Not quite. If you can find a security hole in the Windows kernel that allows arbitrary code execution in privileged mode (not as easy as some Slashdot readers like to believe) then it's possible to bypass UEFI secure boot by making the Windows kernel into a chain bootloader.

HP's approach was monumentally stupid. WebOS was a really nice system (I still prefer the UI on my TouchPad to my TransformerPad Infinity StupidName), but it lacked developers. They were giving them away to developers at the end (which is how I got mine), but then they killed the platform so there was no incentive to write a single line of code for it. I ported Objective-C to work on it, but then gave up on the platform when it became clear that the TouchPad was the last device ever to use it.

I get quite frequent calls from recruiters too. Most of them find my name through Google, a few through Ohloh.net. I don't do social networking (and my mail client has finally learned that any mail from LinkedIn is spam), so it's absolutely not necessary to buy in to corporate buzzwords.

Not near me. And the cost of an IMAX ticket is even higher. 3D? Meh, if I wanted to wear glasses to watch a movie I wouldn't have spent money on contact lenses...

One of two ways:

• RTFM.
• Click on the helpful link to http://localhost:631/ that is named 'Printer Setup' and put on your desktop or in a menu by your desktop environment of choice.

Seriously, your complaint makes as much sense as asking 'How on earth would a normal person figure out that you browse the web by running iexplore.exe?'

Bookstores buy books on a sale-or-return basis. If they don't manage to sell them, they tear off the covers and ship them back to the publisher for a full refund and destroy the rest. And the books that they buy are often the ones that the publisher has spent some money promoting.

Yes it is. I've talked with some publishers that specialise in exactly this. Some of the big publishers now outsource all of their copyediting to freelancers (some are bringing it back in-house, it oscillates a bit), but for small publishers it's very easy to hire a freelancer to copyedit a book and so they're not splitting copyediting staff, they're just spreading investment, and the copyediting on a book can cost under $1000 (it's a pretty crappy market for freelancers at the moment), so it's relatively easy to scatter money across a hundred titles and hope one does really well and the rest come close to breaking even.

Marketing, you might have, but marketing costs for small print runs are pretty small. Publishers scatter a few free copies to amateur reviewers and get some blog posts, put them on their web sites, and push them in the direction of book clubs. If they sell a couple of thousand copies, they've made a profit.

Except for differentiation: no one wants to go into a book shop that just stocks the A-list books that they can get anywhere (and much cheaper on Amazon) and which the more active readers (i.e. their best customers) will have read already. People want to go to a book shop to find a book that they've not read before, and that means having a broad selection of things.

You mean, unlike the young people during the recessions of the '80s?

That said, I haven't been to a cinema for years. I used to go with my housemates and some other friends when I was a student, until we realised that for the cost of us to go a few times (including food and so on) my housemates and I could buy a projector and a set of surround-sound speakers - the DVD was cheaper than the cost of two people going to the cinema - and my friends could come around and bring food and beer (generally of a higher quality than available in cinemas and for less money). When I graduated, one of my housemates bought out my share in the projector, but I bought another one on eBay for just under £200 that's lasted me 5 years (it now tells me the lamp needs replacing). My cost per film, including renting the DVDs and the cost of the equipment, is under £1 and I get to sit on a comfy sofa and watch films with people I like, not random strangers who think shouting at the screen or using their mobile phone is a good idea (oh, and I can pause it if I need to go to the toilet). How do cinemas think they can compete with that by constantly increasing prices?

I don't believe so. They use SecureBoot, with the bootloader locked to Microsoft's signing key. Unless you find a vulnerability in the bootloader then it can't boot anything that Microsoft didn't sign. You might, however, be able to find a vulnerability in the Windows RT kernel that you can exploit to inject a chain boot mechanism into the running kernel and boot Android that way, but it would require a vulnerability that allowed arbitrary code execution in kernel mode.

From TFA, it sounds like the error was corrected very quickly, so it's not impossible to assume that only one person:

• Had a negative balance
• Was checking PayPal.com in the half hour window when the buggy software update was live (assuming that it's rolled out over everything, and they don't do phased updates for the front end like most big web companies)
• Took a screenshot of the massive negative balance
• Reported it to a journalist who had a sufficiently slow news day to write the story.

It would make a difference. If it were backed by gold, you could redeem it for the gold value, dump it in the sea, and then live on the continent made out of gold that you'd just built...

92 quadrillion is about 2,000 times as much money as exists on paper at the moment (i.e. including money that is really assets, but accounted for in US dollars). Suddenly receiving that much would cause hyperinflation, so you might be happy with the amount you'd have left over after tax, but you'd probably have difficulty spending it as very few people would be willing to accept US dollars in payment. $92 billion would be a much nicer amount to receive and pay 99.999% tax on. You'd be left with about a million after tax, and it would still have about the same value as a million today.

I played a bit with a Surface (we have a good relationship with MSR, so lots of people with them are floating around the place) and it seems like a pretty nice device. The problem is not that it's bad, it's that it doesn't really have any compelling advantages. There are several things it seemed to do a bit more cleanly than iOS or Android, but nothing that it did a lot better, and if you want to write code for it you're limited to quite a restrictive environment (which probably doesn't matter to non-geeks, but it will have a knock-on effect on the availability of software).

I think GOG and other commercial users of WINE have been working on (or, at least, funding) Mac support. There's a much bigger market for Windows games running on Mac than there is on other *NIX platforms.

Stripping JavaScript isn't enough. For example, a number of 'PDF' exploits have actually been due to vulnerabilities in libpng: if your PDF contains a PNG image (a lot do), then it may have a metadata payload that triggers a bug in libpng that allows arbitrary code execution. The same can happen for embedded fonts and for embedded JPEG images.

You need to run it through a PDF parser, and therefore potentially trigger bugs. There's nothing stopping you from doing this from a sandboxed process, so exploit code would be contained. You'd also want to make sure that it went through a simpler intermediate format that another sandboxed process could check. On the other hand, if you can do decent sandboxing, why not solve the problem properly and just sandbox the PDF reader so it can't access anything except the PDF that's passed into it?