I had to resort to plastering the guy's block of units with the screen captured photo of the location, *and* deduce his employer's name, and send the address there with an explanation. Turns out the guy just 'found' it and was meaning to return it anyway. Uh-huh.

So anyway, when the cops take the report, tell them (when they ask) that the ipad contains information which may be of use to terrorists. Your porn stash might give aid and comfort, right? At that point, I imagine, they will be bashing the door down to get it back.

Finally, and most surprisingly ... Apple will happily continue to allow the thief to download new software (including, of course, reflashing the device) even if you inform them of the theft, and even if you accompany it with a police report of the theft ... why should Apple care, they're making money both sides of the deal, right? Apple 'support' 'explained' to me that it was technically impossible for them to refuse to allow a thief to make use of Apple's facilities to reflash the iPad into a valuable commodity. Apple 'support' admitted that there was a hard-wired serial number, that the iTunes crapware could read it, and that it could send it to the servers, but ... no ... technically impossible. It'd be a different story if someone were stealing something of theirs, I guess.

Apple Scum.

My next iPad will be a Samsung.

Isn't there also the problem that you need uninfected people to administer the modern medical care. Sure, that's why RNs and MDs are among the first to be immunised, but still it wouldn't take much to bring down the health systems even in an advanced country.

And it is nothing like gnome2 in terms of flexibility, configurability, support for the plugins we came to depend upon.

Gnome jumped the shark, Ubuntu followed them. I'm jumping ship.

"Some day, you will be able to carry a phone, and dock it to a keyboard, mouse and display and use it as a full desktop with all your apps and data. Or use it as a tablet, in a different dock." - M.Shuttlesworth.

This is the 'vision.' With a simple dock, and a healthy dose of kool-aid, you will be able to turn a mouse into a finger, and a big wide screen with no touch capability at all into a touch-sensitive screen. The only thing missing is the part where a mouse behaves even slightly like a finger, and a display behaves even slightly like a touch screen.

Then, instead of relaxing your forearm on a desk and making small precise hand gestures with a mouse, you will be able to either use the mouse to drag the cursor (which you can hardly see) across large distances to precisely hit a sensitive area which you can also hardly see. OR, you will be able to wave your arms around wildly while gesturing at this vertical surface with your fingers ... except of course your forearm and upper arm muscles will quickly tire from all the effort.

We tried this in the lab, and the results are in: hand-waving is the way of the FUTURE!

From the previous Slashdot article about this debacle (the one where Shuttlesworth says "power users" are all wankers for not loving the Unity) one is directed to https://bugs.launchpad.net/unity/+bug/882274/comments/36 and then http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-unity/ which states that the usability of Unity was tested on 15 people, where "Of the 15 participants recruited, 13 were Windows users, 1 was a Mac user, and 1 used both Windows and Mac. None of the participants was familiar with Ubuntu."

This is jumping the shark with *lasers*

Tested, you say? Read this and weep: http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-unity/

It states that the usability of Unity was tested on 15 people, where "Of the 15 participants recruited, 13 were Windows users, 1 was a Mac user, and 1 used both Windows and Mac. None of the participants was familiar with Ubuntu."

No, that would be trademark infringment - the 'potentially cause confusion' test derives from the tort of 'passing off' one thing as another.

If GNU had chosen HTML instead of info for its documentation, perhaps HTML would have been alive.

No ... wait ...

A large proportion of US Aid takes the form of tied loans for the purchase of military equipment. I guess if the arms were used to liberate the oppressed (q.v. Shaw's Major Barbara) that could be considered aid, but I am pretty sure this isn't the usual practice.

Oh, one more!

* Tcl has Safe Interpreters - as someone else noted - you can selectively hide, block or emulate commands in a cascade privilege model, so you can have a sandbox within a sandbox, if you want to. You could write a safe interpreter which executed third party code in a completely untrusted environment. That was a big feature of the Tcl Plugin for FF too. Very advanced security model.