Hmm. When I'm reading something like the editorial from the front article, what gesture do I use to navigate to the next page of the article? back to the previous page? How do i pick a single link, optimized for a mouse click, out of the field of ridiculous links you see strewn across the top and left sides of every text site? What about when I go to a site like the NYT, which spawns popups when I click on the screen? How will I scroll down on a site like that without inundating myself with advertisements?

My point is that web developers aren't thinking in terms gestures and mobile applications when they code their sites, and that a lot of the functionality currently present in websites is completely and utterly geared towards mouse users.

If tablet computing miraculously takes off, it will be because the OS is extensible to the web, allowing developers to tweak their products to behave less like websites and more like applications.

One think I've noticed is that websites are poorly optimized for gesture-based navigation? If any novel UI implementations are going to come out of an Apple tablet, this is probably the place to look.

While human core temperature is generally 98.6, our skin temperature is typically between 85-95 F, depending on environment and where on the body the temperature is measured.

Cell plans might become simple data contracts in the near future, and if that happens cell providers will have no problem with letting you run up your bill by tethering. Even if they don't, there are other possibilities:

An ad-hoc network of cars communicating information in real-time about the traffic ahead, able to inform drivers about the average congestion speed so that traffic jams clear up ten times faster?

Social driving, you can cuss out the asshole who cut you off as he speeds away from you, have a good morning chat with people you recognize in other cars along the commute?

Clearly, banning children from the internet is unenforceable and preposterous.

The idea here is that instead of understanding the technology and applying the old laws to the new medium, legislators feel the need to write overly broad laws that make every Canadian who's ever participated in a flamewar on youtube a potential sex offender / felon.

At the very least, passing a law like this would make parents responsible for whatever distress/harm came to their unaccompanied children while they surfed the net, something many here would agree with.

The obvious legislative solution to this problem is to ban kids from using the internet until they are at least 18 years of age.

Much like children aren't allowed in bars, children should not be allowed on the internet.

Is selective enforcement of a law an effective defense against that law's application against an individual, in Denmark?

All of the author's cited works were written after the cryptographers had their go, presumably she has access to better information than the 1950s sleuths.

For a little bit of alphabetical shuffling and simple puzzle solving to provide a solution to a 400 year old mystery does seem outrageous though, and extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Hopefully an actual linguist will take a few minutes to look at the manuscript and see if there's any truth to this claim.

I think a part of the reason developers ignore the challenges disabled gamers face is because there are so many different types of disability, each of which raises very specific challenges that a non-disabled developer might not have the time or inclination to understand and work around.

When you add that to the normal considerations - storyline objectives, gameplay objectives, internal politics, budgetary concerns, etc., it's not surprising that the disabled are completely marginalized and occasionally screwed by silly decisions like the one you've described.

I think if the disabled want games to have a "mode" of gameplay specifically for them, they need to demonstrate that they are a viable market whose demands are easily met. The gaming review site is excellent - it raises awareness, but disabled gamers might be better off soliciting the ADA or some other organization to set up a system for determining a game's viability for different types of disabled gamers, ultimately placing a label on the packaging with this information.

Flash objects store cookies in a location that is not covered by browser privacy controls.

These cookies stick with you even after you uninstall/reinstall the plugin, and can only be managed through a web interface on the flash website. So you're correct - flash bypasses traditional browser controls and provides advertisers a more persistent method of following a user across multiple domains.

I was ignoring that checkbox until I realized that every time Slashdot hung while loading it was because I was waiting on a third-party ad server.

It's surprising there don't seem to be any quality-of-service clauses in the contracts between content providers and third-party advertisers.

This does not indemnify you against information uploaded by unwitting friends, relatives, acquaintances, or colleagues. The more people come to rely on the internet as a venue for socializing, the less control any individual will have over their personal information or their privacy. As information collecting becomes more automated, AR will become more useful and hence more commonplace, possibly bringing some of the issues raised by the article to the fore.

I think it's important to recognize that even though AR introduces additional risks to *your* security and privacy, it has the exact same effect on a *criminal's* security and privacy. I'll throw a hypothetical scenario out there - say you enabled a service at the supermarket that automatically emails you a copy of your receipt whenever you make a purchase. If your identity thief makes a purchase at one of these supermarkets, you have an incriminating email containing unrecognizable foodstuffs and a credit account you never opened, which can be used to spearhead an investigation pulling CCTV footage from that supermarket to compare to a facial recognition database, resulting in the identification and arrest of the identity thief.

Given this scenario, I think that rather than rebel against the erosion of our privacy, we need to accept that privacy in its current incarnation will never exist again, and instead work towards ensuring that no single group of people is allowed to exempt themselves or abuse this new information.

Starvation is a geopolitical problem, not a resource problem. Grain production has consistently outpaced population growth for the past 30 years. Even during last year's food crisis, resource shortfalls were not an issue.

more here: http://www.worldhunger.org/articles/Learn/world%20hunger%20facts%202002.htm

What gives the police the right to compel a person to say or do anything?

The way I see it, the police know this exec is going to walk away with a clean record- after all, he's done nothing wrong. The consequence of this mess is that the average person will be more likely to comply when an illegal demand is made by the police, because the average person can't afford the same legal representation as a corporate executive.

You pull that server out of the farm and let other servers pick up the slack while you make repairs.

It's hype, based on the assumption that every server on the planet will be virtualized by 2019, and that the separation of hardware from the software that runs on it will allow IT departments ample time to offload work into "the cloud" while they swap out RAM.

Either that or it's made for large datacenters with multiple redundancies and enormous cooling costs. :)