The purpose of a square screen is clearly not for personal viewing, but as a "module" for creating very large, giant screens (such as one would find in baseball stadiums, etc.). With a square screen as basic building block module, one can make any dimension, large screen. Usually giant screens are rectangular portrait or landscape orientation, but it can be any shape... even a circle if the circle size is extremely big, but that would probably be an unrealistic shape for a screen.

This is so out of the ordinary that I am forced to come out with a conspiracy theory. I mean... we are talking of a certain country's court granting a "search warrant" for data stored in another country... this is pretty hard to swallow under any normal circumstances. My conspiracy theory follows... 1) The Irish police knows their courts cannot (for some reason) grant a subpoena to obtain the data they want. If a subpoena is impossible, then a search warrant would definitely be out of the question. 2) To circumvent the legal barrier to their investigation, they ask their American counterpart to request an American court for a search warrant (which they figured an American court will grant). Granting a search warrant is one thing, performing the actual search in another country is another issue. 3) Since directly executing the search warrant is legally impossible (even if legally granted), the American LEO can asks the Irish LEO to perform the search on its behalf based on existing treaties for law enforcement agencies to help each other in crime investigation. 4) The end result is the Irish police can get what they want even if their own courts cannot legally grant them the power to get the data they want. I can be dead wrong, of course, but for some reason, this case looks and smells fishy. If my theory is correct, is this being done with the full knowledge and blessing of the Irish courts? (This is possible because an Irish court may want to assist the Irish police, but the court's hands are legally tied by precidence). I wonder how the Irish people will feel?

Correction: While Sim2Com does not officially support Macs and Linux, some have reported they are using it in those systems. Sim2Com apparently works in Mac Windows Bootcamp, but not properly in Windows 8.1 VM where Sim2Com's graphics do not show properly. So it would be wrong to say Sim2Com works in Linux or Mac under the circumstances; it works in Windows primarily.

I coded and put to market early this week Sim2Com, which stands for Simple-to-Complex Password Converter. Old timers like me would call it a password cruncher (rather than a password manager.) From coder's point-of-view, it is simply a seeded hashing engine that hashes a masterkey and simple text, and converts the hash to random alphanumeric (cum symbols). It's repeatable and the complex passwords can be quickly copy, pasted (Ctrl+C) into the apps password box. It's done on the fly so no temp files or database, network or Internet involved. There is a free trial download available; I'm await verdict from peers such as my fellow Slashdot folks. The downside is it runs in Windows, but it also runs in Windows VM in Linux or Mac. Designed mostly for IT infrastructure professionals who babysit corporate sytems, pcs and users. Probably overkill for consumers. ( www.sim2com.com/sim2com_english_brochure.htm ) Thank you.

While having a direct pipe to Europe will help, I wonder if they have considered the DNS root servers and the DNS servers below them? They still need to control the traffic routing. Dot com, dot net and dot org domain names will be less attractive to the security paranoids.

It's been at Level 3 for several days already...

and break into Random Joe's and Random Bob's systems to steal the communcation data before they are encrypted, transmitted and stored.

U.S. cops watch too much U.S. TV dramas on cops and imitate them. I doubt it is the other way around.

Fending for oneself... is something my generation (babyboomers) had to do simply because our parents did not have the financial means to provide us with free board and lodging. Our parents' concern was what we, their children, would do to earn a life (work, cook, wash clothes etc. rather than earn a degree.) For entertainment, babyboomers had to be creative (making our own toys), and spending most of our time outdoors (TV, especially daytime TV, was boring.) We didn't have the luxury of classifying our food to likes and dislikes... we had them, but we still had to eat what was put in front of us on the dining table or go to bed hungry. Those of us babyboomers who succeeded in life (I think it's safe to assume most of us did succeed in life) then shielded our own children from the social pressures that we had to go through to earn a life (work, cook, wash clothes). So instead of teaching our children about the absolute need to earn a life, we shifted the attention to earn a degree. We gave them almost anything they want... food and drinks they like, cool electronic gadgets, and the like. We literally spoiled our children with the minimum of hands-on training in life. How many of us are guilty of not teaching our children to do home chores -- cleaning the toilet, washing dishes and clothes, washing windows... you name it? In the meantime, the means of entertainment changed drastically. 24-hour, full color TV programs for all kinds of interest, game consols, Internet (virtual realities, virtual friends, and even virtual jobs) were "free" for the asking. The youth could stay at home and enjoy anything for free, including free board and lodging. The problem is that all of them are enjoyed indoors. We have taught our own children to consider work at Starbucks, bookstores, Walmart, McDonald's lowly jobs not worth doing by giving up the freebees at home. The babyboomer generation considered any kind of work as respectful, and certainly better than remaining a leech at home; but this is no longer the case with the young we have raised. Small wonder that after graduation (high school or even university), the young think they have secured their target in life (or what we, their parents, have taught them to aim for), and never leave home where all the good things in life are free. The young can be very agressive at communcation only if it is virtual (email, texting, on-line chat), but are uterly shy and ineffective at human face-to-face communcation. Many can't look at a person eye-to-eye. They have become weak at unspoken language; they can't read body language and often take spoken language quite literally... as one normally would do with written, brief notes on social network services. They are unable to take both the good and bad of real world social life. They want only the good... something that is possible only by living virtual lives and staying at home. Certainly, not all of the young are like what I describe them to be above. But the Hikikomori's are. We can point the fault at ourselves for creating the Hikikomori's.

I thought I was logged in when I clicked submit the first time around, so I'm redoing this, now logged in so it is not an anonymous post... I thought it is widely accepted in the States that college background does not equate to a good, productive employee. In many countries, unfortunately the diploma is still over valued (even 10+ years after graduation.) HR departments' emphasis are legal to protect the company against would-be employees with potential to harm the company. HR's normally look at candidates with a negative eye. It is not surprising that HR's screening process cannot screen for highly productive, innovative, "make-it-happen" type of candidates. A top class business person (employed or self-employed) needs innovative initiative, drive to make things happen, and of high moral standards to succeed. All of these are not graded in school, college or even HR initiated job interviews. Interviews should be done in two major stages: The screening by HR legal types to weed OUT the harmful (from a legal standpoint), and the screening by successful managers to weed IN the desired candidates. HR for the negative weeding, and Managers for the positive weeding. I don't think the two can be merged since they have different purposes. Managers should have the final say on who to hire because in the end, they are the ones who have to assign work to the new hire, and have to take responsibility for their successes and failures... not HR. In this final stage, the HR legal types should stay out of the process because they will just ruin what should be a really "getting to know each other" early encounter between the future the boss and the subordinate. Nothing is perfect though... there are managers who prefer to hire second-class people because first-class hires endanger their own positions. But most top class managers, who have self-confidence in what they are doing, will select really first-class people to work under them. Through experience, really good managers develop a skill to choose and use talented subordinates, so they are better equipped to weed IN candidates at interviews.