If this fingerprint scanner works as poorly and as slowly as the fingerprint scanner on my Thinkpad, there's no way in hell anyone would want this on a gun.

If on the other hand you want to make sure no one can ever fire the gun, this sounds great.

I'd rather fight about the details of implementation and bureaucracy than continue to allow content producers to completely block some uses, sue people over others, and charge exorbitant fees to those they don't like.

I'm thinking that with compulsory licensing (as I describe it), new business models would be enabled because they don't have to ask permission. It would just be their responsibility to pay the negotiated fee. (and they don't have to do any negotiation at all since it's set on a large scale -- renegotiated periodically by content owner and distributor stake-holders and not set by fiat by one or the other). There would be no "licensing deals", and e.g. movie studios wouldn't be able to discriminate against iTunes, Netflix, Amazon, or TPB.

Payment would mostly be by the honor system, using copyright registrations to figure out who to pay (imagine every file having a "copyright holder" hash in it somewhere that identifies who to pay). I'm sure content owners would use a trade organization (MPAA) to track down non-payers, but they wouldn't be able to sue for more than e.g. 3*(license fee) so no more grandmas with $100,000 bills for 2 songs, and it only would make sense for them to go after large distributors.

Imagine an app that takes a hash of each media file you have, looks it up in a central copyright database, and tells you how much it would cost to copy it all onto your friend's laptop, and it would all be legal. I don't want *enforced* drm-style payment, just decent and legal accounting...there are always exceptions and I don't want to re-buy all my music when my HDD crashes, nor do I want anyone's software to tell me whether what I'm doing is legal or not.

Who said it was a tax? Or that the government was involved? All I meant by "compulsory licensing" is that the owner of content would be legally obligated to grant possession and distribution to any entity that asks, for a fixed fee that is negotiated on a large scale (rather than a negotiated punitive damage in court). I'm imagining this would be privately administered, except that there has to be a law to get it started. E.g. imagine that everything on TPB was explicitly legal, and that TPB was tasked with collecting $1.50 for each movie...

This is a good reason to have content production and distribution handled by different entities. Content producers are paranoid and afraid that everyone will abscond with their special little flower, while content distributors are overly liberal in distributing to as wide an audience as possible. It makes sense for these two groups to fight it out to decide what the best compromise of protection vs. distribution is.

Personally, I want compulsory licensing. Posessing or obtaining content would always be legal, and the question becomes who you're supposed to pay and how much (a non-discriminatory licensing fee). It turns the question into an economic one, instead of a criminal one. An entity distributing content without collecting the licensing fee could be sued, but only for an amount proportional to the licensing fees.

desktop computers have filters?

Yes, if you buy a good case. I have an Antec 1200 which has four removable, washable filters. I wish I had the patience to clean them once a month, because they get dirty very quickly. This design isn't the best, it still requires quite a bit of disassembly to get at the filters (which is why I don't clean them more often).

I highly recommend everyone buy a case with filters. I bet poor cooling from dust is the #1 cause of hardware failures. Don't forget to clean your laptops too.

Because a study of those chemicals was recently completed, and guess what? She was right and they're really harmful to humans. California is now overhauling their rules on use of the stuff...

Sure Android will switch to a wifi hotspot, but that paywall/clickwall the provider put up will cause all apps/browsers to download the clickwall instead of their intended destination, and break. I frequently find myself having to disable wifi because I'm in a coffee shop that I frequent, and don't want to deal with your clickwall just so I can pull up google maps to get directions. Happens in airports especially. I'd just rather use the 3G than deal with your clickwall, for some trivial info lookup. Android needs to figure out whether it has a real connection or a clickwall, before routing all your traffic through the new connection.

Switching between wifi and cellular is far from perfect. I don't believe e.g. Skype can really handle switching upstream providers at all...

But the money is already removed from your account. Reporting it does not cause the money to reappear in your account. (Some banks will do that, depending on the nature of the fraud, but it's up to the bank) The dispute process takes 6 months to a year, and in the meantime, you're out the money. And in the event of disagreement, you're screwed by default.

And worse, with PIN transactions, the account holder assumes the risk of fraud, which is large, and the fault of banks creating a ridiculous transaction system based on a set of "secret" numbers (printed on the card).

I hope this will lead to the rise of new, more secure transaction systems, and competition over fees, rather than the collusion that is occurring now. It was eye-opening to live in Europe, and see the SEPA system over there. You can send money securely to any person or business, instantaneously. Over in the US you generally cannot send money to other people (some banks allow ACH now, but that is often TWO way, and your money is in limbo for 3-5 days while the Clearing House makes interest on it). Frankly, I think the US constitution's requirement that the government issue currency means that the government needs to get involved and fix/regulate a secure transaction system, to lubricate the economy. Let's just join the SWIFT/BIC system. It works.

Maybe you would know... Why is research insisting on "broad spectrum" antibiotics: single compounds that kill many bugs, rather than making antibiotic cocktails? If there is a probability of developing a resistance P, then a cocktail containing two antibiotics should have a probability P^2. Is it something sickening to do with patents? Or is there a good scientific reason?

Ipads are great, especially the latest one, except that the screen is slightly small, and writing with a capacitive stylus is worse than crayons. I need a resistive digitizer to write equations.

Multiple tablets. 11x17 has a 1.55 aspect ratio, which is closer to 16:8=1.78 than 8.5x11. The zoom factor is horrible though, nearly 1/4 the area of a full-width page on 8.5x11 vs 11.6 diagonal. Seriously, we need to lobby for tablets matching common paper sizes, at 200-300dpi, not movie and game devices awkwardly adapted to non-frivolous uses.

Well, technically, we were there, and the industry decided to start moving backwards.

I still use a Thinkpad X61 tablet which has a 1400x1050 screen (150 ppi) and a wacom digitizer. I've been using it to annotate PDF's for years. However, it's on it's last legs but there is still nothing to replace it with.

I made a paper cutout of the size of the screen for 10.1" and 11.6" and 13.3" Windows 8 devices at 1080p, which have respectively 218, 190, and 166 ppi. (In my opinion, 150 ppi is the absolute minimum to be able to read subscripts in a full-page maximized document). You'll notice that all these 16:9 screens are substantially narrower and taller than a sheet of paper. (16:9 is an aspect ratio of 1.78, while 8.5"x11" paper is 1.29) So maximizing the width of a full page on a portrait TV-screen gives you closer to 1.5 pages at a time. The old 4:3 monitors were perfect for documents in portrait mode (aspect ratio 1.33 -- so enough room for a toolbar). Why in the bloody dripping hell everyone decided to use TV screens for computer displays boggles my mind. On the most common Windows 8 screen size, 11.6" at 1080p, an 8.5"x11" document is compressed into a 5.69"x7.36" space. How good are your eyes? For those of you with your calculators out, that's less than half the area of the original 8.5"x11" paper. Sure you could zoom it, welcome to an unending hell of fiddling with scrollbars on a tablet device. Oh and don't forget those 1" document margins wasting screen space. Do you know a good PDF reader that can reliably zoom away margins for screen reading? Neither do I.

The only reasonable upcoming windows 8 device, in my opinion, is the Asus Taichi, the 13.3" version of which has been indefinitely delayed. :-(

Everything else on the market either has: too small of a screen or no digitizer. So, in case anyone from the industry is reading this, bring back 4:3 screens, make them around 14" diagonal with very small bezels and while you're at it, give us > 200 PPI or higher and resistive digitizers!!!. An 8.5"x11" sheet of paper has a diagonal size of 13.9". There's a huge market out there that is unsatisfied. Everyone on the damn planet uses paper, and we need devices that emulate paper use-cases. The OP and myself would definitely buy such devices. Screw Apple and their narrow-minded "no stylus" initiative. Paper has been in use for thousands of years. It's not going to stop tomorrow.

So payment security comes down to insurance and legal liability? Fuck that. Truly secure transactions are well within or means, and have been for decades. I want neither to lose my money, nor to funnel billions to criminals through insurance premiums.

Try again, you jokers.

hint: chip and pin, two factor authentication, and private keys for cardholders are good starting points.

I disagree on the music. I too wanted to upload my music collection to my phone, but thought I'd try to live without it with a Galaxy Nexus phone. Since I bought it I've discovered:

• All the music/streaming/radio apps are ad-laden broken crapware. Half the time they stop after 2 songs, and the other half of the time they're shoveling unwanted ads at me. (Pandora: ads, Spotify: facebook credentials?!?!, WinAMP: ads, only works half the time, the list goes on...) In practice I never use any of these, and I hate every one I've tried.
• You might consider paying for one of the above music services to avoid the ads, but since their free adware versions don't work correctly (broken connections and stopping after a couple songs), I'm loathe to fork over cash.
• When I really want my music is when I'm not connected to the internet: on a plane, camping, etc.

So, yes, I really really do want more storage space on these things, and/or a SD card. Of course FAT formatting is downright retarded (interesting point though). I'm happy if it's EXT formatted...