So here we have several devices, all of which run Android, a wonderfully portable OS based on Linux, and yet Netflix can't be bothered to get their service to work on Linux desktops? Sure, they use Silverlight to run the thing in a browser, but why couldn't they just port this app and give us a desktop client to view our paid subscriptions from? Is the source to this available somewhere?

Exactly what I was trying to figure out. The story is /.ed, but last I checked figuring out an algorithm was a far cry from refreshing a page over and over.

Recently some of my in-laws brought me their new HP notebook complaining that it was (of course) slow, and that intermittently they could or could not load their pictures onto it. Turned out that it was one of these notebooks HP had shipped with the webos as some kind of pre-boot setup and my less than technically savvy family members weren't able to tell when they were in windows (yes, a nightmare unto itself) or were in the webos. The solution was to backup their data, wipe the machine and install stock Windows 7 from scratch. They haven't had any complaints since.

HP, this does not bode well!

.. and when I come home and want to 'zone out' in front of a video game I'm not really interested in making sure my system is up to snuff in order to play my favorite games so I pick up my 360's controller and go to town. Now don't get me wrong, I grew up playing PC games, I was around when Kings Quest was 'cutting edge' and migrated through Doom to Quake to UT, etc, etc - but these days the desktop computer (and even the laptop as so many of them are quite the gaming rigs these days) is not the set-it-and-forget-it experience it used to be. Heck, even back in the 80's we'd make all kinds of hardware tweaks just to get a game up and running and _that was part of the fun_! But I'm getting older now and when I want to game I want to get right to it and fiddling with my machine settings shouldn't be part of the equation. Now get off my lawn, etc, etc.

There seems to be some element of confusion in the tech community about Apple's reason for existence. Many people seem to think that Apple is an entity like the force in Star Wars that will galvanize the tech community and resonate their hopes, dreams, and energy into a cornicopia of the coolest products on earth. And like the alchemist's stone, it will transform them as well.

Not quite right, I'm afraid. The sole reason for the existence of Apple Corporation is to transfer money from YOUR bank account to Steven Job's bank account and deliver to you in exchange, shiny trinkets. Remember the Indians selling Manhattan to Steve Jobs for $24 worth of Newtons? Do you really think that you're any different? It seemed like a good deal to them at the time.

Check out your iPhone. It's basically a really expensive plastic little hand-held telephone that glows in the dark. Check out your iPod. It's just a f**king Walkman. It blasts apart when you drop it. It pumps the same sound into your brain that you hear when you go to the mall or step into an elevator. For this you paid $200? No, you paid all that money to be part of the Tao of Steve. The trinkets are just your ID card into this cult.

What I'm trying to say is that if Apple were a serious company instead of a money-sucking vacuum cleaner, then they would have made the trinket nearly waterproof. Your $10 wristwatch is nearly waterproof; it doesn't stop working when you go out running in the rain. So why does your $300 iPhone have moisture sensors INSIDE it that void your warranty when it's in your pants pocket when you take a piss?

It's because neurotic obsessive/compulsive greedy twisted little shithead Steven Jobs demands that his 20,000 poodle engineers come up with ways to void the warranty instead of coming up with solutions to the issues that can cause the trinkets to stop functioning.

I can't believe that any self-respecting engineer would actually work for this guy.

How could this happen? I thought that the internet was more important than the government. Our internet; any government. Is this a cultural thing? Do Egyptian engineers always do whatever the government tells them to do without thinking ? Are they secretly Germans or Soviets? Even when they can see themselves that this particular government has reached its end?

Maybe it's my residual American chauvinism, but I just can't imagine any patriotic person anywhere blindly shutting his country totally off of the international computer network, Regardless of what any corrupt 82-year-old man tells them to do. I'd just hem and haw and techno-babble them blind about how it just couldn't be done.

I think that WE should protest this country's chickenshit engineers by refusing to let them back on the internet when they decide that they are rejoin civilization. And then start oscillating their currency in the international markets while they watch helplessly unable to do anything about it.

This is OUR internet. You just don't shut down part of it just because you feel like it. Every now and then we need to give the third world a taste of what real power is about (" a whiff of grapeshot" as the English used to say) so that they don't get a delusions of grandeur and think that they can get away with doing things like shutting down parts of the Internet.

The last radio transmission from the Challenger was the teacher asking " What's this button do?"

Put this bozo in prison for a LONG time. Gitmo his ass. He deserves it. We (the tech community) must clean up the spammers, hustlers, and criminals on the internet. If we don't (and no one else will or can do it) then no one will take us seriously and OUR vision of what the internet is supposed to be will be overruled by lawyers, global corporations, and their goon squads.

    It is unlikely that this asshole actually has $360,000 to pay the fine. And he committed a serious wide-ranging crime of fraud. So, yes, put this jerk in jail for a long time. Or at least as long as the feds would put a college student in hard jail for selling a little bag of bud to another college student. Which is a long time.

In 1979, Rev. Jesse Jackson traveled to the Middle East to explore a possible connection between the Afro-American and Palestinean people. After the meeting, the Reverend was overheard saying to himself:
    " been a long time since I said Yassir to anyone."

Sorry to imply that I mocking your vacation activies and memories. I simply wished to imply that I found the original poster a touch obsessive towards photography.

    I've been many places, some boring and some more interesting. In the past 20 years, my city of a million people has hosted over 250000 people from other countries throughout the globe.

I don't 'go' anywhere anymore to be in a foreign country. I just sit at the bus stop and the world comes to me. The man on the end was a former South Vietnamese officer who sold guns and supplies to the Viet Cong and used the money to bring his family to the USA. The little Chinese woman sitting on the bench was a Red Guard when she was fifteen. Beating up her teachers for being 'capitalist running dogs' and giving too many pop Algebra quizes. The little girl by the newspaper stand is an Iraqi Christian whose entire family was blown up last year with a car bomb. Her mother's body absorbed all the shrapnel that would have killed her. The other woman on the bench is from a village in Central Mexico where live hasn't changed since before the Conquistadors. She doesn't speak English: or Spanish; only an ancient pre-Columbian Aztec language known only by people living within 50 km of the mountain that her village is on. How she got to 'El Norte', she doesn't remember.