Well, you clearly didn't RTFA. If you had, you'd have read this:

"This is not necessarily the end of the Edison Junior’s portable power project. Siminoff told me that the team will be re-focusing on a device that supports Android phones, tablets, and Apple products, if backers wish to use a Lightning-to-USB connector, or an older 30-pin connector. They’ll only build that device, however, if the crowdfunding community wants it."

The problem was that they'd promised a specific product to their backers, and they couldn't deliver it because Apple pulled the plug (pardon the pun).

Incidentally, what most people are missing is that Apple didn't prevent licensing of the lightning adapter by itself, but rather of the lightning adaptor in combination with other plug options. How crazy is that??

Ah, yes, like the way Groklaw shook its fists at that successful corporation SCO.

Indeed.

To be fair, if you choose to upload your files to Google, they'd be in a lot of trouble if they didn't have a license to host, store and reproduce them. The rest of their terms could be related to the use they make of things designed to be public, such as user-contributed translations. Google's terms of use were a lot better when there were separate terms for separate products; the enveloping of every single Google product under a single TOS (presumably to save on legal redrafting costs for each TOS) has made things seem a lot dodgier. Or it could be them being deliberately evil ... as always, we don't know. It would have been a lot more reassuring if Google had kept individual and separate TOS for all their products.

But I suspect Instagram did genuinely only intend to do what they say in TFA -- to let users willingly promote companies or products that they like. (God knows why people want to do this, but it seems clear from facebook that some people just can't get enough of being unpaid shills for products ...) Instagram got lawyers to draft their new terms of service, and those lawyers came up with the simplest terms to give Instagram the freedom to do what they envisioned. Problem is, of course, that those terms also permit an awful lot more.

Generally those pans turn out jerky rather than blurry, probably because they're often outdoor and using a faster shutter speed. But I rather like them :)

For that matter, when was the last time you heard anyone come out of a film saying, "Man, I loved the plot line, but I wish they'd shot in higher fps so that those pans weren't jerky!" Very few people even notice the jerky pans, and of those that do, I suspect a fair proportion rather enjoy them and would choose to watch a film in 24fps preferentially.

I'm really glad The Hobbit is being critically panned; if it had been a success I think a lot of studios would have latched onto 48fps in the same way as they latched onto 3D post-Avatar.

Personally I don't mind the jerky pans -- I actually quite like them. But it's fascinating that very few people have ever complained about 24fps before. One argument that's come up lately is that 24fps is slow enough to create an "otherworldly" look about films, whilst being sufficiently fast to not disrupt action sequences.

Whatever the reason, if you can get away with shooting in 24fps without people minding, isn't that argument enough to keep using it? The lower the frame rate, the smaller the data files, after all. It's a bit like bluray -- the resolution increase made no difference to most people, so nobody rushed out to adopt it and very few people care about it (current bluray disc sales are about one third of DVD sales).

Everything else Jackson's done with The Hobbit has had a mercenary motive, so I suspect that his choice of 48fps was similarly driven.

Because 24fps in a movie has no relation whatsoever to 24fps to computer games. In a movie, 24fps is shot with cameras and you get motion blur (just as you would if you take photos at a film speed of 1/24th of a second). Your brain is an amazing thing, and happily interpolates the motion blur to give a concept of smoothness. What I'd like to know is whether 48fps looks "soap opera" simply because we've conditioned ourselves to equating high fps video with the crap shows that always used it on TV, or whether there really is something magical about 24fps. I can't really see any inherrent reason why 48fps should look bad per se, even if it probably doesn't add anything much.

I do know, however, that there is no way I want to go anywhere near The Hobbit. Forget the whole 24 vs 48fps thing -- Jackson sold out big time in making three stodgy films out of one tiny, light-hearted children's book, presumably for no other reason than to rake in the extra cash. He ought to be ashamed of himself.

I think you're missing the point of Android -- it's almost certainly not a profit-making exercise. It'd be a bit difficult to suddenly start charging heaps for it, too, since it's open source and there are some huge development communities actively working on AOSP (the Cyanogenmod group being one, AOKP being another ...)

Rather, the argument goes that Android is a moat protecting Google's search castle. The revenue Google gets from its search advertising far outweighs anything else, and they want to keep their stranglehold of the market with as many different strategies as possible (G+ is another moat in this paradigm).

Google's recent ventures into hardware have been primarily aimed at kickstarting the languishing Android tablet market -- with their most recent Nexus phone, the Nexus 4, they were so unprepared for any popular demand that the thing sold out in 15 minutes around the world.

Google doesn't outsell Apple 3:1 -- Google is barely involved in hardware at all. And the Android OS itself they give away for free.

Remember that Android is just a defensive moat around Google's search empire, and Google maps is another. Google would love you to use Android, where they have more control, but what they really don't want to do is lose customers on another major platform. This way they caused maximum damage to the iPhone5 launch and the Apple brand (especially the "Apple does everything best" mentality) but probably won't lose too many users.

Nevertheless, I'm sure they'd have much rather been the default Apple mapping software on iOS, rather than have gone down this route. That they've come out OK in the end is more due to Apple's incompetence than any Googlian master stroke ...

Also, Google managed to inflict the maximum damage on the iphone5 launch and during that time launched their own sell-out phone. Seems to have all worked out very well for Google, and very poorly for Apple.

What I'd really like to know is which company held-up the release of the new Google Maps -- was it Google seeking to maximise damages, or Apple in an attempt to crash-or-crash-through? I'm sure Google could have had the app released much sooner if both parties were willing ...

HQ printing, of course ... every line printed twice, but just think of all that extra contrast.

If only we'd had a daisy-wheel ...

I'd never heard of the F2 shortcut until you just mentioned it (I've always been frustrated that you can't click again on a selected filename to rename, so thanks!) But on whichever Nautilus is running on Ubuntu 12.10, pressing F2 in list view does in fact only select the filename without selecting the extension ... very neat.

The thing I love about Unity is the ability to click on the dock icon of the program you're in and get an expose (well, Compiz would call it scale, but you know what I mean) of just the open windows of that app, which you can then individually switch to or close (right-clicking on an icon to get a new instance of the app is also rather nice). The other thing I love is the automatic Super+[1-9] application hotkeys that get assigned to the first nine apps as they appear in your dock -- it's easy enough to set up hotkeys manually, but knowing that Super+1 will switch to a terminal, Super+2 my text editor and Super+3 to the browser (all set up just by moving around the dock icons once) just makes things so easy. And of course the dash is awesome -- it learns the files I use frequently, and bringing them up with a press of the Super key followed by starting to type the name is much easier than hunting around in a file manager.

I do think that Unity was hideous until 12.04 (I switched to Mint for a year myself; I only switched back to Ubuntu because I didn't like the fugly defaults of Mint and I got sick of spending half a day making the desktop look half-decent everytime I installed Mint on a new box). Thankfully, in the year I'd been gone, Unity had changed from bastard-child to a mature power-user interface. I use the mouse a lot less and the keyboard a lot more with Unity, and that's a good thing in my eyes.

I dunno ... I really enjoyed the film and I found it a lot more nuanced than you did. In particular, I thought that while effectively conveying that war is all hell (and certainly not being in any way sympathetic to the continued presence of America in Iraq), it helped me understand why some people find conflict an intoxicating drug -- and it did so in a much more subtle way than your quote from Apocalypse Now. I found the central characters surprisingly engaging, and the tension in the film was created as much by the internal conflict between them as by their external conflict with unpredictable death. I was even more caught up in the film on a rewatch. FWIW (which may not be much), rottentomatoes seems to have agreed, giving it 97%.

What I don't understand, though, is why the studio's going after the pirates now. I understand that there was a lot of resentment from the studio that people were downloading the Hurt Locker rather than seeing it in cinemas, and I sympathise to some degree. But they're just about to release another Kathryn Bigelow film which, if it proves to be a box office success, will be so precisely because so many people downloaded the Hurt Locker and decided that they liked it. They're biting the hand that was potentially about to feed them big-time, and it seems a dumb decision commercially to attack your fan base.

I'm pretty sure any proprietary drivers have to be manually installed via the "Additional drivers" dialogue, and are not installed by default. And, let's face it -- by buying a computer with an Nvidia GPU, you were already making a statement that you didn't care about driver/hardware openness.

Yep, you sure demonstrated that there isn't any vitriol or paranoia being directed towards him ...