations, as it's much easier and more convenient.
I think this is a service far past its time. Maybe it would have been useful in the 90s.
Work is different, but this isn't exactly targeted at businesspeople.