The IRS would refund the difference. (Assuming they caught the mistake)

Isn't mars in our 'goldilocks zone'? But because it doesn't have a magnetosphere it can't sustain an atmosphere against solar winds? (Not sure, just something I remember reading about). If so, how do we know the odds of habitability of planets in the zone? Couldn't it be that, yes, they do need to be in that zone to support life, but only 1% of planets in that zone have other factors that contribute to that support? (Like a magnetosphere)

While I agree for the most part, the critical exception is that [most] of the android phones don't have to use the single all-powerful app store, you can still install apps from anywhere. (There are exceptions to even this, though)

Well, they probably did test, but their testing apparently included a case that looked like the iphone 3gs to hide the fact that someone was out using a new iPhone. I'm wondering if that's why they didn't discover the issue sooner. None of the testers were using bare phones.

I think the issue is not that we're bad at security, it's just that attacks are cheap, so you need the virtual equivalent of fort knox security on every webserver. That sort of thing isn't feasible.

The lock on my house isn't 100% secure, but a random script kiddie isn't pounding on it 24/7, so it's good enough.

I could see mandatory automated interstate driving. That might be a reasonable compromise, while eliminating a huge bottleneck in most cities. Plus it's probably a much easier problem to solve.

But you can only play free iphone games on an iphone. You could (theoretically) play free flash games on any phone. Apple wants the lock-in more than anything else.

Problem is that it only increases AFTER it is thrown away. Until you do that it is an almost useless piece of junk.

I think that may have whooshed on you, which is understandable if you've never seen the Zero Punctuation videos. The voiceovers of the videos are delivered by an ornery English-born Australian EXTREMELY rapidly, and often end with an emphatic non-sequitur.

A good Ask Slashdot... how does one quickly and securely wipe a pile of hard drives? As for the old memory, one can make money on it if their timing is right. Good old Rambus RAM sold for a pretty penny when the 5 people still using those machines wanted more RAM.

The problem is that local politics is VERY corrupt. It is very hard to influence local politics, since most voters just vote party line. Your ability to actually impact an election is small - as odd as that might seem.

All the geeks on the internet can speak with a loud voice at the national level. All the geeks in Folksville, IN would be 1-2 people most likely - good luck having an impact with that.

Virtually all SD card readers are attached to a USB port, so An SD card cannot be a faster solution than USB. I don't think I have ever seen even one SD card reader on a PC that was not attached via USB. The "built in" SD card readers are just attached to the USB header pins directly on the mother board.

Not sure if it's possible, but I'm guessing that if one added a graphics card, then the processing power of the graphics portion of the CPU could be used for other things. Granted, I wouldn't expect CUDA type performance, but I'd think a few new instructions that allowed programmers to specifically target unused graphics units for processing SIMD instructions would be welcome. Same thinking goes for the AMD chips. Basically an either-or choice: all-in-one chip, or increased computational power... which are generally markets which don't overlap.

Has anyone seen any patent filings related to something like this?

They don't even get to listen to iPods that are made next store in another sweatshop!