The blocking system is a menu of categories you can check or uncheck. Unless they're really stupid, the Sex Education category is there so you can block the Porn category but still leave the Sex Education option unblocked so your teenagers can find that (either because you care about their education or because you want to avoid uncomfortable conversations with your kids, take your pick :-) Even if they ARE irresponsible prudes, the Sex Education category is at least there so they can SAY they're giving you the option of leaving it on.

And yeah, there ought to be an option for blocking crazy right-wing political parties, like the Tories and Labour and on some days also the LibDems.

Because my $DAYJOB calendar has a lot of proprietary information in it. Since it's Outlook, that often includes documents attached in calendar appointments, but even without that, meeting announcements about "lets talk about how to fix the $FOO problem with $NEXT_PROJECT" aren't something we'd trust to an internet-based cloud service without specific contracts in place.

I've got a Coby 10" tablet running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (i.e. really vanilla, with no manufacturer's software value added.) It'll run Google Play Store apps just fine.

The main thing it's missing is a program to sync the calendar with MS Outlook or at least accept iCal events; it really really wants you to sync its calendar app with Google Calendar, and I'm not going to sync my $DAYJOB calendar with Google. The free Play Store apps to do this haven't been very reliable, and $30 is more than I want to gamble for a commercial program that may not be any better.

It's a consumer product. They'll sell a lot less of it if they introduce it in January than if they'd gotten it out Dec. 1, much less pre-Black-Friday.

I'm guessing the answer is probably no, because it's not something that's easy to do in plastic, and in a hotel room you can get by with heating the milk in a microwave, while there are other devices out there for stove tops or camping stoves. But I'd love to see one if there's a practical way to do it.

I met Adler a few years ago at a design thing at Stanford. I forget if it was after I'd bought my Aeropress. The press isn't the same as a high-pressure espresso machine, but it's pretty good, and really convenient.

Aerobie's dog frisbees seemed like they'd be fun also, if you've got an appropriate dog. (I've got cats; flying catnip mice are only interesting to the cats if they're throwing them around themselves.)

The Apartheid governments of South Africa had no business calling anybody else terrorists; Mandela was 30 when they took over, and they were far worse than the British colonial government he'd been working against before then.

OK, I haven't actually taken this approach with either my parents or my wife's mom :-) My parents bought a Mac back in ~1987, and continued to upgrade Macs occasionally. My mom's Mac is currently secured by the fact that it's a Mac, and she only uses dial-up internet because that's good enough for email and she doesn't see well enough to use the web unless she really needs to. (And my siblings all grumble about not having decent internet access when we visit, but she really doesn't want to bother upgrading, even though she did finally get cable TV when the digital transition broke her ability to receive the PBS station she likes via broadcast.)

We got my wife's mom a generic Windows PC when she retired, with AOL. It let her chat with her friends, keep up on the celebrity news, and generally stay connected to the world when she was getting less mobile. "Computer security" for her system meant occasionally formatting the disk, reinstalling Windows from scratch, reinstalling a new free AOL coaster, and having her log in to AOL, because she kept everything she cared about in the cloud rather than on her PC.

Yes, you could buy a pack of 10 incandescent bulbs for less up-front money than an LED that will outlast all of them, though my wife just bought some LED bulbs for $5 (I think they're 40-watt equivalent), and I've bought 60-watt equivalent bulbs for $10. But you can't run the bulbs for all that long without the cost of electricity making up for the lower purchase price, and for the guy in Wisconsin who considers the waste heat to be a feature, remember that that's only true half the year, and if you're in Wisconsin, you've probably got a heating system that's much more efficient than the electric heat I have here in California.

USB mice wander off and disappear from the lab. Mice with PS/2 connectors last forever, or at least there are always lots of spares hanging around. I think we've thrown out all our serial mice.

The first space race was about satellites, and the US lost; the reason for the moon was partly because it was a sufficiently big project to make up for having lost the first round. The real technical driver on both sides was ICBMs, but a lot of ego got dragged along as well.

Yes, they have limitations, and want to lock you in. But iPads, like most Apple products, are designed obsessively to Just Work. Also, you get the option of having a Retina display, which may or may not be extra-helpful, depending on your dad's vision.

I don't know about you, but the only time I notice the LEDs on my keyboard are when something's wrong (e.g. everything's frozen, and I look at the disk LED to see that it's just the disk busy again), and they're not very bright. This has a brighter RGB LED that gives you a wide range of colours. In practice, no, I wouldn't bother using one of these things on my laptop, because it's physically awkward; might be fun to build something like this for a desktop machine, I suppose. (OTOH, the next desktop machine I'm likely to build would be a Raspberry Pi, which has its own support for this kind of thing, and the LED could be useful because the box itself would be jammed behind the TV.)