It's Jabber, but without the hassle of account creation. Username is automatically set up as your phone number, and password is your IMEI or something.

So it's about as secure as SMS, but also as practical for technophobes. It's free of charge and allows much more data than SMS (file transfer of pics etc.), which is why people use it.

If you've got access to propellant it'd often be better to build a Kirk-style blunderbuss out of strong pre-formed tube. It's hard to imagine a situation where you have access to a 3D printer and appropriate plastic, AND happen to have a couple of small-calibre low pressure bullets, but I'm sure there are edge cases where this will do nicely.

You don't have to use the windows though, if you want you can just sit in the back with your wine.

No no, it's the other way around. Debian is Ubuntu for people who don't want to go to the hassle of configuring privacy settings or uninstalling bloat.

Well it's funny, there was a horde of people suggesting more basic versions of John's warping techniques in the comments section to Michael's blog post. They were all dismissed because he felt the silhouetting John talked about was too much of a deal-breaker for realism. John's experiments seem to suggest otherwise, so it'll be interesting to see two competitive headsets using different sets of tricks to try to fool peoples' sense of realism.

I personally think CS education is sorely lacking in primary school age kids, but at that age it's got nothing to do with computers. Just teaching kids basic logic (you can do it formally or in the form of logic jokes and riddles for the kids that learn in different ways) goes a long way to setting them up for CS and other sciences, but it's also a valuable mental tool to have when you start getting affected by politics, propaganda, and marketing in the real world

A "preloaded USB stick" service would be nice from an internet-only store, say if they could do an 8GB stick for $5 and you have the game within a week. You'd still need the dialup connection to decrypt the USB stick files and install to your console, but if you're on dialup you're not going to be playing multiplayer over Internet, so you can safely tell your console not to attempt to update whenever a patch is pushed.

Then why is Microsoft signing a "click OK to continue" shim that allows corporate users to install their own "untrusted" OS onto a system that only trusts the Microsoft key? Does MS have a more restrictive key that can be installed manually by IT departments? If so, could that be part of an evil plan to then get it onto generic vendor machines?

Would you trust a vendor preinstall of a desktop linux distro? Standard practice for Windows power users is to put down a clean install of the OS over whatever the vendor preinstalled, for power users I'd be happy with doing this for GNU/Linux distros even when the system comes with some flavour of Linux-based OS.

ChromeOS provides a set-and-forget OS that avoids the Microsoft tax and works for the non-power-user. As long as there's a supported method of reinstalling an unsigned OS (previous iterations of Chromebook have had this, but it's always something to watch for), that should be suitable for the power user to reinstall over.

In the magical future when there's big commercial support for users on desktop GNU/Linux, then it will be important for vendors to preinstall a desktop-grade OS, but not now. ChromeOS devices should become cheaper and cheaper, not more and more powerful for the same price.

This is actually a good point - Microsoft have gone through decades of pain being the target of malware, have suffered through it, and at this point have something of an immune system developed with Security Essentials and the ecosystem of third-party anti-malware. It's definitely an advantage over Apple, whether or not it's the best way to go.

Read your signature as part of the conversation, wasn't out of place.

What would be nice is an encryption setup mode where you have your password/authentication plus 4k of random data (like a big salt). When you set up the encryption or subsequently boot the system decrypted, it regenerates the random data and re-encrypts the internal final decryption key with your password+new random salt. When you shut the phone down normally, the salt is saved in cleartext and you're ready to go upon next boot, but if you yank the battery or shut down in "panic mode", the salt isn't saved and the phone is unrecoverable by you or anybody else. If you're worried about losing data, you could also have "saved salt" as the default mode, and the only way to render the device unusable would be to shut it down in some sort of "panic mode"

Unity3D will still be usable without GPU acceleration, it will use a new software implementation of OpenGL called llvmpipe. llvmpipe is a much better software rasteriser than we've traditionally had, but it's still software which means it's significantly slower than even the simplest of hardware OpenGL implementations.

Your NAS doing DLNA is doing more than a NAS needs to. XBMC happily supports connecting to Samba or SFTP shares within the application, or you could just use NFS and attach the NAS share to the local filesystem. If a NAS cares about what type of file it's sending over a plain filesystem access protocol like that it's a broken NAS.

He's quadraphonic he's ah.. he's got more channels