That just means Google is now operating in exactly the same manner that Microsoft used to be when they had dominance over consumer device operating systems. Google now has dominance in the mobile market with Android, and is using that to shove Chrome down people's throats. Personally, the first thing I do with any new phone is download Firefox, just like I did (and still do) with new computers. As the statistics show, though, the vast majority of people don't bother to do that so whatever is the default is what they use. The right and fair thing to do would be to stop them from abusing their monopoly power by offering a choice of browsers at time of install, and not favor their own browser in any way. That would have been the thing to force MS to do as well back when they were being sued for abuse of monopoly power after taking down Netscape with the same tactic. Unfortunately, it didn't happen then and it isn't happening now either. So, Google will continue to dominate the market unless and until some other highly disruptive technology comes along to unseat the current smartphone market and gives another player a chance to enter and eventually dominate the market in a similar fashion.

Eliza helped me through some serious shit back in the day.

*1980s and early 1990s. But yes, excellent series.

This smacks a lot of the continuing media smear against the new labour leadership - which is getting tiresome for pretty much everyone (whatever their political views).

From the second paragraph of TFA :
She added: “I must admit I’m not totally convinced at the moment but I’ll have to look at it. ... It’s not something that I have given hours of consideration to.”

"When I ask my other tech friends what they would do, they simply suggest changing ISPs. Nobody likes Comcast, but I don't have a choice here. I'm two years into a three-year contract. So, moving is not an option"

Moving is always an option. But you have to eat the cost of one year of Comcast. Sorry, but that's your solution.

Ideally, yes. But bearing in mind that the OP states that "there is no IT expertise here" - if their use case is simply a list of people and a couple of details then best practice system design may be less important than (trivial) ease of maintenance.

^ This.
MySQL is almost certainly overkill.
It's probably also worth considering if any db is overkill - can you achieve your use cases with a spreadsheet (Calc)? If so - that's a much lower learning curve and less maintenance for you.

Most of those leaky tanks are full of leftover waste from 40's-60's military projects and nobody has any good idea what's in them. They have remote monitors for radioactivity and temperature, but mostly people stay as far away from them as possible. As anyone who's been there knows they have three alarms 1) evacuate 2) shelter in place and 3) you are going to die and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

I agree that bitcoin is built to be scarce, and therefore valuable, but that sort of thing is the opposite of what you want in a currency. If the currency constantly increases in value, then the best option is to obtain as much as possible and stuff it under the mattress. Only an inflationary currency encourages investment, because you actually lose money by hoarding it rather than investing it. If everyone hoards the stuff instead of spending it, it becomes useless as a medium of exchange.

Sure, first you can control the cell phone with your brain, then the cell phone can control your brain, and before you know it the Cybermen are invading.

"Fucking awful" is a bit strong, but they definitely weren't up to par. I'm not surprised it was cancelled, and at this point I'd be much happier if they put the series to bed instead of continually trying to bring it back, as it will inevitably get worse every time they do.

Not to DoD standards. Several (usually 3-7 passes with /dev/random (or /dev/urandom) followed by /dev/zero will erase data well enough for any standard out there other than those that specifically require physical destruction, though.

SFW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2ghcYF_R-0

But that's the point - they're making a point out of the fact that it's unmodified.

If they're willing to modify it, then ok - lets throw out the screen, the battery, and the speakers. And since we're doing that, why don't we modify/remove the chassis - as it's primary design consideration is the parts we're stripping out.

And yes, we can replace the O/S with a modified, stripped down, or completely alternate one....

Every step they take in adapting a phone to better suit the operating environment is a step towards other existing off the shelf solutions.

I'm tempted to agree. I don't really understand the point of this shoehorning - apart from to inspire.

If the article is to be believed, and the phone is completely unmodified, I straight away see a number of issues :

• * The battery will be way outside it's operating norms - likely to alternately produce very little power, and explode due to overheating.
• * The electronics is specifically designed to be small, and consequently more vulnerable to radiation.
• * Half of the mass of the device is unnecessary. For example, there is no point having a touchscreen display if nobody is there to look at it or touch it.
• * The unmodified operating system is completely geared towards having a user interacting with it. There are far more suitable (free) alternatives available off the shelf.