See this page, which has much more information, graphical breakdown of who gets what, etc.

Ok, now I've seen the link to the study, I take back what I said above. Sorry, I've been drinking.

Very misleading summary (yeah, duh). This is not a study, it is an editorial. Someone's opinion. It says so right at the top. Note at the bottom of the article; "Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed."

It's incredibly misleading to cite this article as a "study", all it is is an opinion piece article, nothing more.

I'd suggest it might be because of the support costs of all those people having trouble logging in, forgetting their passwords etc, or getting compromised because they wrote down their hard-to-remember password, if they went more secure. My bank allows a weak password (plus some nominated characters from a secondary "memorable phrase"), and no requirement to change it ever. TBH I'm pretty cool with that because I can remember both, so if I'm ever caught without access to my password manager, I won't be screwed. In order to add a new payment recipient, they do require a code sent to my registered phone to be entered. I feel it's a reasonable balance between security and convenience.

Good thing they're not just handing out hardware then.

FTA: "As with Sunward Park, the schools in this new pilot will be using a centralised portal developed by Bramley’s MIB Software for managing tablets and aggregating educational content into a single portal. MIB’s backend pulls in CAPS aligned digital textbooks from the likes of Via Afrika as well as extra resources from around the web."

Just because it's been done wrong in the past doesn't mean it can't be done right in the future, although it doesn't bode well that this particular project appears to have been rushed, and significant questions not answered in detail. However there's nothing wrong with the theory; access to textbooks, collaboration and communications tools, monitoring of students progress while they perform activities (and as the article mentions, monitoring of teachers as well), the list of potential benefits to using tablets or laptops as a central educational tool is long. At some point, someone is going to get it right and actually realize many of the potential advantages.

Of course such people exist. There is no science whatsoever that says that the earth is only 6000 years old, for example, so creationists who believe that are simply denying the science. They don't question the science, they reject it; there's a difference.

I use that as an example because it is more clear-cut than the climate issue, where there are a lot of people who hold a spectrum of views which are probably somewhere between being very skeptical and being outright deniers, but for sure there are those who pretty clearly aren't interested in any science that says man-made climate change might be real.

The whole point of emphasising the difference between an actual sceptic and a denier is that the sceptic questions the science, whereas the denier ignores it entirely. The scientists and others referred to in the article have no problem with the actual sceptics. Questioning the science is fine, disregarding it is not.

The Register is reporting that it's actually a power failure, apparently according to a Heathrow Airport spokesperson.

You'd think that such systems would have fully redundant power supply infrastructure though, so maybe that's misinformation.

Not only that,but according to the article on The Register last week, they haven't actually got the games yet, they are just hoping that the rights holders are going to come forward and give permission for them to include the games for free. They've sent out a letter to the rights holders, no idea if they've had any replies yet. So even the games are in question.

I don't think that accurately reflects the attitude, although it might sometimes seem that way. There is nothing wrong with thinking that coming at old problems from a new direction, with fresh ideas, and bringing the latest science and technology to bear on the problems, might throw up new solutions. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Having respect for "those who came before" doesn't mean assuming that problems can't be solved just because they haven't been solved already.

There is a big difference between an allowance and a loophole; where you are allowed to write down xyx against your tax bill, that is an intended tax allowance by your tax authority, put in play for whatever reason - balancing the tax system, encouraging certain types of spending, buying votes, etc. Such allowances are all part of making sure everyone pays a fair amount of tax, and everyone ultimately benefits.

A loophole however is not intended; a loophole is legal only because governments have not figured out how to close it. Clearly Amazon is expected to pay some tax on its non-US earnings, and it's not. This is not in any way the intent of the governments of the countries in which Amazon operates. Taking advantage of such loopholes benefits nobody except Amazon; taxpayers in the countries that Amazon operates in are deprived of tax revenue that would benefit them directly, and local competitors to Amazon who do pay their taxes are squeezed and put out of business, ultimately again to the detriment of everyone except Amazon.

To be fair, nobody has really hit a mass-market sweet spot with this class of device yet, so it's worth a shot for Microsoft, normally they are later to the party than that. Although personally I think they've gone too niche with the health focus and the $200 price tag, and I wouldn't bet against you on the Microsoft Band being discontinued in a couple of years. Maybe they just wan to dip their toes in the water of the wearables market for now, and this is a fairly low-key, unambitious start that will pave the way for the Microsoft Watch :).

Umm, did you read the article yourself?

"The backend takes the url, gets the HTML source of the website, minifies it, gets rid of the css, Javascript, and images, [...]"

That's quoted in the article from the projects own gihub page. CSS, JavaScript, and images are removed. Hardly "rendered normally".

"Then TOR will be wrapped by a VPN service, and Comcast will be fscked."

Let's not forget that rights holders are already calling for VPN users to be assumed to be criminals. So it's far from impossible that what they're doing for TOR now, they may do for VPNs later. Sure they would have to have some sort of system to allow "approved" VPN connections, so that people who need them for work wouldn't be screwed, but I wouldn't rule it out.