Let's agree on this.
* Bombing people with nukes is bad.
* Shooting civilian aircraft out of the sky is also bad.

No amount of excuses are going to make the above good, and neither one of those unrelated incidents justifies the other.

Ah yes, the Intel compiler. Wasn't that also known as the compiler that "cripplied" performance for many AMD systems, by ignoring capabilities flags and instead looking for a "GenuineIntel" processor...

Yeah, that sounds like a great alternative to GCC.

See also many other links. I'll stick with GCC, thanks. At least the GCC team doesn't have a vested interest in f***ing over other hardware vendors.

I own a Z10 as well. Not sure what you're raving about battery-wise. It will (barely) survive a weekend with basically no use, which is better than other phones but still not saying much.

Unless they're using logic similar to internet /w Netflix, in which case the towers may be congested due to being poorly maintained/upgraded (to be fail, cellular infrastructure seems better in this regard)

A certain internet company in eastern Canada appears to have already done that, except back in the days of torrents. If you torrented, suddenly yours speeds dropped dramatically (regardless of whether the torrent was anywhere near to using your capacity).
That was annoying enough, but then when most torrent streams started getting encrypted etc, they started doing it for SSH traffic on non-standard ports.
Everything would be working just fine until I opened an SSH connection/tunnel to work, and then suddenly *all* my connections would plummet in speed.

If your security consists of
a) A poorly maintained barb-wire fence
b) A gate manned by a 75-year-old semi-dead/blind security guard named fred

And records are stored in a big box just inside an unlocked door easily accessible to anyone, then yes... they would be responsible.

It's not that they weren't a "victim" of hacking, it's that their terrible data retention and security practises put customer-data at risk and enabled the hacking.

A common (generally mild) side effect is dry eyes, especially recently after the surgery, but often for longer time periods as well. I have enough issues with dry eyes due to allergy/hayfever, so I'd really hate to aggravate the situation. Of course, I'm lucky enough to only need glasses for driving in the later hours, so I'm not wearing them constantly anyhow.

The second would be that it would screw up my near-vision for reading in the future, meaning I'd need reading glasses (probably more often than I need driving glasses). One solution would be to only laze one eye , but that takes longer to adjust too and I'm not sure it's worth it.

One of the reasons these would be awesome on Linux:
* PXE boot game environments

There are a surprising number of people who enjoy playing nostalgia games. I have a PXE server which - through some custom scripts - loads the appropriate fglrx/nvidia driver and the loads a custom GUI with various games. There are some native linux games but most are loaded through wine and do a lot of trickery involving COW filesystems and a remote DB to get a unique (legit) serial key loaded on individual machines for net-play.
The linux-native games tend to be a lot easier to get up and running, and have less issues than the wine games. Thus far I've got BF1942, C&C3, UT4, DN3D, iWAR and various other "classics."
I'd love to see these games with native Linux support so I can avoid all the complications and bugs with wine. It would make "classic game night" so much more fun...

Yeah. Emulators for disc-based systems will often read original disks (although to be fair, they often do tend to work better with ISO's).
For a GB hack, it would cool to see this with something like a USB/serial interface to the original cart slot.

Agent Smith, we need to be on the watch for these pathogens entering our soil. Here, open this bottle and take a sniff. Note the scene. If you detect any of these while on shift, please inform your superior immediately.

Now, please report to quarantine room C for the next 36 hours....

I don't get it. Samsung, Sony, etc have Blu-ray players, they've got Android phones, why not combine both technologies into one awesome media box?

So I got to thinking... "surely somebody has thought of/tried this somewhere by now"

I've found this thus far. It says it supports 3d blu-ray and menus... though I don't see where you would insert the discs (hopefully it's not just for rips)

That used to be the advantage of cheap DVD players too.
The bigger brand names respected region encoding, un-skippable previews/warnings, etc. The cheaper ones were sometimes a bit noisy (parts movement) but generally they didn't bother to implement "features" such as region-lock or unskippable sections, which actually made them more useful.

There don't seem to be as many off-brand Blu-ray players, especially if you want one with Netflix etc. I'd love to see an android-based system which combines something like a Minix X8 or Asus Cube and a Blu-ray. Bonus points if somebody could come up with a blu-ray "shell" which basically includes the drive, power, and infrared remote but allows an upgradable android core for the advanced OS features. It shouldn't be hard to have something which just plugs into the base for power and connects to the drive via a OTG interface. The biggest issue is probably stuff like the Java and copy protection/licensing crap.

Also, how much of said "private data" is actually harvested the phone itself, other than perhaps location data?
Gmail: That goes to Goog's servers before your phone
Talk: Same thing
Contacts: Can be kept on just the phone without sync (for that matter, sync can be toggled on/off for most things)
Browsing history: Do they get anything if you use firefox instead of chrome, and/or don't sync bookmarks?
Maps/Latitude: Location stuff can be turned off

Most of the ways they can get information *from* the phone seem inherent in the functionality being used: i.e. use of gmail, maps, etc

It would be interesting to learn what data is being "sync'ed" beyond that needed to get the functionality out of the given apps.

Or just turn off all location services. On every phone I've got, it's usually a question during the initial installation process.