Yeah, this seems like a simple enough problem to solve. Well, simple for new installations.

That video, which is the first I've ever seen on this, mentions that the location is about 1,000 ft (300m) away, but it looks like the distance needs to be greater than that.

I see, so that was a change in price for illicit goods, and the safer alternative in Afghanistan is a good replacement? I don't know much about farming, but it sounds like an "everyone wins" scenario, to me. Well... everyone but the bad guys.

Fracking is a bullshit political issue now, not a technology issue. Nobody is interested in real information anymore... only rhetoric.

Curious. Doesn't the price per bag for fertilizer going from $4 to $100 make it prohibitively expensive for it's normal use as fertilizer?

Was there a considerable reduction in the number of IED's since the price skyrocketed?

No. We have no reason to think it's anything like that.

The important takeaway is that the Navy is actually checking their shit. The deficiencies in network security were found by Navy pen testers, determined to be "not severe enough to prevent the deployment", the results are classified, and they're working on improving them.

That's how things get done. Test and improve, all the time, because no part of any complex system is, or ever will be, perfect.

We know this isn't true. Look at the music industry, now look at your post, now look back at the music industry.

Is it dead? No. It's still a multi-billion dollar industry. But I can legally buy any song I want without drm. Hasn't killed them.

Wow. That escala... climaxed quickly.

Well and, what exactly is wrong with this even if it's true?

Isn't that precisely what you're supposed to do for your project? Get attention and as many eyes on the product as possible?

Besides, we're talking about 7m of content here. It's not like they're relying on BitTorrent to sell and distribute a feature film. Though with external mechanisms, that's entirely possible. It's not like we don't have private trackers and such, and guys like Louis CK have demonstrated that a little good faith effort can make non-DRM'd content a financially viable product.

This is why we can't have nice things.

No. What you're actually advocating is making legal content inaccessible only to the niche you're in, by exclusion, for the sake of ideology.

DRM will exist in most legitimate channels. That's a fact of life for the next 5+ years, yet. The option right now is whether or not you want it to work everywhere.

I'm genuinely curious, since that was about the worst sales pitch ever, what makes a wholly inferior smartphone from '09 the best phone in '13.

Believe it or not, people care about different things.

I use the hell out of my smartphones, but I've yet to need more than a few gig of local storage. I just don't use my phones to hold my entire music and movie collections, even if I have the option.

And given how many smartphones do not have card slots, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it isn't necessarily a make-or-break feature.

Nobody has to look too far to understand why the Simpsons is still on. They told us...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZwgu8_b0Vw

If you want one that has stayed funny, I still think South Park is fantastic. I never really thought Family Guy was so great though, so I guess I'm a bit of an odd duck.

You can probably count on one hand all the directly life critical software running as a regular app on XP, in the whole world.

It's very unlikely there's anything at the eye doctor's office that falls in that category. This is a case of simple vendor lock-in. That's all.

If your software is so insanely mission critical (running on XP?) that a driver certification issue is a major legal liability, then you've already built the cost of hw/sw into the cost of doing business, and you pay the $10k for the new stuff.

More than likely, in situations as described by the OP, your customer database isn't so ridiculously fanciful or connected to anything life-saving, and it's actually a non-issue. Test it in compatibility mode, and if that doesn't work, look for a solution that isn't going to come with absurd vendor lock-in.