BD-ROM is pretty paranoid; plus it's just plain big (especially for video, where there isn't any reason to not fill the entire disk, unless your movie is so short that you'd go over the maximum supported data rate by doing so). Even in areas where ISPs aren't fucking around, 50GB is a big download. Plus, that's only 20 disks/TB, assuming no unpacking of assets for better access times. Storing BD rips is cheaper than it used to be, especially with 3.5 inch disks; but with a single 2.5 in the console, that's actually a pretty low ceiling.

DLNA is a standard so dreadful that it's hard to imagine that it wasn't written as some kind of joke, except that you never, ever, hit the punchline, it just keeps hurting.

However, it should be noted that, with the PS3, Sony didn't let that stop them: They put out a DLNA client and, because their hardware was about the single most common DLNA client that anybody actually used (I think WMP, at least some versions, is nominally a DLNA client; but sharing from computer to computer, when both machines are Windows boxes and you could just use SMB, isn't much of a use case compared to streaming to your TV), people sucked it up and tailored their DLNA server support to the PS3. That's why "http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/" is called what it is. It's a DLNA server, it isn't locked to PS3s only or anything; but wherever something was fucked up or unclear (with DLNA, this is normal) the PS3's behavior was taken into account.

Either Sony's figures suggested that only .01% of users ever used the feature, and it isn't worth the terrible burden of recompiling it for x86, or they actively wish to de-support streaming of 3rd-party media, for reasons of their own.

Given that aircraft fly around in a veritable EM soup (AM, FM, VHF transmission towers, the spark gaps of an angry god, etc.), I would hope that every phone on the plane draining its battery in a coordinated RF scream would be a survivable event. Whether all the chatter raises the noise floor or introduces errors into sensitive measurements is a subtler but more likely issue.

Who's the more wooshed? In Fight Club, that's the question that the guy in the airline seat asks after the recall decision algorithm is described. The answer is "A major one."

The NYT does do some tech stuff (mostly softpedal consumer electronics reviews with no real depth); and I suppose they could expand that to a "Cool App of the week, a week after you've already heard about it" or synergize by having a little circle jerk for the website of some 'entrepreneur' that is being written up in the business section; but the notion that 'We should have reviews for software, like we do for movies!' seems either trivial to the point of worthlessness (pick up a random trashy computer-oriented magazine, now condense it down to less than a newspaper page, how much will fit?) or to be a serious misunderstanding of the breadth of 'software' (not all stuff shot to tape is a 'movie' in the sense that a reviewer would care about; but with 'software', probably 90+ percent of the world's code is invisible almost to the point of being incomprehensible, and uninteresting, to the layman, or even the specialist in a specific part of it.)

This seems like a bizarre lament: We have plenty of software reviews, for various flavors of software, mostly located on the parts of the internet where people who care would find them(since 'Medal of Warfare 3: Gorepocalypse Now' and 'Oracle Enterprise Resource Dominance Solution 11' are somewhat less similar than a bad summer action movie and an occupational safety training video, they aren't reviewed by the same people or in the same places). Who is the audience for the 'NYT Software Review'? What are their perceived interests? What do they not know that they should? Why do they need to get their reviews from a dead tree rather than the internet?

Also, what 'category' would they be shooting for? Movie reviews (implicitly or explicitly) exist largely in the context of assuming that movies are some combination of entertainment and art/culture(exactly what the mix is depends on how highbrow the review is supposed to be). Software, though, does just about everything. What aspects of it is the NYT supposed to care about?

As much as I think Obama is a two-faced prick, the vision of Palin with unfettered access to CIA killbots and the world's largest surveillance database is pretty chilling...

Australia, in addition to being one of our Valued Partners in Totally Legal Intelligence activities, is crucial to the supply of judicial marsupials that help keep these activities legal.

If FISA were denied the lovable noses and endearing antics of the noble Kangaroo, and forced to make do with goats or something, we'd be in serious trouble inside a week! Why, it might get as bad as that time, during the Church Commission, when we had to pretend to be reformed characters. That was harrowing.

Not entirely: "Regulatory capture" is the term for a process (often a complex, multi-channel one) where a regulated sector comes to exert control over the relevant regulatory body.

'Graft', and its utility for rewarding... cooperative... officials is one technique; but a variety of other factors come into play: if most of the perceived expertise about an industry works in that industry, regulatory job openings tend to be filled by people who have expertise; but also have personal and past professional connections with the people they are supposed to be regulating. Outright bribery is crass and generally illegal (unless it's a campaign contribution, of course) so that isn't preferred; but 'revolving door' hiring mechanisms are pretty effective.

Regulatory capture may also be more coercive (the tobacco industry's showdown with the FDA is perhaps the prototypical example): if there are (or if sympathetic congresscritters can add) any chinks in the regulatory legislation, the ability to drag the would-be-regulator into court for a few years every time they propose to touch just about anything, and the willingness to do so, can really scare a comparatively weak body, especially if their historical mandate (and internal talent pool) is more about techie-nerd stuff like RF interference or foodborne pathogens, rather than high-pressure courtroom work against hostile "Product defense consultants".

This is not to excuse old-school Tammany Hall Machine and slipping-the-officer-a-$20-with-your-license-and-registration style corruption; but if your model of regulatory capture (and your attempts to halt it) relies on nice, visible, bagmen and suitcases full of cash as being the conduits of influence, it will fail.

And let's not even talk about the 'tiny town where sheriff Cletus is the law, and only his cousins and the high school football team are above it' problem.

Not much of a regulatory capture issue, since there just isn't much on the table; but small-scale governance offers some thrilling opportunities for misgovernance according to humanity's oldest tribal atavisms...

Are there any manufacturing/polymer types (or even armchair chemists) around who would want to hazard a guess as to why a PC component would have that smell?

My understanding is that chassis materials don't differ wildly from laptop to laptop (ABS or ABS+PC seem to the the typical plastics, Aluminum or coated magnesium-alloy the usual metals, with some assorted adhesives and things). Is there some plasticizer, or mould-release agent, or incomplete-polymerization impurity, or particularly malodorous-if-the-proportions-aren't-right two-part adhesive out there?

Apple's support model is (with the exception of prosaic stuff like 'hard drive is dead, sounds like coffee-grinder', where the ability to get retail support from somebody other than the geek squad is quite a blessing for people without corporate support contracts):

1. Deny that a problem exists. Reports of the problem will silently disappear from their message boards, CSRs will either emit cluelessness, or (if challeged) suggest that customer misuse was the cause.

2. Wait. Despite the outward appearance of not giving a fuck, Apple clearly isn't oblivious to the level of buzz, and apparent frequency with which a problem is occuring.

3. One of two options: if the buzz level of step 2 was low enough, continue to insist that product N is absolutely without fault, until it's time to release revision N+1, where the problem will silently be fixed, with absolutely no acknowledgement that the change was made to address any particular issue. If the buzz level of step 2 is high enough, Apple will then offer repair replacement, sometimes even for otherwise-out-of-warranty hardware.

Fair enough(due to my disinterest in actually owning either, I haven't been in a position to distrust-and-verify every alleged capability on the spec sheet, just what they say they can do, plus first-impression type reviews).

My point was that Samsung built a product that could not possibly have not sucked (short of unobtanium fuel modules that don't exist or something), while Pebble adopted a spec level that (while they could certainly fuck it up), can actually be done with contemporary technology.

Whether you can succeed at executing the possible is what distinguishes good engineering from poor engineering. Attempting to succeed at executing the impossible shows a form of incompetence that nullifies even your finest engineering prowess before you start.

Binary decision trees also tend to be of limited use in the real world: Does Beijing deliver the mail and fine you for traffic violations in Taiwan? No. Are there things that Taiwan could theoretically do; but never would because that would make China rage out? Quite possibly.

Mozilla fully supports single-line flexbox (that is, flexbox in which the child flex items are all layed out in a single row or column), which is what most flexbox use cases want, and has for a while.

What's missing is support for multiline flexbox.