I'm curious what you think innovation looks like. There's a dozen form factors with focus on various improvements such as better cameras, brighter screens, longer battery life, better performance, lower prices, detachable physical keyboards with their own supplemental battery supply, SD and MicroSD card slots, USB ports, dongle-less micro HDMI ports, and more.

Wait, so "innovation" in your mind is "the same thing only different"? That's not innovation, that's knockoff-ism. And you're not looking very hard if you haven't found an Android tablet that offers similar specs. Transformer Prime is the same price point, with added features, better battery life, better performance, thinner, lighter, and some interesting other bonuses. Also the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is so much the same thing that Apple has been suing Samsung over it.

And they have it several times over, plus other options that try less to be an iPad and do a commendable job of being their own thing, often for a lot cheaper.

I'm not really a gun rights kind of guy (never owned one, and only fired one a handful of times - and never anything too exciting either), but I can point out that there's a dangerous second amendment implication embedded in this line of thinking. Taking away gun rights for gray language terminology such as "careless" has a slippery slope associated with it. Today, careless counts as using your gun in a manner which has a chance of starting a fire. Over time what counts as careless can drift, and can be used to squash the right to own a gun.

Love it or hate it, the two most important things our founders believed were, "You can speak out against your government," and "You can defend yourself against your government." The government should always fear its citizens, and it's always dangerous for the government to be able to castrate any citizen's rights such as by revoking their access to the 2nd amendment - particularly since the 2nd amendment is meant as a way for citizens to enforce the other amendments on the government.

All modern public corporate economics are based on short term gain, not long term gain. Executives ride this year after year, making enormous bonuses for superficially great years, then when the economy takes a downturn, they "restructure," shed this baggage, cut some jobs, take a meager bonus for one or two years, and start all over again.

You're more than right; at this age an occasional and almost accidental "dada" or "mama" is appropriate. It's pretty intriguing that she is able to operate the phone well enough to unlock it and call you. My son is 13 months old, and I go out of my way to make sure he doesn't have access to my phone since at this age, they tend to explore the world with their mouth (not surprising, the tongue is the highest nerve density in your body, you can feel detail with it that you can't with any other part of your body, and you get the added bonus of taste).

Face unlock is not intended to be industrial grade security. By its nature it has to be tolerant to unlocks (it would suck if you couldn't unlock your phone after a haircut or beard trim, for example). It's intended to prevent casual perusal by someone who finds the phone sitting around. They've added some little things like requiring some movement in the face (eg, blinking), so it's mildly surprising that a static photo can trick it. But it's not especially worrying either - again, it's meant to be one step above slide to unlock.

It's almost like stating that the standard "slide to unlock" is insecure because anyone can slide that button! The statement is true, but it misses the point.

Also, a quote from Samsung taken directly FTFA:

"Therefore, users with sensitive information on their phone are advised to use higher-protection security features, such as pattern, pin, or password unlock."

I'm sure that if the school has a normal and reasonable response to the incendiary criticisms leveled against it in the press, that this will be given as much air time as the original coverage.

IE being better funded isn't an abuse of desktop monopoly. Sure, maybe it's the profits from the desktop monopoly that facilitated this, but Microsoft funding a project doesn't make that project a monopoly abuse.

IE also had the advantage of really only striving to support a single platform - Windows, allowing them to do a lot of platform-specific optimizations as well as have a less complicated code path. Plus it had the advantage of having an in with that platform's developers (especially evident since IE4 was the browser version which introduced Windows shell integration - something I went out of the way to avoid prior to Windows 2000 when it was baked in by default). Sure, there was Mac IE and such, but it always lagged dramatically behind (in version number, compatibility, and features). Mostly I think this was just Microsoft hedging their bets.

I was a web developer in the IE4 era, and I had Netscape (versions 4 and 4.5) and Internet Explorer (version 3.5, 4, and eventually 5), even Opera (2 and 3) all available to me (I spent a lot of time in each). I preferred IE; not only did I work less hard to get pages to render correctly, but it was faster and had better features. IE remained my favorite browser through the 6 days. Netscape / Mozilla was such a huge pile of bloat that even though I liked it ideologically, I still didn't care to use it day-to-day. It really wasn't until Firefox came along that I finally found a browser I was willing to use day-to-day that wasn't IE. Of course now Firefox is the pile of bloat that Mozilla used to be (but in a different way), so today I use Chrome.

IE achieved dominance only in part due to desktop monopoly abuse. It also owes a lot to the fact that for quite a while, it really was the best browser.

Not necessarily, it depends on how it's hacked. If it's hacked in a way that observing values from the pad allow you to guess the secret on which the pad is based, then yes, it's now fundamentally broken.

If the software hack is just that they discovered how to determine the secret on which the pad is based by reversing it from where it's stored, the hardware pads are no less safe than they were all along; you still can't observe the hardware key without an awful lot more trouble - and again, this requires physical access (vs reversing the software key, which is subject to the possibility of remote access via an alternate channel). In this case, the software pads are weakened and the hardware pads are not.

The hardware versions are the ones used for the more important operations. Their seed is a lot harder to snoop. If the hardware version became fundamentally broken, an awful lot of systems and networks would suddenly be a lot weaker.

All random number sequences produced by computers are reproducible if you know the algorithm and the seed; that's in fact the whole strategy behind the RSA SecureID token - if you know the seed, you know the value fo any given point in time. It's not that they discovered random number generators are actually pseudo random number generators, it's just that they snooped a software key. Snooping a hardware key is a lot harder, and requires physical access since these aren't networked in any way. It's very misleading for the article title to sound like the hardware versions were broken when they weren't.

IE 5.5 through IE 8 use JavaScript 1.5.

So you can only depend on it if you are willing to shut out close to 20% of your target market (that's why we do something like if (typeof Array.prototype.indexOf == 'undefined') { Array.prototype.indexOf = function(needle) { ... } })

Only a Google employee in the sense that he worked for a 3rd party firm (Noser Engineering AG) Google hired to help create Android.

I suspect SpinyNorman is actually referring to the fact that data formats shift every few years, so if you don't format shift your images periodically, you could end up with unreadable images. Every few years when you get a new computer or replace the drive the photos are stored on, you have to migrate your old photos over. You have to periodically verify that the current storage medium has not suffered any data loss (or else your backups just amount to backing up corrupt data), including from human error, medium failure, or something more nefarious such as a virus or worm. And you have to verify your backups are indeed working correctly (actually a pretty easy task to get wrong for relatively static data).

I'm an amateur photographer, and data loss is my biggest nightmare. I back up three different ways on-premises, and I also back up to Amazon S3 as a means to have an off-site disaster recovery plan. I still wake up in the middle of the night sometimes and feel compelled to spot check my photos. Twice, I've discovered problems that put my data at risk, and if I hadn't been actively engaged in protecting this data, it would have been disastrous.

Data at rest is data at risk, don't be fooled into believing otherwise.

Blackstone's Formulation: "Better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."

Or maybe send DVDs. Costs less to produce, costs less to ship, and can be used by individual soldiers or shown in common areas with existing briefing equipment.