...that the NSA or some other US intelligence agency cannot/has not cracked this phone. What I find more believable is that they have the information and they want to force Apple to crack the phone to protect their methods and knowledge of their access. If they win the get the bonus of sticking it to Apple and get a precedent they can use in other cases.

...given that it is now believed that the estimate of the number of trees was off by a factor of 8 a decade ago (and we were sure and sure we were sure we were right back then), what makes us think any of these numbers are correct?

Most people who work in enterprises don't work in IT so they don't care about admin tools etc. Most people work in marketing, sales, accounting, finance, logistics or manufacturing and all the software for all those departments runs on Windows. Middle market accounting software for Mac? Does not exist. Manufacturing/inventory control software for Mac? Nope. Contractor estimating/job costing? You get the picture.

...too expensive. People are voting with their wallets. Time for the time honored appropriate response to a shift in the demand curve where the amount demanded at every price is less: time for price cuts.

Everybody in the industry has gotten fat: producers, actors, athletes, sports leagues, coaches, college athletic programs, on air talent, etc. (I'm mostly interested in ESPN, I almost never watch anything on HBO etc, but the same logic applies). You can't pay billions to televise a single college football conference, raise your prices to astronomical levels to cover same and expect your customers to keep shelling out.

There will be a blood bath, especially in the college sports world. The days of $5mm/year coaches, $1mm/year AD's and $750mm stadiums with lavish locker rooms, indoor training facilities, etc, are going to quickly come to an end.

The NFL will feel the pinch as well.

ALL information,all documents,all emails that would be subject to FOIA requests should be put on the web as they are produced. We should not have to ask for the information, it should already be there.

And all this time I thought Stirling, Stephenson and Gibson were the same guy.

Exactly. Ever. And that is the root of the problem.

But Astronauts must click through an ad to get to the guidance and control system.

Just let athletes dope, and if they injure or kill themselves in the process they bear the consequences. It would be my bet that if there were two sporting regimes, one "clean" and one "open", the "clean" regime would wither and die in a few years due to lack of interest from fans and athletes. This is like the controversy around letting "professionals" participate in the Olympics. Its going to happen.

You other brother's can't deny.

I wouldn't go for the Galaxy note, that's too large, but I much prefer my Samsung Galaxy 2 Skyrocket (I don't like big phone names) to the iPhone 4 it replaced. I won't consider going back to an iPhone if Apple does not offer a version with a > 4.5" screen.

Is GOOG making money off of that is not advertising related to search? If I were an investor I'd want to know what they've spent the cash they haven't paid out as dividends on and what return they've produced on it. With $44bn in cash, why are they wasting money on driverless cars and not paying dividends?

I have a Revue purchased late last year for $99 and upgraded to 2.0. Here are my answers to some of the issues posted above.

1) CIFS/SMB easily supported using File Expert. Sees and opens the SMB shares on my Ubuntu media server just fine.

2) DLNA also works. The Logitech DLNA client works just fine with both MiniDLNA and Media Tomb. The limitation is the codecs supported by Android. If Android will play it you can get it via DLNA.

3) Plex is even easier. Set up a plex server, install plex on the Revue and, voila, streaming video. Plex promises that shortly (ha) it will overcome most codec limitations.

That said I don't want to watch Hulu or some of the other sites others are interested in. I want Amazon streaming video (well supported) and ESPN. Amazon is well supported and ESPN is reasonably will supported. The problem with ESPN is in Flash and, as I understand it, is partially a problem of Adobe, Google, ESPN and hardware. There are some glitches on all fronts, one of the most important is that when Flash sites are coded they make assumptions about the minimum level of hardware available on the client (memory, processor speed, storage) that the Revue does not meet.

So for me its a win. Amazon + 90% ESPN + excellent integration with my Dish box + full web browser + personal movies and photos. Your mileage may vary.

...dark matter eventually turns out to be like luminiferous aether from the 19th century? I don't believe anyone has directly observed dark matter.

Wait, what? Supreme court justices have political opinions? Who would have thunk it.

The first fallacy of HCI is they start with things like user surveys. Users always say they want contradictory things like "make the same interface work well on a desktop and a phone". Anybody can see these are mutually exclusive things, but users say that sort of thing all the time. Users can never tell you what they actually want/need until you give them what they ask for.

The second fallacy here is that HCI is somehow scientific. HCI types try to sound scientific, there are statistics and measurements, and even so called laws, but interface design is not scientific because its acceptance is based on individual preference. Its sort of like saying "We have statistically analyzed popular music and produced the ultimate song based on users requests and what they listened to before". So these UI's are the UI equivalent of the Monkees or Milli Vanilli.

Designing UI's based on telemetry, user studies or Fitt's "Law" does not insure a good UI, some common sense must be used as well. The New and Improved Windows 8 interface, for example, does not permit multiple overlapping windows and the browser does not run plugins. Those are considered features not bugs. Statistics will not fix stupid.