The communication with the notaries is in all likelihood encrypted and signed with predistributed keys, similar to CA certificates today. That's not a large problem, because ultimately you have to trust the software you are running anyway.
That still retains all the benefits over the CA system that you mention; you get multiple points of trust that all have to be compromised, and if one is compromised you can distrust it with minimal consequences.

We do have some idea.

We know that Microsoft is approaching this in pretty much the most scummy and mafia-like way possible, using strong-arm tactics to make companies sign NDA agreements to prevent information leaking out that would allow other companies to protect themselves ahead of time.

We know that the patents that we have seen, mostly thanks to B&N having some balls and not falling for the MS's cheap tricks, are dubious and certainly not worth what Microsoft is demanding, given that you can licence Windows 7 for about the same price.

I personally know that I'll do my best to not give MS a dime of my money, though they sure know to take their rent from PC and phone manufacturers, and in fact I'm glad this story came up, because I was about to inadvertently buy some of their hardware, but come to think of it I won't, because who wants to subsidize shit like this?

To be honest, while id Tech 5 with its heavy focus on textures is an interesting experiment, I'm looking a lot more forward to id Tech 6. It looks like it will use raycasting on sparse voxel octrees, same as the Unlimited Detail guys. That will by all accounts amount to a generational leap in graphics, doing for geometry pretty much what MegaTexturing does for textures.

John Carmack has been talking about voxels since 2008, but the hardware weren't up to it back then. Apparently they're doing research on id Tech 6 now.

While the Unlimited Detail guys have made some promising demos using static geometry with static lightning, I believe rendering a more dynamic game world with animation and varying lightning remains an unsolved problem. I can't wait to see what Carmack and his team can come up with.

That's an oversimplification assuming the entire brain receives the exact same amount of energy, and that is just the radio transmissions, while a cell phone can also output heat on its own and reflect your body heat.

These "Platonic thought experiment" rebuttals tend to be simplistic to the point of "assuming spherical cows" and ignore the complex interactions of a real biological system. That's not a valid scientific argument, at best it's a plausibility argument.

We didn't think asbestos was a carcinogen but it was. We then thought glass fibers were likely to be carcinogens too, but they weren't.

Any cell phone use comes on top of all that, and some professions could easily spend more than an hour a day on the cell phone. (Though admittedly they'd normally get a hand-free set then.)

A correlation can be plenty to work with if you can clearly prove it. If the correlation can not be explained by other established models, or discarded as coincidence, you can then start searching for a underlying mechanism.

John Snow found a correlation between drinking from a certain well and outbreaks of cholera. The mechanism of infection was not known at the time, but even so the correlation was clear and undeniable.

The problem here is rather that they have tested for a correlation and there isn't one. Empirically testing a hypothesis you don't like is not pseudo-science.

Personally I doubt that cell phones have any notable effect on cancer rates, but dismissing it simply because the radiation is non-ionizing would be too hasty.

There are plenty of documented carcinogens besides ionizing radiation; irritants, burns, bacteria and various chemicals can all increase your risk of cancer.

The researchers are looking at cell phone use as a whole here. There are a couple of other effects that could plausibly have carcinogenic effects, though it is unlikely.
There's a list of potential issues at Wikipedia.
E.g., holding a cell phone close to your head while talking will cause slight but measurable heating of the brain.

Dismissing out of hand that any of these effects could cause cancer just because you think you understand the physics of radiation interacting with physical matter would be folly, comparable to dismissing asbestos as a carcinogen because you understand the effects of throwing rocks at a person.

Now, at this point there has been extensive studies on the matter, and I feel reasonably convinced that if there is indeed an effect, it is very slight. That was IMO the most likely result from the beginning, but considering the massive scale of worldwide mobile use, even a small probability of health issues is well worth researching.

The Hydrogen Audio Forums tests have traditionally used a sound methodology, it would probably be worth reading up on it before you comment, lest you make a fool out of yourself.

They will not be trying to measure how 'good' each codec sounds, they are trying to measure how close it is to the source material, with a 'perfect score' being statistically indistinguishable.

An end, but also a beginning; the final selection of the hash algorithm that will become SHA-3 is scheduled for 2012.

The current candidates are all faster than SHA-1 on platforms without hardware acceleration, even with the added security. Unless a weakness is discovered after the standardization, SHA-3 should eventually replace SHA-1 in all security critical applications.

Looks like they're planning to add alpha channels and XMP metadata, as well as a bunch of other more-or-less useful features, like 3d support.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30_AIEhar-I#t=29m10s

I think the SSIM advantage is adequately documented with the study linked to in TFA, though in the end what it comes down to is visual comparison. The earlier encoder was accused of overoptimising for PSNR, to the detriment of the overall image quality. Hopefully they can get some more heavy-duty psychovisual optimisations applied to both the video and still image encoders for further improvements.

Some streaming protocols, like HTTP live streaming, can work well with common techniques like content delivery networks and transparent caching to allow content distributors or ISPs to reduce network load by moving popular content closer to the endpoints.

Programming for Symbian in Python is pretty neat, but judging by the "TouchStudio" name I would guess this differs by being oriented toward editing on a touchscreen.

I think the question of how to effectively edit code on the go on a small portable device is an interesting question. Typing typically is pretty slow even on the few devices with a dedicated keyboard, and special characters tend to be hard to type.

I personally believe there is promise in a language with a simple structure, maybe something LISPy, intended for a more effective use of the the touch screen than letter-by-letter input. Possibly something similar to Lego's RCX code, where you drag and connect statement, control and value blocks in a pretty intuitive way.

Another possibility would be to have an adaptive keyboard with buttons for keywords and variable names that depend on context. Or program in APL, so commands are just one letter long anyway.

I'd have appreciated if they had provided a video of the editing interface.

Will this be upgradeable to Honeycomb?
I've been thinking for buying a tablet for general surfing and reading, but it looked like a bad time to buy anything, with most next-gen tablets available in March-April at earliest.

This thing seems to have the specs, so I'd be very interested in knowing if it's rootable, if it will run unsigned images, and if there's official plans to provide an upgrade to Android 3.0 at a later time.

I see this attitude a lot on /., but I don't understand where it comes from? It seems obvious to me that having a strong verification system in place is a good thing for everybody but the fraudsters.
In this case it turns out that it wasn't actually secure, which raises concern about whether the protocol was subject to adequate public scrutiny before it was decided to employ on such a massive scale. But do you have any reason to say that they aren't actually interested in preventing fraud?
Are there more secure methods that they are refusing to employ? Or are you saying that the problem of secure authentication is inherently unsolvable, and that they should just give up and resign themselves to laughable measures like signatures and card numbers?

Are you sure? The CIA world factbook lists the US as having the 4th largest export in US. dollars in the world - counting the EU.

Visit the test site and look again.

I don't see that Opera has done anything particularly protest-worthy here. Maintaining proxies to circumvent oppressive regimes' firewalls, admirable as it might be, is not in my default expectations of a browser company, and I can't help but notice that neither the Mozilla Project, Microsoft or Apple provide such a service, leaving you with few places to turn if you're going to boycott everyone who isn't in the trenches fighting the CPC.
It's regrettable that the government of China chose to operate this way, but Opera merely chose to follow the local law by restricting access to a service, much as every search engine of note has done, in China, Germany, the US and elsewhere.
If we as a society really don't want to economically aid a state employing political censorship, we should stop pussy-footing around and enact a proper embargo. Yeah, that won't happen.

I differentiate between not actively resisting, and actively aiding, though. If, for instance, Opera released the internet browsing history of individuals on request, that'd be a serious breach of trust in my eyes, and I'd do my part to name and shame.