I suspect many of the misgivings about remote-wipe policies have to do with the clarity of explanation. Explain to users clearly what ‘remote wipe’ means, and what they can do to protect their data.

Just today, I wrote a new document for our users about our remote wipe policy and how, with iOS 4.2, they can too thanks to Find My iPhone. Here’s what I wrote, under the heading ‘A brief but important note about your privacy and data:’

“It’s important you know that the locating feature of Find My iPhone is tied to your own, personal Apple ID. This feature is not accessible by anyone else in the company, including the IT department, and cannot be used to track or determine your location. We respect your privacy.

“On the other hand, the IT department can immediately erase your iPhone’s data should it be lost or stolen. This would cause everything on your iPhone to be erased, including pictures, music, and apps — not just company data. Therefore, we recommend you connect and sync your iPhone to iTunes regularly to ensure that any personal data on your iPhone is backed up.”

Companies have a right to secure their smartphones —there’s a lot of data on them. End users have a right to protect their personal, non-company data. These are not mutually exclusive. Can we agree?

The OLPC XO was very easy to use, yet somehow Sugar/Linux doesn't get the same sort of attention Mac OS X or iOS do.

What real-world questions did the OLPC XO answer? I've never used one, so I honestly have no idea.

For as many people as bought the various Apple products, Macs in the XP and Vista era answered the question, "Would you like your computer to not be a malware-infested heap of frustration?", the iPod answered the question, "Would you like to carry all your CDs in a fun little pocket-sized box?", and the iPhone answered the question, "Would you like to carry the Internet in your pocket?" Not really novel stuff, but it was packaged thoughtfully and it made sense to a lot of people without requiring a great amount of explanation. The iPad is arguably the first major Apple product in a while that doesn't immediately scratch an obvious itch. Its selling point is more along the lines of, "A lot of what you do with your computer, in a smaller, sleeker package."

Again, I don't think it's rocket science. Apple built what their own people thought would be great, and lo and behold, a couple million other people thought it was great too. Sure, Apple is a slick marketer (although Apple's marketing budget is in line with other tech companies its size: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/28/apples-2009-ad-budget-half-a-billion/) and gets a lot of free love from pop culture, but it would be myopic to suggest that this is much more than sugar-coating on an already solid and aggressive business model.

Go back about five years in the archives of most tech publications and you can find similar stories about "The coming onslaught of iPod competitors." Look how that worked out.

For some reason, the tech community believes that the commoditize-and-cannabalize cycle that typified the 1980s and 1990s is a perpetual law. It isn't, and Apple's success this decade is a resounding rejoinder to that view. Apple's products aren't, in all respects, better than the competitors; what they are is more polished, more refined, and an order of magnitude easier to pick up on and figure out on your own.

The typical screeds about how Apple's success is due to marketing prowess, reality distortion fields, media sycophancy, etc. are all a bunch of red herrings. Apple makes great products, and it's a real shame that more companies haven't picked up on how they do it and why. It's not rocket science to diligently refine your products while at the same time planning their long-term placement growth; it's just more involved than most companies want to be.

So sure, I'm sure there will be an onslaught of cheaper, different tablets that mindless consumers (Who, I might add, the tech community still believes to be largely ignorant about technology. You know, in 2010.) will buy up and the iPad will be dead. It's impossible that, say, every single one of the competitor tablets will be inferior in one or more significant ways that fails to make an appreciable dent in the iPad's adoption rate. Equally impossible that Apple would refine the iPad beyond its current iteration to entice new customers. I mean, really.

I'm not giving Apple the keys to the kingdom carte blanche, as heaven knows they've made their share of mistakes, but on the whole, I think they've been too successful, too visionary, and too aggressive to continue this endless narrative about how, just when they're about to succeed, the commodity tech market comes up aces and wins the hand.

I'm assuming you're talking about web video; if not, this info won't be applicable. The 'Video for Everybody' project at Camen Design has put a lot of work into cross-platform HTML5 video, and the test page has an extensive compatibility matrix for both desktop and mobile platforms.

Be aware that if you're targeting Android, its implementation of HTML5 video is lackluster (for now; I'd expect this to get better soon). Details of the problems, and a few solutions, can be found here: http://www.broken-links.com/2010/07/08/making-html5-video-work-on-android-phones/.

I'm speaking purely for the United States here. The first thing that came to mind was this great scene from the movie Apollo 13 where engineers are told they have to fit a square filter in a round hole using only the elements on the table. First reaction? They dive right in.

So to use this as an example, it sometimes feels like we've lost the raw brilliance and creativity that allowed us to put human beings on the moon. And we did it years before the development of advanced composites, sophisticated integrated circuits, and computer modeling. The moon missions were calculated with slide rules; even the astronauts had to be skilled mathematicians.

In that sense, it feels like our creativity is on the wane. On the other hand, perhaps it's just changing form.

True, we haven't put anybody on the moon in a while, but we've instead built a giant worldwide interconnected computer network. We've built a search engine that aggregates and indexes it all. We've built touchscreen devices that can make phone calls, access websites, pinpoint your location to within 30 feet using satellites hundreds of miles in the sky, and put it all into a tiny package that slips into your pocket and runs all day on a battery charge.

That's pretty creative, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. So I don't necessarily know that we're less creative today; I see the emotional and anecdotal evidence for it, but the contrary evidence suggests that we're still exceptionally creative and eclectic with our skills.

The list should more accurately be called, "Top 500 publicly-acknowledged supercomputers." You can go right on thinking that the US NSA, British MI6, and even some private industries (AT&T?) don't have vastly larger supers that are not publicly disclosed.

If there's one thing history teaches about rumors regarding upcoming Apple products, it's that nobody talking knows anything.

That's not always the case; sometimes, far from it. The source for this information comes from John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. It's well known, and John says as much, that he has sources inside Apple. As a reliable critic ('critic' as in Ebert, not hostility) of Apple, it seems his sources are either known to the company and the leaks are green-lighted, or else Apple simply doesn't care enough about smaller announcements to ferret out the mole. I'd bet heavily on the former.

John doesn't always make predictions of a declarative nature, but when he does, you can more or less take them as stated fact; for example, his "predictions" for last year's WWDC.

Name an important piece of investigative journalism done by the Times in the last ten years. I can't. And I'm a regular reader.

So am I. Here's a recent example: Toxic Waters, a series that ran late last year. The Times put a lot of time - and thus, money - into researching the series, combing through the data (and filing the FOIAs, etc.), as well as the interactive features, which were well done.

"Reinstated," not "ushered in." Before Rupert Murdoch, there was Hearst and Pulitzer, whose yellow journalism more or less defined the conditions to which Murdoch is now returning his media empire.

The good news is that these things seem to be cyclical. The bad news is that, if Hearst and Pulitzer are any indication, it takes a somewhat cataclysmic event (such as the Spanish-American War) to shake people into their senses and start demanding across-the-board accountability.

It's water under the bridge, but in hindsight, it would have been better to not create the alternate TLDs .cm, .co. While I'm at it, tell me there's a good reason we have augmented reality iPhones and 60 MPG cars but not web browsers that autocorrect non-existent TLDs.

Seriously, why doesn't every browser have a "I don't live in Cameroon or Colombia; auto-correct .cm and .co to .com, don't warn me when doing it, and don't bother me about this again" option? (I know, I know, .hosts and/or Firefox extensions. Still.)

I wrote this here years ago, but it bears repeating: Libertarianism is the carrying out of fascism by other means. The one thing it precisely does not guarantee is liberty.

According to this comment post on Engadget, it was a contractor working for Danger/Microsoft who screwed up a SAN upgrade and caused the data loss. Obviously, take this with a grain of salt until it's substantiated:

"I've been getting the straight dope from the inside on this. Let me assure you, your data IS gone. Currently MS is trying to get the devices to sync the data they have back to the service as a form of recovery.

It's not a server failure. They were upgrading their SAN, and they outsourced it to a Hitachi consulting firm. There was room for a backup of the data on the SAN, but they didn't do it (some say they started it but didn't wait for it to complete). They upgraded the SAN, screwed it up and lost all the data.

All the apps in the developer store are gone too.

This is surely the end of Danger. I only hope it's the end of those involved who screwed this up and the MS folks who laid off and drove out anyone at Danger who knew what they were doing.

"Epic fail" doesn't begin to describe this one.

It would be much buggier, less stable, and more bloated, due to its need to support a whole range of hardware, rather than a narrowly constricted band. Apple will not license OS X. There is zero financial incentive for them to do so; they already print their own money by selling their own hardware. Apple's primary business is *not* to sell software.

I don't see the point you're making. You might as well have contrasted nine-year disparate statements about RAM size. Over nine years, Apple's stance towards Java has changed; what's wrong with that? In 2000, Java seemed to have a wider path on the desktops than it does in 2009. Other languages and runtime environments have grown up around Java in the subsequent nine years, and to Apple's thinking, the other languages (such as Objective-C 2.0) allow for building better software than Java allows.

Apple's stance appears to be, right or wrong, that Java on the desktop and mobile devices is no longer the best way to develop and deploy software, and thus, they've allowed the Java implementation in OS X to grow long in the tooth, and have outright declined to port it to the iPhone/iPod Touch OS.

The nuke has very effectively prevented WWIII from happening as the deterrent of MAD has proven to be histories most effective peace policy.

MAD is a doctrine; that is, a dogma of belief; it is, more accurately, a statement of condition about the geopolitical theatre. In any case, it is neither a policy nor a hypothesis. By definition, it is untestable, because the first time it is tested is the last time it is testable. MAD is often held up as a policy that is "effective," but it is not, because its efficacy will never, and can never, be established. MAD simply means, "the condition within which major nuclear powers have not yet engaged in a large-scale offensive nuclear exchange" (emphasis mine). The "not yet" is a vitally important point. The MAD doctrine categorically does not and will not prevent a nuclear exchange. In other words, it is not a policy of safeguard. MAD means that the possibility -- indeed, the likelihood -- of nuclear conflict is still very real.

This is the whole point of non-proliferation, and is the fundamental and scientifically demonstrable reason why non-proliferation is the only safeguard against nuclear exchange.

More to the point, the phrase "Mutually Assured Destruction" is a euphamism which has the look-alike appearance of a military policy; however, the more accurate rendition of the doctrine is "Global Nuclear Annihilation."