I think you mean a cashier. The cashier is the person who rings up the purchase. The sales person is the one to tell you which phones are good and which ones are rubbish.

Don't feel embarrassed, it's an easy mistake to make.

Only idiots made fun of the Xbox. Windows has always been the best platform for games.

Also Nokia is not getting enough money from Microsoft to collapse the way that they have. Nokia is a publicly traded company so if Microsoft was paying them for all the customers they are lost, that would show up in their financials.

You would think if the human body can block the radiation from the scanners then the fuselage would block it as well. One theory that I've heard is that radiation that goes through you is potentially less dangerous than radiation that doesn't. I'm not an expert so I can't say if it's an apples to apples comparison or not.

It's interesting to think about people starting to caring about their country's online reputation. The article is right as well that the internet has created classes of online vigilantes.

I don't think it's going to change policy at all. America has the most defense of any country and doesn't worry about vigilantes. Also America has a sense of self rightness as well. Americans believe that the wars are God's work so practical considerations come second.

But your approach would bankrupt the company.

It would be hard to hurt the company more than Elop has. He has set a historic world record for destroying market share. RIM would have set the record by just muddling along without a good strategy but Elop managed to outdo them. They deliberately didn't sell the n9. How stupid is that?

Actually it's pretty common that governments liberalize a little and the standard of life improves and then people overthrow the government. The collapse of the USSR is an example. There are tens of thousands of large scale protests in China every year and the number is rising.

We're entering an interesting period of history. The US is on the brink of a new great depression. The EU is about to collapse. China is about to experience a revolution. Fascinating stuff.

People default to the iPhone because it is the best phone available.

Before the iPhone came out Nokia used to sell the best phone available and it cost twice as much as the iPhone. When the iPhone came out, Nokia freaked out and killed their high end products. Now their best phone costs the same as an iPhone and has roughly the same hardware as the iPhone, although Symbian sucks so it's not as good over all.

If the password is a four to six digit number that is not 1234 then it's probably an ATM card number as well. Actually if it's 1234 then it's still probably an ATM card.

All the money is really at the high end. Nokia went from owning 29% to owning 24% of the smart phone market. Everyone predicted that they would lose a lot of the market, but I don't think anyone predicted it would be that bad, that quickly.

When Nokia decided to switch to Windows, they knew that they would have to limp along selling their old phones this year. People were obviously going to buy fewer phones and they were going to want them at a cheaper price because they're EOL. Hopefully next year when the first Windows phones came out, they'd be able to make money again.

It was a huge gamble to throw away a year for something that wasn't tested. It seems like customers aren't willing to wait a year for a Windows phone.

The article conflates 2 things that make the URL bar suck.

1) It's basically the output of /dev/urandom which is ugly and a waste of space.

2) It's pretty stupid. It should be able to tell the difference between searches (words that form an invalid URL or that don't resolve) and searches. For example, if I want to find the time in San Francisco, I open a new tab, type google.com into the url bar and then enter "time: san francisco". That should all be done straight in the URL bar.

The article makes those two issues seem like one issue, which they're not. But at the same time both are real annoyances and it's good that someone is thinking about it.

The professor did that. But no one is a robot even at work. For example, there is always company politics and a lot of it happens over email. I'd never write anything libelous or otherwise illegal, but I'd still want to keep my private work email private.

Uh... Credit card companies are hardly good examples of ethics. It's hard to think of a worse example of ethics really. :P

You make a fair point.

According to wired the machines have never been tested against mice. That seems like an obvious test to do. Also it should be tested by somebody independent, because we're all sick of the blatant lies we've been told from Rapiscan vendors.

They didn't start the Wayland thing. Keith Packard and the other Xorg hackers started Wayland. It will be good. Linux people have been lying to ourselves for too long that X11 is an acceptable windowing system.

Wayland will still have an X server in it for legacy apps.