I find the thought of a well funded media outlet staffed by people who don't see their most important job as being subservient to those in power and corporate interests quite appealing.

Pro Publica has been doing good work in this arena as well.

Actually, there are several advantages. The most glaringly obvious is the fact that it has double the number of registers and that those registers double in size.

We are also changing over to ARM's redesigned version 8 of it's instruction set which adds several new types of instructions that previously didn't exist at all.

Also added is support for hardware based virtualization, as is seen on some Intel and AMD SKU's.

How quickly people seem to forget:

"The iPhone 5 is the most difficult device that Foxconn has ever assembled. To make it light and thin, the design is very complicated," said an anonymous company official to The Wall Street Journal. "It takes time to learn how to make this new device. Practice makes perfect. Our productivity has been improving day by day."

http://www.informationweek.com/mobility/smart-phones/foxconn-iphone-5-is-hard-to-make/240009249

If you want a device you can sell for 99 bucks on contract it needs to be easier to make.

There is a standard feature made available by ARM called TrustZone which enables hardware based separation of a device's OS and apps from a trusted environment, including trusted peripherals such as biometric devices or storage devices.

It's been around for a while now and has also been adopted by AMD for their upcoming X86 chips.

Details here:

The security of the system is achieved by partitioning all of the SoC hardware and software resources so that they exist in one of two worlds - the Secure world for the security subsystem, and the Normal world for everything else. Hardware logic present in the TrustZone-enabled AMBA3 AXI bus fabric ensures that Normal world components do not access Secure world resources, enabling construction of a strong perimeter boundary between the two. A design that places the sensitive resources in the Secure world, and implements robust software running on the secure processor cores, can protect assets against many possible attacks, including those which are normally difficult to secure, such as passwords entered using a keyboard or touch-screen. By separating security sensitive peripherals through hardware, a designer can limit the number of sub-systems that need to go through security evaluation and therefore save costs when submitting a device for security certification.

http://www.arm.com/products/processors/technologies/trustzone.php?tab=Hardware+Architecture

So yes. ARM enables Apple to physically separate the operation of the biometric device and storage of encrypted biometric information in what Apple calls "secure enclave" storage where it is not available to the OS or to apps.

Both Greenwald and Snowden have publicly denied giving any documents to the Independent.

I wonder what large secretive organizations might have an interest in making Snowden and Greenwald look like dangerous leakers to people who haven't previously been abusing their power to spy on the innocent and lying to the public about it?

You might want to listen to the guy who figured out how to pull this off without damaging the user's eyesight decades ago, Google.

TFA:

Google Glass and several similarly configured systems now in development suffer from another problem I learned about 30 years ago that arises from the basic asymmetry of their designs, in which the wearer views the display through only one eye. These systems all contain lenses that make the display appear to hover in space, farther away than it really is. That’s because the human eye can’t focus on something that’s only a couple of centimeters away, so an optical correction is needed. But what Google and other companies are doing—using fixed-focus lenses to make the display appear farther away—is not good.

Using lenses in this way forces one eye to remain focused at some set distance while the focus of the other eye shifts according to whatever the wearer is looking at, near or far. Doing this leads to severe eyestrain, which again can be harmful, especially to children.

The phone for your parents? Samsung has certainly been trying to convince people this is true with their ads, but shockingly it turns out that advertising and reality don't match up.

It turns out that Android skews towards older users, not iOS.

When you buy a particular device, the hardware inside that device (e.g. SOC, Camera, Baseband) doesn't change. As long as Google doesn't change how the drivers interface with newer versions of the OS, the drivers for your particular device will continue to work.

For example, graphics card drivers for Windows 2000 worked fine in XP. Windows Vista introduced a new way to handle graphics drivers which required a driver update, but this new method is still used being used in Windows 7 and 8.

Until the Android ecosystem can handle an issue as basic as providing it's users with OS and security updates, Android is not ahead at all.

Over half of the Android devices out there are still running variants of version 2 of the OS and lower while the last three Android releases are version 4 and higher.

Android needs to be rearchitected so that carriers provide drivers for the hardware, while Google takes full responsibility for updates to the OS. This approach has been working with Windows for decades.

If it can run general purpose word processors, spreadsheets, and databases, it's a personal computer.

If people haven't bothered to create the traditional applications that defined PC's mentioned above, it's not a personal computer, it's a specialized device.

You are a fucking retard. This isn't about "political rhetoric".

It doesn't matter if it's Bush and John Yoo releasing a memo justifying torture, or Obama releasing a memo justifying murder. Sane people oppose Presidents who seek to destroy the entire concept of the rule of law.

Twitter has begun to censor porn related searches on Vine.

Twitter's video-sharing app now blocks many searches for pornographic terms. Trying to search for the #porn hashtag (and other terms such as #sex, #boobs, and #booty) brings up no results at this time.

The iPod Touch starts at $199 and the iPad Mini is expected to start at $329.

Since this website has an excellent track record for nailing Apple's upcoming announcements, their pricing is likely much more accurate.

AC parent is correct.

One of the blogs with an inside source and a proven track record for nailing what is to come in recent Apple announcements, 9 to 5 Mac, has also come out and said the starting price will be $329.

Read for yourself.

Sadly, a $250 price point seems to be wishful thinking. Apple isn't going to pull a Google and sell things anywhere near break even.

Actually, the opposite is true. This was possible before RTM, but Microsoft has removed this ability in the final code.

CNET reports that users of the recently-leaked RTM builds of Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 have discovered that one of the tweaks Microsoft has made since the launch of the last public test build, Windows 8 Release Preview, centers on the boot process. Microsoft is reportedly now blocking users from bypassing the boxy Start screen, preventing them from booting straight into Desktop mode.

Previous test builds allowed Windows 8 users to create a shortcut that switches to the Windows 8 desktop. If the user didn't want to boot their machine into the tiled desktop UI (formerly known as Metro), they could simply schedule this shortcut to be activated immediately after logging into the user's account.

Rafael Rivera, coauthor of the forthcoming Windows 8 Secrets, has reportedly verified with RTM downloaders that Microsoft's block of the boot bypass is indeed in place. He also believes that Microsoft has blocked the ability for administrators to use Group Policy to allow users to bypass the tiled startup screen. That said, it seems that Microsoft is trying to keep the desktop of old out of sight, hoping users will simply grow accustomed to the new blocky era of Windows.