I will say, the one thing Mac has done well is avoiding the exact problem the OP describes. They basically have 2 laptops, with a few different monitor sizes. The specs can vary slightly, but not so much as to make a real difference.

You're right! I read the title of the article, not the title of the fair when I was thinking this. Doh!

Sounds like an awesome result, but isn't this more a feat of engineering than science? Not that I am complaining per se, but I feel that it's important that people recognize the difference.

Because reading a normal desktop's output from 15 feet away on the couch is hard. The nice thing about these is that the UI is designed for easy reading and navigation with a remote.

Incognito mode doesn't prevent cookies within the browsing session. It merely prevents them from persisting after private-browsing mode has ended. Hence, you can still log into sites that use cookies.

Stop making it bigger! Start making it faster!

I don't think a reasonable password hashing algorithm works like that. If I change one character in the password (any single character) the entire hash could/should change. You can't look at it and say "well, 90% of the hash matches, let's tweak it a bit more."

"On some login systems, the computer will check password characters one at a time, and kick back a "login failed" message as soon as it spots a bad character in the password."

If you do almost any sort of reasonable hashing or encryption algorthm on a password, this becomes a moot point, since the place that fails to match in the string will change. Are there still sites out there that don't do this? Really?

It's not IP Law. It's marketing and, as frustrating as the end result is, it is completely reasonable in the bigger picture. If a product maker wants to sell their product for different prices in different places, then by all means, go for it. Furthermore, if an product maker needs to translate or in some other way localize their product for international markets, then that adds costs. There's nothing inherently wrong with adjusting your product for the market your selling in.