Nah this is just Sony Electronics wanting to leverage their entertainment holdings to sell TVs and PLayers with proprietaty formats while Sony Entertainment wants to maximize sales. Or maybe I got it backward. Anyhow lots of diversified companies have internal conflicts. The IBM PC which uses all non-IBM parts was not made by the primary Computer division at IBM. Samsung also has internal competition with conflicting objectives,

except a lot of places now won't roll the video if the ad is also blocked.

it's the surveillance I don't like. In theory this surveillance is supposed to get me relevant ads but it just creeps me out with it's persistence. I don't really need relevant ads ever. What I actually like is being exposed to lots of different ads. It gives me a sense of what the world is up to in a way. SO I don't mind the ads. It's not like TV ads that I have to wait through. they are just off to the side. What I don't want therefore is the surveillance. it has negative value to me. I don't want targeted ads.

If I could be sure I could be surveillance free I'd pay $230. But I don't see how that is possible. How would I know? where does one draw the line-- things like cookies for sessions and autologin on returning to a site and resuming my netflix movie where I left off are useful. What about amazon auto suggest? I once bought a book on amazon about sexual practices in different cultures and for months I had autosuggests for dildos and some amazingly raunchy bondage movies that I had no idea amazon carried. My sense of embarrassment prevented me from using amazon when other people were in the room. I think however this is not really the surveillance I am worried about. I can easily not use amazon and certainly in the future I always now check the "people who bought this also bought..." before I purchase some item that will trigger things I don't want it suggesting to me. SO that's containable.

But that experience makes me wonder what that little search did for my google profile. Am I now pegged as a dog fucker on google because the key terms I used for a scholarly search had other meanings? I know that google pricks up it's ears when a search leads down a path to a purchase.

You might ask why do I care. I just do, and that's normal. were trained in caring about appearances when were on the playground.

"Surfboard" is what you surf on and it goes with the "surface" theme.

How about "Webbie" who would guide you like clippie ("It looks like you are searching for tentacle porn, today")?

I nominate the name (acronym): UFIA or UFIA explorer

If for somereason all the humans in NY city were to just up and leave there would be a huge biological impact. rats, cats, dogs, birds, trees, and butterflies would be disrupted by lack of food, changes in water, reduction of the temperature island, heated underground spaces, lack of trash. Predators formerly finding the human habitation uninviting would swarm into the area.

    Likewise formerly unfit mutants on some species, such as cockroaches in bright colors that were out in the daytime might appear

I'm somewhat skeptical that every observed change in Fukashima is casued by radition, even the new appearance of mutations. the departure of the human population might well be a catalyst as well.

Will they allow professor's to assign Hachette textbooks? Can student's order Hachette study guides?

But those people dieing of of the flue are often compromised in some other way, such as old age or malnutrition.

you might as well say that more people in africa die of old age every day than all ebola deaths combined.

The reason people fear ebola is that unlike old age, it spreads and attacks the healthy.

the exact same exaggeration is true of flu. You catch flu by being in close proximity to someone with the flu or some a vector that can temporarily support the flu's transmission, just like ebola.

E-bola is so 1990. it should get with the times and be called iBola. Then everyone would wait in line to get it.

foxcon assembles these in china

bullet proof video conferencing is exactly the idea behind the xbox appliance

Tizen is the german word for dingleberry-- those pieces of crap that cling to the hairs of your butt. I think if they ever intended to ship they might have checked that.

install the rosetta @ home boinc project and predict and desing protein strucures.

perhaps Apple and google will ration their back end service such that a user of an old phone only gets the equivalent compute power that was available at the time the phone was first sold. Newer phones thus pay for upgrades in the computing infrastructure, and thus are entitled to superior backend services.