I'll hazard a guess here: don't underestimate Amazon's branding and market reach.
The Kindle series is massively popular and has raised awareness in the e-reader market far better than any of its competitors.
Many people might actually give an Android tablet a shot (not referring to geeks here) considering the stellar track record Kindle presents.

Time and again, /.ers always predict a product's performance based on it's technical merit (e.g. Apple products).
What many fail to realize is that the vast majority of the consumers don't give a crap about technical merit; marketing, usability and design is really important.
Amazon's services has gathered a strong following and a tablet guaranteed to work with all their services may appeal to quite a few people.

I don't think it's really fair to say at this stage that SSDs aren't more reliable than hard drives.

For one, SSDs are still rather new. Yes, they've been around for a few years but compared to hard drives they are still at the beginning of their development cycle, and it shows: firmware issues and recalls, as stated in the article, may be a heavy contributing factor to the SSD failure rates. We can expect this to drop as manufacturers continually revise their firmware and manufacturing techniques for the better.
For another, the article also notes that the SSD failure rates, to this point, are rather constant. If this trend holds, SSDs can easily outstrip HDDs in reliability by the 3rd or 4th year.
Finally, SSD has been coined reliable often in the perspective of the average consumer. The benefits are obvious: when mishandling occurs (which happens much more often than you'd think, even on desktops), HDDs will have a far higher chance of damage.

Hence, while the results of this article is indeed interesting, perhaps a study done when the technology matures further would be more useful.

Just because many companies astroturf their products doesn't make it right, it is still false advertising.

They should be called out for it and these actions should be discouraged (preferably by law).
And that's exactly what this article attempts to do.

Subway wants to provide us with food, because they want to know what we eat.
Let's stop that "evil empire" by eating.

The answer isn't to stop consuming, but rather to encourage increased competition.

This is correct.

From my limited understanding of Japanese, the article refers to reactor #3, not explosion #3.
I know Slashdot has limited editors, but shouldn't you at least click and check the links before posting such an important piece of news?

Many local news outlets will pick up and spread this piece of disinformation.

So what you're saying in car analogy terms:
Roads will exist, and roads will need maintenance whether they are used or not. So we shouldn't charge road users for it right, because 'the maintenance needed to be done anyways'.

Yes, the bandwidth is 'free' and SMS bandwidth will be used either ways.
Just as someone needs to pay to build the roads in the first place (and more roads as the car usage goes up), someone needs to pay to build cell phone towers (and more towers as more phones are needed).

Now of course there are several ways to go about this:
1.) Everyone Tax: If cell phone service is deemed critical enough, the government taxes everyone to pay for the expansion of services.
2.) Per-Cellphone Tax: Just like the road tax, the government controls the expansion of the system through a monthly fee from all cell phone users. Of course, that means infrequent users will be charged the same high monthly fee to get SMSing.
3.) Free Market: Providers distribute the costs through various more 'tangible' services in order to allow greater accessibility to infrequent users whilst making the frequent users bear the brunt of the costs.

Since Americans scream "COMMUNIST!" at the first two options, naturally the third has taken root.

The -REAL- problem, however, is that alot of the money is not used for expansion but instead wasted by top management in terms of salary, lawyering, entertainment, etc.
You need to break up your monopolies, America, or let the government intervene.

Printer drivers were just one of the examples.
I suspect this guy doesn't know much about the specifics, and his comptroller just told him it's more financially viable to switch back to Windows.

Frankly, I believe that Linux is causing a great deal of inconvenience to both them and businesses that work with them.
Just Microsoft Office alone and the poor job OpenOffice does of transparently replacing it is sufficient to piss off a whole lot of employees.

It's hard to put a hard figure on lost productivity as employees are encumbered by inexperience or poor UI.
Training helps (and that costs quite a nice amount too), but I'm pretty certain employees work far faster on a UI they're familiar with.

It's not simply chicken and egg.

I've recommended linux to my friends who are using netbook, i.e. mostly sharing common configurations with no obscure hardware expected.
Whilst they don't have driver issues, the most common complaints are:

- Poor and inconsistent UI. They particularly hated that Ubuntu was swapping the buttons around often.
- Many open source software are feature-incomplete when compared to their commercial counterparts.
- Linux desktop (esp. Ubuntu) is very unstable when it comes to updates; half the time the updates would break something for them.

Typical overlooking of economic factors in your argument, i.e. economies of scale.

You're forgetting that in 5-10 years, many developing nations (most notably China) will have higher mean incomes.
As demand for monochrome displays drop significantly and that of smart phones rise, it is highly possible that due to economies of scale, a monochrome display will cost MORE than a smart screen phone, simply due to the waning demand.

Case in point: DDR2 memory today is now cheaper than the DDR memory it replaced.

World to US: Your carriers are screwing you over, not the smart/dumbphone makers.
I have a subsidized iPhone at $25/mo.

A rather alarmist post that overshadows the progress Google puts forth here.
Two-factor authentication is long overdue for communications that is critical and private for businesses and individuals alike.

1.) Firstly and most importantly, the "mandatory" is pure guessing/speculation. Google almost always implements an opt-out system for such features.
2.) Secondly, if you're the type that relies on e-mail being available everywhere (business-types), chances are your phone is also everywhere with you. The large majority already bring their phones everywhere with them. Those that don't are a really small group.

Furthermore, it is very easy for Google to implement something like this:

- Read-only and/or Reply-only mail for the past 24 hours if you only have the password, with no changes permitted to settings and all attempts logged.
- Full access if you are able to reproduce the code. Those logging in through this way will be clearly warned of any past password-only attempts.

This way, leakage of personal information and impersonation will be minimized whilst those needing their latest updates from email everywhere can get it.

Morality is a very subjective topic, what's moral to me (e.g. euthanasia) may not be moral to you.

If you see it from a mainland-China perspective, their "stealing" may be deemed justified considered how much of US's crap China has to put up with.

But one can also understand Google's stance when it comes to this issue.

There have already been numerous complaints how the Google App Market is terrible fractured and hence not appealing due to the widely varying hardware configurations and OS versions each Android device is currently using.
Loosening the CCD and removal of more compulsory hardware requirements will only fracture the App Market even more.

Here are some of the forseeable effects:
- Consumers are pissed how wonderful-app-X is not available for their tablet because it lacks a camera or a GPS.
- Developers are pissed at how limited their target audience is if they wish to fully utilize the hardware of the device due to the fragmented nature of the platform.

As a result, developers' creativity with applications are limited, consumers buy less applications, the vicious cycle continues and the App Market can't ever match up to the Apple App Store.