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You're welcome to take that up with the reviewers listing them in the top 10. I personally don't care, I was just answering the guy's question about how they make money.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/tes...
http://www.av-test.org/en/anti...
http://anti-virus-software-rev...

Yes, I've used Redphone. No strange setup process needed for the calls to be secure. That's what we're discussing, right?

The first time you start up RedPhone, the app prompts you to register your phone number by tapping a button. And then you're done; that's it. RedPhone doesn't ask for passwords, logins, or even for users to create an account. The app is designed with privacy in mind, so it requires as little from you as it can.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Keep waiting.

I kind of got the impression most things being called 4G weren't even properly that.

You are correct. The ITU defined 4G, and none of the carriers followed the standard. Instead, they strong armed the ITU to change the definition of 4G to fit the technology they had already deployed. I suspect the same will happen with 5G as well.

Yet again you fail to see the bigger picture. BlackBerry phone sales aren't where the company makes money. They make it on MDM and EMM offerings which are subscription based thus the subscriber base numbers. When BES only supported BB devices phone sales were crucial for them. Now that BES 12 supports iOS, Android, and Windows Phone devices phone sales are a secondary concern. They really don't need to be #1, 2, or 3 in phone sales to make money as long as they continue to grow their MDM business...which, despite rumors to the contrary, they are doing. In fact they just entered into a partnership with Samsung to integrate the Knox security platform into the BES system to enhance Android security.

Jon Chen knows BlackBerry addicts love their QWERTY based devices and he will continue to build those phones to keep the faithful but he is a businessman and not an idealist like Lazrdis or Balsillie. He won't hesitate to cut off a limb if it is toxic to the company.

Wrong.

The United States is the worst spammer and Indonesia is the worst cyber-attacker.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
"Grayson never reviewed Depression Quest, nor did anyone else at Kotaku. "

Firewire is a bigger security threat than USB in many ways, namely that it is a bus with direct memory access, meaning it can read and write anything in RAM at any time.

There is a DMA component, a quick search reveals they haven't fixed that either yet. Bah.

The USB attack vector has nothing to do with USB itself; it's a flaw in a poor quality devices that allow their firmwares to be reprogrammed, enabling them to act as a different class of device.

This is both wrong and technically right. It has everything to do with the design of USB, and nothing to do with any "flaws" in "poor quality devices". The problem lies in that USB trusts the device to be what it says it is, even if that is more than one thing.

There is no reason Firewire would not be vulnerable in the same way, were a Firewire device's firmware made writable in the same way as the vulnerable subset of USB devices; only the exposure would be worse, given Firewire's DMA. Likewise with Thunderbolt, as it also has DMA.

Might as well add expressCard, PCI, PCIExpress, and anything else with DMA capabilities.

I love the fact that you can take over a computer by plugging in a storage device

Citation? Maybe there's something I missed, but I think you're thinking of this, in which case: Nope. Well, no more than a device with direct memory access. In fact, a little less.

I was referring to WIred's story

Also, maybe try getting a USB3 hub that isn't a piece of shit. I don't have the speed problems you describe at all.

I wasn't running on a USB3 hub, but directly off the motherboard (which AFAIK share multiple ports per controller and this is a high end Gigabyte motherboard, so not a POS either). The slow down is a direct result of the design of USB serial communications. If you have multiple controllers, you can avoid this issue by running drives on 1 port per controller. I have successfully done this as well, when doing some mass backups among multiple drives. It's how I confirmed the problem in the first place. You will need drives that are capable of relatively high transfer rates to see this problem, but it is still there in USB3.

I love the fact that you can take over a computer by plugging in a storage device

Citation? Maybe there's something I missed, but I think you're thinking of this, in which case: Nope. Well, no more than a device with direct memory access. In fact, a little less.

Also, maybe try getting a USB3 hub that isn't a piece of shit. I don't have the speed problems you describe at all.

I have a TV antenna in the attic, let them raise the cable TV rates.

Dvorak says that OTA broadcasting is going away. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

He also happens to be an outspoken critic of the current movement demanding "'Net Neutrality" by FCC / government regulation. He makes some good points, too. I won't repeat them here, because I always get hammered and flamed when I point out the flaws in the proposals in this space.

Do
http://www.ibtimes.com/icloud-...
you
http://securitywatch.pcmag.com...
think
http://www.thehothits.com/news...!
iCloud
http://www.businessinsider.com...
is
http://www.troyhunt.com/2014/0...
secure?
http://hollywoodlife.com/2014/...

Three major hacks in the last few months, one by a preteen.

You are correct. I was repeating something that I had heard many times, but turns out not to be true.

Here, I Googled it for me:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Samsung needs to sue them for this innovation.

http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/story/316700/samsung-galaxy-round-and-5-other-curved-phones

Say, many android apps have arm binaries

Android apps are interpreted byte-code, not native binaries, same as java class files are interpreted byte code. The only binary you need is the dalvek apk interpreter, same as the only binary you need to run java on a windows machine is a windows java interpreter, and the only binary you need to run the same java class files on a linux box is a linux java interpreter.

So, if they've come up with a dalvek interpreter that runs on chromebooks, this is a good thing. It shouldn't look like the crappy android development emulator that simulates a whole smartphone - just running the app itself. Android already has the calls for laying out app widgets differently / intelligently based on different-sized screens, right up to big-screen TVs.

Compare this to Canonical, which had announced their Android Execution Environment in 2009 and, like Ubuntu TV, Ubuntu Smartphone, Ubuntu One, Ubuntu for Android, the failure to crowd-source the Ubuntu Superphone, and who knows how much other vapour-ware, an android interpreter that runs on a lappy is what people wanted to play with ... 5 years ago.

What next - run android apps on iPhones via a side-loaded dalvek interpreter? Android for Windows? (Could help make up for the dearth of app developers for Windows Phone, or whatever they're going to call it next week).

Google has so far been completely lackadaisical about doing the legwork with business partners to enable their NFC payments system. What Google has to do is go on a stage with Visa and MasterCard, and talk about how every POS will be accepting Android NFC payments in 6 months, and we'll give a free phone to every merchant in America who can't afford to upgrade.

The business deals are necessary before the NFC hardware is useful. Just because Android phones have an antenna and a chip, it doesn't mean that everyone will be drawn by the gravitational force of Market Share to support Android. What they want is a payments platform, and the hardware is only a small part of a platform -- the important, big parts, are the business deals with credit card companies and bank networks. And Google's general attitude with this sort of thing has been "we'll work with banks but we get to define all the terms of the deal," and if banks don't work with us we'll just use include them without their permission anyways.

This is typical of Google's approach in a myriad of business sectors: they design an open system, but design the business model in such a way that they receive a lions share of the benefit, and then they accuse anyone who doesn't work with them of "stifling openness."

.
Keep it simple. If you try to satisfy too many requirements with the chair, you'll wind up with something that has compromises all over the place, and you won't want to sit in it.

Get a chair that is comfortable for you, then use other items to meet your other criteria.

You are making a lot of assumptions there; but, ok, I guess...

There are no assumptions here, it's well known that a high percentage of users reuse the same password for multiple sites, including their email. Therefore if you crack an average user's account on a site you've got a good chance of also having their email address password. Obviously having control of someone's email is ground zero as far as getting account credentials is concerned, but even if they use a different password for email there could be connected sites (such as the Sony example in the link) that many users use the same login for, so a breach in a "low importance" service could expose users on more important service from the same company.

It's just a 2XL and a Radio Shack Armatron glued together... I had this in 1985...
http://www.retrothing.com/2006...
http://www1.pcmag.com/media/im...

Also, a fax machine is just a waffle iron with a phone attached.

Know what else is a slippery slope? This.

According to Reuters, one topic of conversation will be the fact that results are only censored on European versions of Google, like Google.co.uk. So EU Web users can simply go to Google.com for full results, which some argue defeats the purpose of the ruling.

So, Europe would like to be able to affect what everyone sees, not just what Europe sees. I understand the need for privacy, but how certain are we that this won't devolve into plain old censorship? Are there some case histories that have been problematic that we should be aware of? The EU seems to have Google in their sights, but I'm not sure what Google did to get them quite so riled up. I remember Google's accidental collection of wifi info (the more cynical may put "accidental" in quotes, but it looked rather inadvertent to me. Besides which, the data was in the clear to begin with). Then there's the anti-trust issue, if I recall correctly, which I never quite understood either.

Have there been other incidents? Why the hell do they hate Google so much? I'm not exactly a Google fanboy myself, but it's probably good for Microsoft and Apple to have some serious competition.

WIkipedia has a list of a dozen open-source phones with operating systems such as OpenMoko and Firefox OS, which includes parts of Android:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Nokia makes Android phones without the Google apps, and Google gives away the base operating system that allows them to do so.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Cyanogenmod lets you run Android with no Google apps, some Google apps, or all Google apps - whatever you want.
http://www.cyanogenmod.org/

Ubuntu Touch may appeal to you:
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

Instead of asking Slashdot such a silly question you could also just google getting a gsm sim card in the us.

Lo and behold!

#1) "The best Prepaid SIM Cards"
#2) "SIM Cards - Best Buy"

It's been trivial to do this for about a decade and 5 seconds of googling got me the answer. This is one of the stupidest ask slashdots ever, and they are almost all incredibly stupid. I'm not looking and I'm going to guess tImothy put this story up.
checks the top of the page
Yup. Fuck timothy.

Regardless of the clever implementation, Aereo behaved like a subscription cable service. How it collected and stored programming was not relevant to this.

Appearances can deceive: The elephant bird may have looked like an ostrich but it's not related to ostriches. It's actually related to kiwis.

From the article: "Launched a year ago in New York and then extended to 10 other U.S. cities, it allows customers to watch over-the-air TV programs on a smartphone, tablet, or computer for as little as $8 a month."

Here's how Aereo [works | worked]. Redirecting a free over-the-air product over the web is a clever idea. It would seem to me that it would give advertisers a broader reach.

I don't think this tech is going to go away. This ruling merely consolidates the power of the existing media companies over the broadcast medium. Which, in my opinion, is regrettable. They already have too much power IMO.

1. 1. Omni motion "trackpad" -- $500 (or similar product)
2. 2. Oculus rift headset -- $350 (devkit2 pricing)
3. 3. Razer Hydra or similar -- $140 (priced from here)
4. 4. playstation move motion controller -- $70
5. 5. at least commodity laptop worth of components to power it all -- $450 (based on middle tier notebook here)
6. 6. At least basic surround sound or decent headphones -- $90 (here and here)
7. 7. A decent gaming computer ~$1500

So that brings the overall price to ~$3,100 if you don't already have a gaming box and ~$1,600 if you do. Plus the const of your living room. This is totally in price for a lot of people. It's all available in hardware form now (to varying degrees of "done").

The major problem is what you pointed out: it will eat your living room/den. These costs and tech are also only for one player and you might get interference/tracking issues with more than on person in the same room. Only people who have solo/networked gaming as their primary form of entertainment will be willing to to make this trade off (that still is a lot of people). BUT, it's super affordable from a business aspect. Take a building, divide it into sound-proofed closets. Put one of these units into each of said closets. Have a desirable set of games (could even be one a la LaserQuest) that people want to play (or with telepresence bots: virtual tourism! (project tango?)) and it's really something to get in on. You could also see it used easily in therapies, spas (walk through a beautiful garden), military training (not as good as the real thing, but decent),and whole lot more.

That said, businesses won't be willing to invest in this without content Just like 3D movies and TVs, the life and death of an entertainment technology depends on the content available to it. There are a lot of companies jumping on the VR bandwagon right now. I think there will be a good set of initial IP that launches with these products or it will integrate with previous games (Skyrim, etc.), but there has to be something that makes you throw your money at them.

Overall, it's getting cheaper, faster and better. I think within 5 years everyone will know someone who has VR in their house.

> If you are concerned about your privacy giving these tools to the public is just a bad idea. Sure the black hat
> argument, if we break in then they will have to fix it and make it more secure..

I think you believe your own straw man.

What is being assaulted here is the relative bubble the NSA operates in. You see, if the NSA develops a tool, that is them. Its tradecraft, its keeping us safe, its under control. They have it, we have no proof anyone else does. No "real" problem...just an "academic" problem of us whiny people complaining about "rights".

However, when someone produces it and shows how easy it is, its no longer the NSA in a vacuume, its anybody with a few bucks. `The thing is....this isn't special. If you really, truely want these devices, you can, for the most part, build them yourself with time. That is true now, it was true a few years ago.

The only real difference is how plausible the deniability is when someone claims that its hard or it requires sophistication to some huge level. It isn't true, its not been true for a while, and it is high time to dispel that myth.

Fact is, the risk is already out there. We already see specialized hardware attacks on ATMs. We have already seen "evil maid" attacks on laptops of Poker players: http://securitywatch.pcmag.com...

I don't think informing people with concrete examples of the real threats and popping the bubble around the NSA is really a bad thing. The "bad guys" of whatever flavor you imagine, already have these tools and no qualms about using them.

Start up/shut down times are nominally much improved due to hardware states not having to be reinitialized from scratch every single boot. This also assists with a higher function, low power sleep mode.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/arc...

Cleaned up timing core meaning that where Windows 7 is hard-locked to a timer cycle, Windows 8 is not and can scale down processor usage accordingly. It is also more efficient in memory usage, reducing the footprint in memory considerably. http://www.engadget.com/2011/0...

Hyper-visor core technologies using Hyper-V (supporting 32 and 64 bit guests) rather than that lackluster Virtual PC. (no link, this is just a 'duh' observation)

Problems with the ugly start menu can be resolved in part using the Windows 8.1 free upgrade, the Update 1 (adding more desktop-friendly features back into the UI) and use of the Windows-S search feature to quickly locate programs you frequently use. I don't often go to the start menu myself, I open the Search utility and find my app in as few keystrokes as possible. It isn't perfect, but it (combined with the core re-architecture mentioned before) makes Windows 8 very usable.

That myth about Apple getting a one-year exclusive deal on Thunderbolt was debunked by Intel the day after it's release, three years ago. On top of that, Thunderbolt could never work as a standard PCI add-on card, because it is lower-level and needs to expose/act as an entire PCI bus itself. Asus makes add-ons for certain of their motherboards that have an additional specific Thunderbolt header, though - and Displayport is optional there, busting yet another one of your claims.

Gaining customers: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Umm... Project Ara and Phonebloks are partners, yo.

The Ara group has already partnered with 3D Systems and Phonebloks, and plans to collaborate with more partners, including academic experts at MIT and Carnegie Mellon, CNET said.

PocketPCs had them before the T42 laptop you linked to.

http://www.mobiletechreview.co...
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow...

No difference, except "$PRIOR_ART, but with a cellular transceiver"

I still think that Google lost the opportunity with the TV when selling the "Motorola Cable Box" unit to Arris: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

They had the opportunity on their hands to transform that unit and give a different kind of life to cable box subscribers.... too bad they didn't have vision for that.

I'm assuming you're too lazy to google

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
http://usabilitygeek.com/windo...
http://www.techspot.com/review...
http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8...

If you're lazy, you can just read the conclusions. It's not necessarily enough to make me upgrade to 8 (already have 8 on one laptop and 7 on some other devices), but it measurably better in a few areas.

Between them Netflix and YouTube made up more than 50 percent of peak downstream Internet traffic in N America, so it is a significant issue.

If we had true net neutrality Netflix might be the only content you could get at a reasonable speed, it would be cached all over the net. Content form Vimeo would play second fiddle to the Netflix congestion. I might not even get the content because my 18 neighbors are all watching 18 different shows on Netflix. Net neutrality doesn't solve this nor does providers paying for access.

I think that everyone agrees, that. The point is who pays for the carrying of data between the providers. OK: what I pay my ISP should also pay for them to fetch/send my bytes onwards in the Internet as well. I will cost my ISP less if I choose to download something from a local mirror than if I grab it from the other side of the world. Netflix are aware of that and have the Open Connect Content Delivery Network, but that won't solve all the probelms.

Between them Netflix and YouTube made up more than 50 percent of peak downstream Internet traffic in N America, so it is a significant issue.

What are you taking about?
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Doesn't need one. This is not an NP-hard problem, nor is the proposed solution. It could, in fact, be done on a relatively low budget. Relative, that is, to the costs that might otherwise come with lawsuits or bad media publicity resulting from "unauthorized" video taken by passengers, in any event.

Besides, if he does the footwork and engineering on his customer's dime, he (and perhaps the customer, as a partner in a joint venture) could come out of it with a product they can market and sell to other similar bus operators, theaters, etc.

None of the tech I outlined is rare, odd, or terribly expensive (excepting LIDAR units, at about $5k each), and can be done entirely with COTS hardware and some customized programming that would only have to be built on top of programming that has already been done in this field. In fact, the PS3EYE or Kinect already has most of the capability needed.

Honestly, I've seen homebrewers do much more complex things (including code), such as the home-built, automated air-hockey table built by a father for his daughter, which not only has to identify the puck, but then do loads of computational math to determine angles, speeds and force loads: what I initially described in my original post would almost be child's play by comparison.

HOWTO Remote kill phone

iPhone requires having an iCloud account.

Android has push capabilities. Micrsoft's is pretty good too I don't know if you have to create a windowsphone.com account since I don't have a Windows phone. And Blackberry allows you too, but who wants a Blackberry? Theft wouldn't be an issue for them. :-P

Radiation should be top of the list, unless we develop a somewhat thin metamaterial or something like that that reflects or absorb radiation (in the worst case we could rely on poop, but may exist other options) anything that implies long time on space (like a trip to mars, or trying to have self-sustained colonies in space). But if this one can't be solved, that should put an end to especulations about aliens visiting us or we visiting other star systems, ever, same for colonize anywhere else in this solar system, or to keep screwing the only planet that we will ever have in the whole universe.

The lack of gravity could to be solved with rotation, but you probably need something very big or rotating very fast to get something close to 1g that way. Or, for long trips, with acceleration/deacceleration. But may be practical factors that could make this not a solution, and if ends being not solvable, applies the same as the previous point.

Regarding the mind factors, probably are the easiest solvable ones in the long term, our minds adapt to new situations, and we could do a lot to help that adaptation, even if is just playing games.

I am tired of chrome not implementing W3C standards without using the -webkit to get it to work properly. I am not the only once concerned it is the next IE 6 but thankfully there are only a few sites which only work well in Chrome.

You seem to have no idea why IE6 was the big problem it was. It's not possible for Chrome to be "the new IE6", since:

1) It's not tied into Windows
2) It auto-updates silently, and new version adoption is VERY high among Chrome users.
3) vendor prefixes are not much of a problem compared to not implementing features at all, or implementing them badly.

Nice troll attempt, though.

Everyone here would be screaming bloody murder and all MS is trying to sabotage the web again?! But if Google does it then it is cool and innovative.

I am tired of chrome not implementing W3C standards without using the -webkit to get it to work properly. I am not the only once concerned it is the next IE 6 but thankfully there are only a few sites which only work well in Chrome.

Mozilla Firefox is catching up and has the fasted DOM according to tomshardware and ASM.JS looks to be rather interesting. Unfortunately it is agaisn't Google's interest to support it as they want a closed ecosystem similar to IE 6 and activeX before it.

I still use Chrome as Firefox is still behind in a few areas, but even IE is catching up and I find both IE and Firefox to use less ram than Chrome.

things will really changed. You will still need computers for serious production, but the $38 tablet may take over as the home computer.

Incidentally, Snapchat is actually a terrible example of 'eraseable internet' (though it sure doesn't go out of its way to tell you that...)

They recently rolled out a fun new feature:

"If you're a Snapchat aficionado, it's worth your while to check out some of the app's enhancements, for they include a brand-new "Replay" feature that now allows you to re-view one of your previously viewed Snapchats a second time. Perhaps you didn't have your Snapchat screenshotting app ready to go the first time (or, worse, your physical camera).

Snapchat does build in a few caveats with the Replay feature. For starters, it doesn't appear as if you can close the app down and reopen it to view a previously viewed Snapchat. Any replay action you do has to be in one, singular instance — which eliminates our "load your screenshot app up" example from above. Additionally, you only get one Replay each day. Make it good.

Interestingly enough, Snapchat doesn't notify the party that sent you the original Snapchat that you've elected to view it a second time. That might be useful information for a sender to know, for no particular reason whatsoever (wink). "

Well, well. you mean to say that those magic disappearing 'snaps' don't actually magically disappear, it's just a couple of permission bits getting twiddled on the server and the client doing a (generally sloppy) job of deleting the local copy? Wow, you'll tell me that 'streaming a video' is actually the same as 'downloading it in ordered chunks and starting to watch the first ones while you wait for the rest' and not something magically different...

If anything, to be able to enable this 'feature' after the fact, snapchat is clearly storing much, much, more than their service would theoretically require (the 'snap' would have to live server-side until delivery; but could be purged immediately thereafter. It isn't.) They may be tapping into a desire for ephemeral communication that somebody like Google doesn't; but it's a facade, a deliberate deception to encourage people to put more sensitive information into the same giant pool of ever cheaper storage with some dubious path to 'monetization'.

Only a complete and utter moron would buy from them after this.

Remember how the RSA SecureID authentication system was hacked?

Now, the way you do these tokens is to have a counter or timer inside them that's synchronized with an external system. You simply encrypt the counter and that's your verifiable ID code. The server can authenticate a couple counts in the past or present to give a wider window, and updates if drift is detected to stay in sych.

There's a concept in security called "single point of failure" that all competent security researchers are aware of and attempt to avoid, but RSA didn't. They didn't let you seed your own SecureIDs. Instead, they seeded them. In this way you had to rely on RSA to authenticate the tokens for you, instead of let you run your own server. So, this immediately raises several red flags for a security aware person: Denial of Service == All your cards stop authenticating at RSA's whim. Additionally, RSA can grant access to other people, say the NSA, by seeding a SecureID with a duplicate of yours. Furthermore, if RSA is compromised then everyone who uses SecureID is at risk, they've made themselves a single point of failure.

A better approach is to allow businesses to seed your security cards yourself, and run your own servers. This way there's no single point of failure for the entire card system -- Compromise one business doesn't leak to others. You don't have to rely on external servers for validation so even if all external lines are cut, your intranet can still validate cards. And you don't have to worry about the NSA compromising the folks you bought the cards from after you purchased them -- Only your systems know the authentication codes -- The crackers have to crack your database.

It wasn't surprising to me that RSA would get compromised because they were the single point of failure, it was only a matter of time (if not pre-compromised from inception). It wasn't surprising at all when defense related companies like Lockheed Martin and L-3 Communications were compromised thanks to RSA's SecureID breech.

Now, given the ineptitude you'd have to have as a team of premier security researchers to screw the pooch this badly in the design of your security product, and given how asinine it would be to select the absolute worst and slowest random number generator as the default for your BSafe security product, knowing you have many embedded platform use-cases, and given that it was known well in advance that trusting the PRNG was ill advised... Then considering Snowden leaks info explaining that the NSA was paying RSA to botch and weaken their security systems. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Given a gag order I'd understand RSA keeping quiet on this. If they cared about security of their customers then at that point we'd see RSA engineering a completely new line of security products with a goal to put our minds at ease, and inexplicably discontinue their past offerings. However, since they opened their fool mouths and claimed not to be screwing up everything on purpose... At least if they were forced to mess things up this bad I could understand, and once the spying apparatus has been dismantled I'd consider RSA still viable. However, if the NSA wasn't paying RSA to botch their security systems, then they can never be trusted again.

I use YubiKey instead. I can run my own server, install my own codes in the tokens, or let yubico do it if the application doesn't require such security. The protocol and server source code is open. I hear Google's partnering with them too.

Sad, really. Now anything RSA has touched I'm distancing myself from.

"Don't have FiOS in your area yet" doesn't apply because Verizon halted FiOS expansion almost 4 years ago. If you can't get FiOS to your house now you likely never will get it. http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2361919,00.asp

AT&T has virtually halted U-Verse expansion as well http://stopthecap.com/2012/02/08/at-atts-rural-broadband-solution-we-dont-have-one/

The future of high-bandwidth Internet access in America is not bright.

Unintentionally it would have had the same effect as Southwest giving out Wiis... good publicity all around.

Netflix is already turning this around by offering some ISPs higher quality streams for establishing partnerships.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2425696,00.asp

"U.S. ISPs that have signed on for Open Connect include Cablevision, Frontier, Clearwire, and Google Fiber. British Telecom, TDC, GVT, Telus, Bell Canada, Virgin, Telmex, and more have also signed up overseas. Those who sign up have the option to stream Netflix content in Super HD or 3D." Other ISPs like Verizon Communications and Time Warner Cable, have declined to sign up for Open Connect.

They are also working to get integration with set-top boxes.

Bullshit. They squarely placed the blame on the charger, and instituted a discounted trade-in program for 3rd-party chargers. It had nothing to do with cables and Apple never claimed that.

When you posted above saying "there are only Apple zealots and normal people," where does that put people like you who post lies and FUD? Honest idiots?

Buying decisions are often NOT made based on how well a product scores on benchmarks. Evidence: iDevices

Except they win most benchmarks handily.

Bribery is illegal so it would be unlikely to hit it.

Feds Probing Microsoft Over Foreign Bribery Charges

"U.S. officials are investigating whether Microsoft offered bribes to foreign clients in exchange for software contracts, according to the Wall Street Journal"

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416800,00.asp

Of course Slashdot does not consider this to be news, because they're being paid not to.

They've been dead last in laptop quality, support quality, and hardware reliability initially and over time for over a decade.

Nope, they're movin' on up. They're now tied for second-to-last with Acer. Gateway is now dead last, which isn't surprising in the least.

There were actually quite a few verified cases where Google suspended or even purged accounts over the names policy. A few links I found from a quick search:
Wikipedia's "Nymwars" article names a few
Google Plus deleting accounts en masse
Limor “Ladyada” Fried's brief post on being suspended
Violet Blue: Too Much Unnecessary Drama
William Shatner's Profile Temporarily Removed From Google+

Last Iheard, Google was allowing obvious pseudonyms in the "also known as"type field, but still required a "realistic"name for the account. (I use a "realistic"pseudonym myself.)