I'll venture a guess that in 10 years, RIM's fall from grace will probably be a great case study in business schools around the world.

How a successful company managed, through horrible fore-sight, atrocious product management and lousy business management, to squander an insurmountable lead in the enterprise market is amazing.

On to the story at hand: there is no doubt that the wider handset market is in all kinds of trouble. Apple clearly makes most of the profit, and Samsung picks off what is left. What does this leave the other players? Nothing. Clearly there is no competition in the iOS market, and Samsung has a huge lead (and massive fab capabilities). Unless one of the other players steps up and makes a handset that, you know, you'd actually want, then they're dead.

End of story - this isn't that complex. Make a product people want. The competition has showed you the way....

Obviously, electronic devices can't bring down a plane. Millions of fliers every week "forget" to turn off their devices, and nary a plane goes down. Can common sense finally prevail? Arbitrary rules reduce respect for the necessary ones. For example: No headphones during take-off? Makes perfect sense - take-off is one of the most sensitive times of the flight. If someone needs to yell directions, you need to hear them. Reading a book on your Kindle? Not so much.

Having said that, of course, if my plane is going down, I'd probably take off my headphones. YMMV.

My apologies. These fossils were clearly placed (rather cleverly) to fool us & test our faith.

You're right, of course. The ethical questions are staggering. I guess the geek side of me went "cool, I want to talk to these guys". Wouldn't it be cool to see if they were really like us? Haven't you always wondered if Neanderthals would see you as a fellow (albeit weird) "person"?

I, for one, think this is absolutely fascinating! The thought that, as recently as 10k years ago, there were other species of human is amazing - that's not far off of written history!

I wonder if we could think about cloning these people - is the DNA "fresh" enough?

Some cynical people might even suspect a plot here - our right wing party would love to bury the NBN and have been claiming that it'll be more expensive than ADSL services - perhaps Telstra wants to give them more ammunition, and muddy the waters at the same time?

I'm not entirely sure how this is a "contradiciton". Would you disagree with the following statement:

Yes, I have no doubt that some innocent people are being caught up unfairly in the process. But I also can't blame New York for having these much-malinged "police".

As much fun as it is to bash Monsanto, if we want to change the patent regime, we must do it ourselves. Monsanto is only doing what is best for their shareholders - protecting their patents. I'm not saying that is good or bad, but not expecting them to do so is silly. Having said that, innocent farmers should obviously not fall prey to this.

So perhaps I'm new to this game - but this is a pretty cool hack. Using the sizes of PNG files over an encrypted channel to locate someone is pretty nifty.

For those who know more: is SSL encryption predictable (size-wise)? If I have the same size payload, will it always generate the same size encrypted result?

Your username implies a bias :-)

Honestly, wouldn't a MacBook of some description be the best choice? You "like the Unix/BSD aspect...", hardware working, good battery life, AppleCare-type support, etc. Why switch? Are you looking for cheaper hardware? Philosophical leaning towards Linux?

So is it wrong to goatse someone within a day of them being able to see for the first time, ever, in their whole life? They said they can see shapes after all.....

So is it wrong to goatse someone within a day of them being able to see for the first time, ever, in their whole life? They said they can see shapes.....

So is it wrong to goatse someone within a day of the operation?

My kingdom for some mod points. This might be the funniest thing I see this week. Kudos, good sir, kudos.

How does checking for iodine and silver check for water safety? Also - proofreading would be nice - "which are to used kill..."? My god what do we pay editors for?