The "porno scanners"? Give me a break. You are so scared that somebody is going to see your naked body? Big whoop. What are you ashamed of? This is getting ridiculous.

While I personally do think that the TSA is ridiculously ineffective and this is security theater, I don't get why most Americans are so ashamed of their bodies. It is ... unnatural for lack of a better words. It reminds me of the idiocy surrounding Janet Jackson's nipple. The whole world was laughing. Duh, she is a woman - she has nipples. My mother has them too.

I remember in Europe little girls and boys as old as 5-6 years old used to run completely naked on the beach. Of course in the USA that would be considered "perversion", I guess. The perversion is in fact the exact opposite.

It isn't that, I think. The phone is ringing, but the screen remains black so there is no way to answer. Often I have another problem - it can't hang up; just locks up there and only removing the battery fixes it.

In a strange way it is by far the best phone I have ever had, and by far the most unreliable one :-)

I love my Nexus One, but I have to say the statistics are probably true. I have to reboot it a couple of times per week - the touch screen stops working, or the screen just turns black when I am receiving or making a call. Sometimes I have to resort to removing the battery. A co-worker with a Nexus One is having similar problems, so it is not that my specific device is defective.

As much as I hate Apple, my wife's IPhone 3GS hasn't had any problems whatsoever and she's had it for longer.

No, no, you don't understand. Microsoft does this because they care! Ask any Windows developer :-)

Seriously though, objectively speaking, no matter how ridiculous this technology churn seems to us looking from outside of the Microsoft universe, it does keep people perpetually employed. It feeds not only Microsoft but a huge ecosystem of businesses, consultants, IT experts, MCEs, support stuff, technical book authors, administrators, etc. It is great!

It may look inefficient, but if it was really inefficient, would it continue to exist and be successful in a market-driven economy? Well, of course market rules wouldn't apply if there was a monopolist in the room :-)

Just to show how objective I can be, the constant API churn of the Linux kernel acts in much the same way. And it sucks.

Sigh. Few people actually realize this, but Google can't possibly do it even if they wanted.

Each different phone has different custom hardware. That requires a different kernel, different drivers, etc, etc. Google couldn't possible push an update to any hardware except its own - Nexus One and Nexus S. There is no standard for phones like there is for personal computers. Google would have to maintain and test different Android distributions for every one of the (hundreds?) phones out there. Absurd.

When you buy a phone from a manufacturer (Samsung, HTC, Motorola, whatever) it is that manufacturer's responsibility to update your phone. If you don't like their update policies, don't buy from them. The market should work. And if people don't care (which is apparently the case), why should the manufacturers?

Sadly, Google gets blamed for something which is outside of their control. It is like blaming Linus Torvalds for me being too lazy to install the latest security updates on our company website.

Well, I am a Comcast customer (have been for several years) and I really don't have issues, especially in the last couple of years. Before that there were service outages for about an hour every week, which was annoying as hell. The speed is reliable 5up / 20down and I haven't ever hit any throttling or caps, considering that my usage pattern is hardly typical (remote access to different machines, shared document editing, VPNs, transferring large amounts of data over SSH, etc). The only time I remember needing a Comcast technician - when I moved in my current place - he was on time and did his job.

Of course that is just my personal experience, but it is the only one I have :-) It may depend on where you live - I am located in the Bay Area - but it bothers me to see Comcast constantly being vilified, when my personal experience with them has been consistently good, and as far as I can tell they are actually better than some other ISPs.

My only real complaint is that 5up/20down should cost like $10 a month, and it should be the only kind of service I need from Comcast :-) (With Netflix and, say, Vonage).

I don't understand this irrational hate. How is Comcast trying to destroy the Internet? They have clearly defined caps, they are one of the first trying to deploy IPv6 to consumers, they offer one of the best speeds. No, they are not perfect, and they are not cheap, but as an ISP they are better than AT&T, for example.

One of them is a monopoly in a couple of important areas, and using that monopoly to muscle itself via brute force in nearly every single aspect of computing (gaming, mobile, cloud, etc) - guess which one?
Microsoft can no longer be judged solely on technical grounds (where fortunately they do suck).

I think your suggestion makes a lot of practical sense. I doubt many people will actually understand and appreciate it though. Judging from the other comments they don't - it is actually quite shocking how negative most of the replies are. That is why it has zero change of being adopted. Oh, well, at least a couple of years from now, when we are fucked and IPv6 is still nowhere, you can tell everybody "I told you so" :-)

Thank god, there is Ron Miller to tell us what to think and like.

While I am not particularly excited about The Daily specifically, Miller's assertion that "we" (who is "we"??) don't want a paid daily newspaper from a single source is very arrogant and short sighted. Many of us _do_ want a paid daily newspaper from a single source. No, that is not all that "we" read, but "we" like the reliable and consistent quality and even a little predictable bias. It is not the same as Google News. I am not bashing the latter, but to assume that everybody wants the same thing is amazingly naive.

"20-century model" in a "21-century package" is "doomed to fail from the get go". Oh my. Such buzz-filled nonsense makes me sick. A paper book is a 16-century model, and a Kindle is the same but in a "21-century" package. Are they doomed to fail?

Don't like "The Daily" (I personally don't) - OK - don't f*ink read it. But don't pretend you have deep all-encompassing insights about what everybody wants in the "21st century".

Not going to happen. HotSpot is way too complex to be maintained by the "community". As far as I know, so far, years later, the "community" hasn't been able to port HotSpot to a single additional architecture. It runs in interpreted mode, but not as JIT on anything other than x86 or SPARC.

Good luck getting respect on Slashdot :-)

For what its worth, I have been a happy Comcast customer for years. My connection has been getting faster and recently (quite surprisingly) even more reliable.

I like how Comcast approached the IPv6 transition testing and I like what they are doing with DNSSEC.

Nothing is perfect in this world, of course, but you guys are doing a good job. So, thank you.

I am pretty sure no security appliance can fool anything unless it can present a security certificate that my browser trusts. That can work in a corporate environment, a school, etc, but definitely not in general.

In any case, you can trust https only to the extent you can trust the CAs. If there are any CAs in China, UAE, etc, then you can be sure the respective governments can issue a certificate for *.com :-)

One would assume that this is all pointless, since anybody could just use a web service via https.

However one would also assume that these governments control at least one trusted signing authority, so they can freely intercept any https.

People deserve the freedom they get. Have you read the comments on BBC's article.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10899338
Let me quite a few:

Abu Mohd, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

I am an expat living in Saudi Arabia. For me the Blackberry is key to staying in contact with my family and friends in a way that I cannot do with other messaging services. I hope Saudi Arabia and RIM solve this situation. There are many people that work here who are away from their families that use this service. This ban would be one more reason to not come here, it does not help to the development of this country.

Suresh Haridas, Al khobar, Saudi Arabia

BlackBerry made our life much easier, whether we are using e-mail, internet, or BBM. A lot of people/students such as myself who live thousands of miles away from their family and friends really depend on BBM as a convenient medium to communicate. There is nothing compared to BBM in terms of quickness, convenience, and cost. On the other hand, I understand why governments such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, and others feel threatened. However, I am wondering why BlackBerry does not help these countries in terms of monitoring data and using their own servers to get to encrypted information.

Rakan H, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

I am one of the youths who owns a BlackBerry and I completely agree that it is a major step in my country to protect it against any terrorist or anything that might affect our security. Also I believe all countries like the US should consider the same thing, because it is a tool that can be used among those people who can get access to national security and cause terror to communities. It is a perfect tool for them, cutting it off worldwide will definitely reduce the amount of global issues occurring. If it is necessary to protect the country then why not!

Jim, Singapore

I am a Canadian, living in Dubai and dreading losing my Blackberry. Most people I know are aware of the high level of security in the UAE and appreciate the benefits it provides. I would much rather lose some personal freedoms than take a chance with security. RIM has to understand that Dubai is a transit point for trade and potentially terrorism. Its population is continuously changing as over 80% of its residents are foreigners. UAE's high level of security is in the interests of the West. I am hopeful for a positive resolution but am not brave enough to buy up all the handsets that are selling cheap.

Ara, Dubai, UAE

Whilst it's perfectly true that any invasion of personal privacy in the name of national security is usually resented, I don't really understand the sense of outrage on this one. After all, don't the western intelligence agencies have extensive gathering facilities for the same sort of thing? I don't see the Gulf states doing anything more than our own governments, like it or not.