Cameras with physical lens covers are thicker than cameras without. That's all it took to convince Apple.

Now, why they have an 8051 hardwired to the USB bus that accepts arbitrary firmware uploads without even having to elevate beyond user permissions, I can only blame stupidity.

Creating your own ammunition is not a legitimate use. Not in this country.

When I next get to see my competition shooter friend ... oh, I forget, there's another who was in the Olympic biathlon team ... I'll ask one or the other of them if they've ever heard of anyone "rolling their own" ammo. I wouldn't be surprised if it's simply not allowed at competition, so there is no point in practising with it.

Look on the bright side. This might be what finally spurs support for your phone from an alternative operating system.

Doesn't Asus have Transformers with 10" and expandable storage? ... yep, memo pad, transformer, slate... As for your last point, MS is completely willing to drop a platform that turns out to be more trouble than it's worth. We'll see.

The F-450 is sufficiently ungainly to where most people will not drive one for vanity. I do know of one F-450 pickup truck conversion, which has a shortened frame and a custom bed, but even it is regularly used for towing.

I'd imagine that the range will be somewhat decreased, but if most Leafs which haven't been piloted into a tree (etc) aren't still operating in 12 years, I will be shocked. Hopefully not literally.

I believe the assumption here is that it's not difficult for TPTB to get their firmware onto your computer. In an enterprise it's slightly tricky to do it without risk of being caught. Where individual users are concerned there is little risk in leaning on the OS vendor to deliver to you and you alone an additional payload right in a signed patch package.

Why can't I buy a webcam with a lens cover and no microphone, or a physical on/off switch for the microphone anymore?

I wouldn't trust the switch to actually turn off the microphone any more than I trust the switch that supposedly turns off the WiFi and Bluetooth to actually do so (rather than tell the software to not use them - for the normal stack.)

Even if it DID physically turn off the Microphone, remember that the speakers built into a typical laptop can also act as microphones. If the chip driving them is designed appropriately it can have a stealth listen-through-the-speakers mode.

Back when I had my TRS-80 Model 1 you could 'listen' to the 1.77 MHz Z80 processor do its thing on any AM radio nearby. Now get off my lawn.

In those days I carried a transistor radio and used it for debugging - (on stuff substantially larger than a TRS-80). It gave subtle insights into how much time the machine was spending in different parts of algorithms. (The ear and its post-processing in the brain is really good at picking this stuff out.)

The rise of multitasking, with fine-grained time slices, ruined this approach by cutting up the signal of interest and mixing it with bits from other programs running "simultaneously". Then the march of Moore's Law and its variants nailed up the coffin by cutting the run time of most stuff of interest down to such short periods that even a bat couldn't get anything useful from their radio-to-accoustic signatures.

But modern cryptography involves deliberately long computations, on machines that are otherwise so fast that other tasks are mostly idle,. So the technique rises from the grave...

... the trademark dispute between the two was settled with a pittance and an agreement by Apple, Inc. not to sell music. However, they managed to win over a judge when iTunes came out and then wrest control of the trademark away from Apple Corps ...

But isn't that also part of why the app and store is named "iTunes" - generalizing the iMac naming scheme into "iWhatever" - with no mention of the word "Apple"?

Hi.

the Nyquist limit of the audio sampling hardware of a cell phone over instruction rate of a modern CPU is a pretty small fraction.

The "audio" in question is most likely all below 24 kHz, that being the Nyquist limit for the 48 kHz sampling hardware, unless it happens that some phones can actually sample faster, and have microphones that can respond to higher frequencies.

The instruction rate of the CPUs in question is many times that frequency.

It doesn't sound likely.

Well I hope it's a *bit* faster than that, since it looks (haha) like I'm going to get MD later in life just like my Dad.

I have the same worry. So far I'm doing OK (and taking my vitamin A) but it's still a worry.

(I also worry that, with the increasing governmental takeover of medicine, research on and deployment of new treatments will grind to a halt as a cost-cutting measure.)

I really wish we could the body itself to grow these cells, since obviously it was able to do it once before.

If you follow this link from TFA, you'll find that (as of last January) they've also been able to inject "precursor" cells into blind mice and get them to grow a new, fully differentiated, and possibly fully functional, retina in about two weeks.

(I presume by "precursor cells" they mean "stem cells that have been partially differentiated into pluripotent cells along the developmental path to retina tissue" or perhaps "harvested pluripotent cells from the same developmental stage".)

The new retina tissue definitely connected well enough to produce behavioral evidence of light sensitivity, though more work was needed to determine whether/how well it hooked up to the brain's image processing.

Using multiple cores turns out to help the attack (by shifting down the signal frequencies).

Say what? Through what mechanism would multiple cores shift down the frequency? And what about parallel instruction streams contributing to noise?

First, you'd need a GPG port to Commodore 64.