Germany did see a drop in its economy. Hauling the East on board took a giant's effort and they were "lucky" enough to be one of the strongest economies on this planet so they could pull that off. That doesn't mean that everything in the East was "bad" or outdated, but a lot of corruption was going on as well, leading to a big loss where actually competitive companies were sold off cheaply and the state being stuck with the duds. Crime and unemployment are currently a serious problem in the East (with unemployment rates as high as 20-25%), and it's not really likely that this is going to change soon.

If anyone, it wasn't the population that really won in the unification. It was mostly a win for big business. Sadly, that doesn't automatically translate into a windfall for Germany's economy. It mostly means that the country is now forced to deal with a lot of unemployed people while the assets of the East were squandered to "friends" of the government that was in charge back then.

I was actually considering getting it. Of course, not sleeping on the sidewalk to get it, I was out of luck, but indeed I do think that a quick SOLD OUT is not necessarily a good sign. Of course, many other items were in short supply at their initial release, too, but with all of them it meant for me that I waited for a good while to see if it was intentional or whether it was really a manufacturing problem.

I have a Wii. I got it about a year after its release for exactly the same reasons. Though it was pretty much a given that Nintendo HAS to commit because, well, what other products do they really have that they can stand on? They needed to commit to it because there was no other option if they wanted to stay in the console race. I didn't intend to get a PS3, so that didn't bother me, but the others all had one serious problem: The company making them needn't commit. They have other items that are their main product, and if that one flops badly, so what.

Same with this tablet. MS has many other legs to stand on, if this one fizzles like the Kin or to a lesser degree the Zune, they could easily accept the loss and just cut it. The "guaranteed software support" isn't really that great if it bombs and no company jumps onto it and makes software for it.

Yes, from the government's point of view. But how many went into that area of work and how many dedicated pretty much their life (and, like von Braun for example) would sleep with the devil because they really WANTED it to happen?

To me it sounds like the company that made it not only did poor market research, they also don't seem to believe in their own product if they don't trust it to sell and hence produce only a small number of them because they themselves thought it would sit on the shelf.

Enough reason for me to steer clear of it. Or at the very least I'll watch the market for a while now and if, and only if, they sell large numbers in the foreseeable future, I could believe that they are willing to support it for a while afterwards and not simply let it "phase out".

Why did man go to the moon?

Because someone said it's impossible and most of all, because it is there.

Now return your geek card, please.

Hard, no. It ain't hard. It's easy.

Easy to forget about it and having to apologize, too.

That was actually one of the few really good features. Remember the good ol' times, when you carried a notebook around with phone numbers? Or shuffling through business cards to find the one of the person you wanted to call? I do.

And mostly of the "it doesn't crash" feature.

Seriously, I know I'm a dying breed, but I want a phone that can make a call, no matter what. Everything else is fluff. And if it crashes every couple hours or days, it does not fulfill that spec.

Security comes in three forms:

1. Something you know (passwords, access credentials)
2. Something you have (key, token, access cards)
3. Something you are (biometry, finger scans)

You can hardly improve on a single one of them. Requiring more or more elaborate forms of any does not really increase security sensibly. Brute forcing passwords or credentials is already pretty much a thing of the past. Requiring longer, more elaborate passwords do not necessarily lead to more security for more than one reason. The obvious one is, that you can NOT expect a human being to remember some bizarre character combination like d5Zn$2aUk%kR'snawP. What will people do? Note it down. Which turns security into a combination of 1 and 2, but an OR combination thereof. It's enough to EITHER know the password OR have the post-it that it was written on. The same applies to password vaults, where it becomes enough to have them, not know a password.

A good improvement of security means that you add another security group to the fold with an AND combination. Require a password AND a token. Like ATMs do, requiring your bank card AND a code. That it's not foolproof, well, ATMs are a good example why not. Coincidentally, a good reason just WHY they are not is actually lying in the fact that people, again, make the mistake of writing down their ATM code and storing it together with their card, reducing the security to a Model 2 only security. Which also illustrates why it is usually pretty pointless to create more of the same kind of security layer, because requiring two passwords only means I have to sniff two (being entered at the same time, meaning I get them at the same time), or requiring two tokens (because most humans store them at the same place, like the ATM card and the written down code).

So improving security can only mean requiring authentication from another group of the three. But ADDITIONALLY. Not instead of. Replacing passwords with fingerprint scanners (as seen quite often today, especially with laptops) does not really increase security by a lot. At least if we're talking about company laptops where the (currently) authorized user may well not be one anymore tomorrow. Though at least biometry ensures that the person entrusted with access cannot easily grant it to a third person, unless he is physically present.

Who in their sane mind (in ITSEC, that is) is still dabbling with brute force problems? Seriously, Deloitte, stick with economy audits, at least there you can't do much more harm than has already been done to this economy, but stay out of real work, will ya? At least we could do without your "recommendations" to your clients to require bizarre combinations of characters from their employees that only leads to them noting them down on a post-it and stick it underneath their keyboards (which, oddly, you do NOT have a recommendation against ... but I ramble).

Whether your password has 3 or 30 characters, and how many special characters in what odd combination and how many generations back you may not repeat even 2 of those characters again is moot. NOBODY on the "other side" bothers with brute forcing anymore. Passwords are being sniffed, hacked or simply lifted in other ways, from keyloggers to the good old "this is your IT-department on the phone, we need your password". And when I have your secretary TELL me her password, it's frickin' pointless to make it 100 chars long. Only means I have to talk to her longer. Which, I admit, may or may not be a nuisance to me when I get tasked with testing something you "secured". Depending on how nasty the voice of the person I audit is.

The security hole is NOT the length of your password. Get with the times, brute forcing just simply and plainly takes too long. Even if it's only a 3 char password, there are simply ways that get the attacker access far easier, more reliably and with a lot less effort.

How gravity works is simple. Take a hammer, put your toe under it and watch gravity in all its glory.

How it works is well established. The question (the only question actually, in most applications) is why.

Think. You could either go and spend your life in your attempt to invent something, break your financial security and health (think of Mr. Goodyear, sure everyone knows his name now but he was poor most of his life). And in this time and age, chances are good that as soon as you actually have something worthwhile, some shyster will come along with some hare brained patent and rob you.

Or you could hope onto the latest fad bandwagon and try to mooch yourself.

Look around you and tell me which is it if you just want money. Because, essentially, that's what drives invention today.

I dare to disagree. At least where I live, casinos are heavily regulated and if the house cheats you, they get shut down. In this casino, they get bailed out.

Now, now... I have actually met a few decent lawyers. Economists, on the other hand...

"In earlier days, the riffraff was sitting in the fairground booth in front of a crystal ball. Today they just changed their rags with suits and stand in front of flipcharts."