You misunderstand, there needs to be HW support in order to decode 720p30 and 1080p30 on these embedded platforms. Your CPU cannot perform the task. Luckily, most of these devices ship with the associated hardware. Unfortunately, Android chooses (or chose in 2010) not to make this available to developers.

We developed during Android 2.2, when there wasn't all the support there currently is. Furthermore, the support we had access to involved playing URLs, well the transport stream we used does not have a URL. Furthermore, at times we may have to directly insert I-Frames into the stream, manually step the decoder, and insert discontinuities into the stream. The codecs did not support any of that.

No, that's not correct; the problem goes further. On some devices things display differently, even though they have the same version of Android. On some devices you have access to audio/video codecs that aren't available on others.

In the end, this lack of cohesion meant my company stopped developing their A/V application because there was too much variability, even when versions of the Android OS were the same. When this happens we lose out on a market, but the customers never get a chance to use and enjoy our applications.

Know all of those "Send error report to Microsoft" windows that pop up when an app crashes? I suspect that these dumps are making their way to these guys.

Basically, everyone who's ever clicked "send report" has been informing the NSA of exploit vectors and not letting the vendor know.

You're being rather sexist. You assume that the women you spoke to are hired booth workers, but my experience (having worked the booths, myself has been that the attractive, professionally dressed woman is actually the technically competent person is sales and marketing for the company. Times have changed, women can have real jobs, too!

BTW, IT folks don't work the booths. Booths and shows are for establishing contact with potential businesses. They're where the meeting and greeting, and the wheeling and dealing of business takes place. The people the booths want are the C-levels and the VPs who can bring in contracts; not Joe User who is wasting their time asking whether or not this widget is backwards compatible with their DB9 system from 1983.

You're mixing two different programs. There is the program to monitor Verizon and other carriers, but this involved a site-wide pen register system. Then there is PRISM, which gives direct access to the servers of Google, Facebook, and several other tech giants.

End-to-end encryption hides information that is not being collected in the former program as they are not wiretapping the phone's voice data. End-to-end encryption does nothing for the latter program as the endpoint (Google, Facebook, etc) are providing your data to regardless how hard you try to obfuscate it from prying eyes.

This makes little sense. The purpose of using encryption is to prevent someone tapping into the conversation and hearing what you are saying. The NSA is instead going to each of the people you talk to and asking "what did russotto say?" and getting an answer in real time. Encryption does NOTHING to change this.

Sounds like covering up their prior negligence to me.

Can't do that. What if you forget to plug it back in every 24 hours so it can phone home?

Pretty much all cameras that operate during daylight have an IR filter. IR in sunlight tends to damage the quality of the image. The only cameras that are affected are the night time security cameras, as they do not have the IR filter and usually have a ring of IR LEDs to illuminate their scene. Those are the only cameras subject to IR overexposure.

Not necessarily. You've characterized the whole story in terms of the viewer and consumer of such content. What you haven't done is taken a look at the perspective employed by the one being recorded. They may not appreciate their exposure becoming public knowledge, this may lead to reduced possibilities as various people come across videos when looking someone up. Recall those awkward school-age years? What would be a faux pas that becomes gossip amongst a clique can expand to a video that is shared across an entire school.

The consequences of every action being made public at the discretion of some Google Glass wearer is rather concerning.

Ugh. This trope again. I watched them as they aired from 1999 on. They were very much about topical jokes about current events, with plenty of references to the 2000 Election, what if Al Gore won, Ally McBeal (Single Female Lawyer), Lucy Liu, Beastie Boys, and so forth. Just watching it is like going back to a microcosm of pop culture in the early 2000s. Only your perspective has changed; you see things in current events much differently than you see the current events of yesteryear.