Incidentally, none of Facebook's accounts are fake. They all represent an online identity. Whether those identities maps 1:1 to physical users or not is irrelevant. There are still actual humans using the accounts, viewing ads, contributing to the usefulness of the platform, etc. There is no legitimate reason for Facebook to be concerned about these accounts that do not center around fundamental invasions of personal privacy, such as correlating user behavior outside of Facebook with what they do and say inside of Facebook.
If, as they have said, their "entire platform is based on people using their real identities", then their entire platform is fundamentally flawed. No one should be forced to use their real identity for any purposes online, and the harder companies like Facebook try to force people to do so (and the more sites that use Facebook for authentication), the more backlash there will be against Facebook, and the more traction alternative services will get.
Amazon's targeting is pretty good. It is based on products you have looked at (but not bought), products that other people who have bought the products you have in your card have bought in the same order, etc. It isn't perfect, but it is halfway decent much of the time. And you can delete items from your browsing history if you don't want them to affect your suggestions (e.g. things you were pricing for a friend, etc.).
So basically, what this new rule says is that if you don't already have a working prototype, don't bother to use Kickstarter. Otherwise, you'll have nothing visual that you would be allowed to show, and nobody will take an interest in your project. The whole purpose of mock-ups and other things is to help people quickly see the potential of your idea. Without that, the amount of effort required to sort the wheat from the chaff is excessive, and most people won't bother to donate to anything.
Make no mistake, it can certainly get awkward if people show mock-ups that can do twenty things and end up with a final design that can only do three, or that otherwise fails to live up to the expectations set by the mock-ups, but I don't see how that's any different from a textual description of what you hope to accomplish. So all this rule change does is ensure that Kickstarter is only useful for projects near the end of their product design lifecycle. And if you're that far along, you really don't need something like Kickstarter to reach the end.
So what is the purpose of Kickstarter again? Because I can't see any useful purpose for the site anymore. At this point, the entire model is broken beyond repair.
Is there a way to achieve those goals of the appeals during the initial investigation of the murder?
No, there really isn't. You have to start under the assumption that a not-insignificant percentage of the people arrested and jailed were railroaded by a jury because of racism or other factors. Therefore, you have to have neutral parties (read "from a different geographical area") to provide the necessary checks and balances.
By definition, the fallibility, corruption, sloppiness, and/or bias of the people doing the initial investigation is precisely why you have to have independent review, which means that nothing they can do can possibly take the place of that independent review.
Having independent labs vet the evidence is certainly a good idea, but it's not just the evidence. It is reevaluating the credibility of witnesses (including the ones the prosecutors used to vet the evidence), evaluating new evidence that was not available at the time of the original trial, etc.
Do Not Track is definitely far less damaging to ad-supported sites than ad blocking. Revenue from ads served to DNT users would be lower than tracked users because the ads wouldn't be targeted, but it would be nonzero.
One interesting aspect of DNT is that it doesn't cover tracking information gathered by the sites you visit for their own use. It covers only third-party tracking services, and only to the extent that the data is used by someone other than the first-party site. This means that Amazon can continue to track what people buy on their site. More significantly, as far as I can tell, there's nothing inherently preventing companies like Amazon from using that knowledge to serve ads based on the user's buying history on other sites, so long as they record the data only in aggregate (X site got N copies of ad Q) and do not in any way record the fact that a particular user visited the site. In that scenario, there's no tracking data being gathered according to DNT rules because all the data was gathered legitimately while the user was actually using and interacting with the (Amazon) ad network's first-party website.
Thus, the most likely result of DNT is the erosion of nameless, faceless tracking companies like doubleclick and the rise of ad networks built around sales platforms like Amazon, search networks like Google, and maybe, *maybe* social networking sites like Facebook. This is almost inarguably a good thing, as it will not only result in much better targeting of ads, but also a clear separation between your non-commerce activities on the Internet and the sorts of ads that you see.
Git is a cleaner model in a lot of ways. In particular, the fact that you have a local copy of the entire repository makes it easier to roll back mistakes you make while editing the code. This isn't always important, but if you decide you're going to do a significant rewrite of some piece of code (and in particular, if you are ever remote while you're doing so), it helps a lot.
Correction: If you starve yourself and force yourself to maintain a high activity level in spite of the extreme lethargy, you lose weight. When most people starve themselves, they maintain roughly the same weight or lose only a very small amount of weight. Then, when they go back to eating again, they gain weight because their metabolism is slower, but they are consuming calories sufficient for a faster metabolism.
What makes weight loss hard is that IIRC, your metabolism typically slows down faster than it speeds up. So reducing caloric intake doesn't make you lose as much as you gain when you remove the reduction.
It isn't a fallacy. You're trying to distort the true cost. You can't just look at the cost of the execution itself and compare it with the cost of the incarceration. You have to compare the cost of a shorter incarceration plus capital crime appeals plus execution against the longer incarceration with non-capital crime appeals and no execution.
What you're failing to acknowledge is that death penalty cases have a series of mandatory appeals because you have to be absolutely sure that somebody is guilty if you're going to execute them. Therefore, there is a significant cost after the initial conviction leading up to the execution.
By contrast, most people who are merely jailed for a crime do not appeal or do not have sufficient grounds for an appeal and so are rapidly denied that appeal. Therefore, the appeals process has a much lower cost.
Define rare. Between thyroid and parathyroid disorders, somewhere around 6% of adults have actual hormone imbalances. That rises to a whopping 23% of women 65 and older. And after pregnancy, another roughly 8% of women develop temporary thyroid hormone imbalances that go away after a few months.
Natural hormonal problems certainly don't explain all of the obesity in the U.S., but they probably explain a sizable chunk of it.
At the absolute minimum, "worse than the soda" is pretty unlikely.
"Worse than the soda" actually isn't unlikely. Hormonal imbalances are a major cause of weight gain. If your hormones are significantly out of balance, you aren't going to achieve a healthy weight even if you practically starve yourself.
Also, soda is arguably one of the least significant sources of BPA in people's diet. Most people don't drink from cans all that often; they drink soda from 2-liter bottles (which do not contain BPA), from soda fountain tanks (which AFAIK are not lined with BPA), etc.
The average person is exposed to BPA from many, many other sources—canned foods, plastic tupperware dishes (particularly while reheating food in them), dental fillings and sealants, reusable plastic water bottles of all types, the ink used on newspapers and many cash register receipts, and so on.
Besides, it is straightforward to compensate for any bias in the data caused by the tiny portion of BPA that comes from people's soda drinking habits.
Otherwise, there is not enough hydrogen to cause problems unless something happens to the gas cylinder sitting somewhere in the back that supplies the fuel
But that was kind of my point. Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas. In the absence of equipment to detect leaks, you wouldn't know that the hydrogen levels in the air had passed the 4% threshold. Then, a small spark can turn the whole building into a larger version of your high school demonstration. And even with equipment, it doesn't take very long for a building to become dangerous if you have pipes as big around as my head filled with pressurized hydrogen gas.
As for ITER, that's a tiny, purely experimental test reactor. It is nowhere near production scale. Basing the risk calculation on the amount of hydrogen in ITER is like computing the risk of dying in a plane crash based on the frequency of engine failures in model RC planes. At some level, small-scale experiments have similar behavior, but in practice, the safety systems required for the full-scale systems are much more significant because the damage caused by a failure would also be much bigger. (That, and they don't let rank amateurs fly jumbo jets, but that's a separate issue....)
It takes more than an order of magnitude less energy to ignite hydrogen than to ignite hydrocarbon fuels. A match isn't necessary by any stretch of the imagination. Rubbing your feet across the carpet can produce 10-25 millijoules of energy, which is somewhere around 600-1500 times as much energy as is required to trigger hydrogen combustion in a hydrogen-air mixture, given the right concentration of hydrogen. No flame needed. I don't consider a couple hundredths of a millijoule to be a lot of energy, personally. When you're talking about explosion risk, I consider a lot of energy to mean at least kilojoules, and I'm not entirely comfortable with stuff that explodes with fewer than megajoules.:-)
Saying that it will start spontaneous combustion with air is Todd Akin levels of stupidity.
What I said was that it "pretty much spontaneously" combusts. That wording, in English, typically means that it doesn't, strictly speaking, spontaneously combust, but that it is really close. And I maintain the correctness of that statement. I mean, we're not talking Things I Won't Work With here, but you have to admit that working with it in industrial quantities wouldn't exactly be the highlight of any sane person's day.
But in any case, mere combustion may be enthusiastic, but is nowhere near (by orders of magnitude) the energy of fusion.
An explosion of a fusion reactor would almost certainly be caused by a breach of containment by what is presumably high-pressure, high-temperature hydrogen gas. Once it is outside the containment vessel/field/*, it doesn't matter that it isn't as hot as the fusion process; the containment vessel is no longer between it and the outside world.:-) Even if it didn't explode at that point, a mere fire in a power plant could potentially cause millions of dollars in property damage. And at those sorts of temperatures, I'd expect something closer to an explosion than a fire. Maybe not—I mean, I've never had the opportunity to heat hydrogen up to several thousand degrees and then release it suddenly, so I'm kind of out of my element here (pun intended).:-D
... which makes it correspondingly more difficult to achieve a chain of events that would allow a reactor to detonate in the manner portrayed in bad fiction.
How do you define "detonate" in this context? Are we talking about a building-sized explosion here (which is what I was thinking of), or are we talking hydrogen bomb test? Because the former seems quite possible even if you're just working with high-pressure hydrogen without any sort of reactor. Just release a lot of hydrogen into the air so that the concentration is anywhere from about 4% to about 75%, then let someone shuffle his or her feet across the carpet.... The latter is, of course, obviously quite ridiculous.
Come on. You guys should know by now that I'm prone to hyperbole.:-)
The phrase you need to reinterpret is "pretty much". By that, I mean that it is relatively unstable, and that it doesn't take much to trigger an explosion. Not nothing, but not much. It could be anything from a spark to a sudden change in pressure to a catalyst like platinum to.... You get the idea.
It spontaneously combines with oxygen, but at STP it usually doesn't do so at a rate that qualifies as combustion. That said, when you're working with high pressure hydrogen, sometimes it does combust, and sometimes it does so with no obvious catalyst or ignition source. Sources:
Perhaps more curiously, nobody is really sure why, as far as I can tell. Either way, the point remains that you don't have to have an ignition source.
BTW, even if you did need an ignition source, I think it's safe to say that the temperatures inside or near a fusion reactor of any significant scale would probably qualify as an ignition source....
Right. HTML5 local storage is a fairly recent addition. You might also have been able to use a cookie with the "secure" flag set, which means the cookie is sent only over HTTPS connections, but AFAIK can be accessed in JavaScript code locally. I'm not certain whether such cookies are accessible through JavaScript that arrived over unencrypted HTTP, though, so that might not work.
Regarding cross-origin XHR, it's pretty straightforward. It works just like regular XHR. The only difference is that the server has to send out an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to indicate that the browser should be allowed to make the request. And the browser makes two requests—a HEAD request to check the ACAO header and an actual request for the URL. As a small caveat, unless they have fixed it recently, Internet Explorer requires you to use a different object, XDomainRequest.
Irwin Allen notwithstanding, fusion reactors don't spectacularly detonate.
Depends on what you're fusing. I mean, hydrogen pretty much spontaneously combusts in air, and does so rather explosively. Remember, they launched the shuttle with that stuff (at least partially).
Perhaps you're thinking of fission reactors. Those don't spectacularly detonate. Melt, maybe, or even burn if you're using a graphite moderator, but not detonate.:-)
...but aren't the Android ones of those capable of browsing the web as well?
The Nook Simple Touch is Android-based, but has no general-purpose web browsing functionality unless you root it. That said, I'm also not sure if those count in the statistics. I suppose it depends on whose statistics you look at.
Well, you might argue that the existence of a regulatory body like the FCC is part of the reason there are only a handful of nationwide U.S. carriers. That would be a somewhat specious argument (because in the absence of regulation, you'd probably also have a couple of jerks broadcasting broadband noise that makes the entire radio spectrum unusable), but many people make it anyway.
The real problem is that building out cellular infrastructure is expensive, and having multiple redundant infrastructures is expensive. This makes competition hard, and makes monopolies or oligopolies the default steady state. Without government intervention, such a market tends to be inherently anti-consumer. So you have to have either regulations that force competition or regulations that limit what the major players can do.
I could perhaps see a regulatory approach that limits the number of towers within a 30-mile radius to something on the order of one, and requires the carriers to sell off the remaining towers or spin them off into separate companies. That would result in a bunch of competing nationwide cellular networks that are forced to make roaming deals with one another in order to even function in cities. Combine this with rules that require interoperability (choose a single national standard) and rules that require RAND-ish tower access agreements, and you might actually get some real competition. Unfortunately, they'd probably choose a broken standard where handoffs between roaming and non-roaming cells isn't possible, and then you'd just make city-dwellers as cellularly miserable as folks out in the country....
Uh... JavaScript has allowed cross-site XHR for going on four years now. It does, however, require appropriate configuration on the server you're contacting. The bigger problem with that design is that if your web hosting server doesn't support HTTPS, how will the third-party server handing out authentication tokens set the token on the server side?
No, this is better handled through a DH key exchange. Then both sides have a shared symmetric key, and both sides can store it locally (with client-side storage, *not* cookies—you don't want it getting sent in cleartext over the wire). This is actually what the website I'm developing now does. With that solution, sniffing is prevented (or, in my case, injection of unauthenticated non-replay queries to the server; I'm not encrypting the requests, just signing them).
Of course, none of that prevents active tampering (modifying the JavaScript code to send a copy to a MITM server, for example), which is why HTTPS is still a good idea if at all possible. It would be helpful if more browsers supported SSL with SNI, or if browsers supported SSL with domain keys when working with DNS servers that support DNSSEC, or both.
The insurance is roughly 1/3 the cost of a replacement.
No, the insurance is roughly half the cost of the repair bill from a single drop (although the repair is performed by replacing the device with a refurbished device that someone else dropped previously). A true replacement of the device (the cost of buying one without a contract), assuming the contract-free cost is similar to that of the iPhone 4S, is almost seven times the insurance cost. The difference in cost is because the expensive guts rarely break.
Slashdot Mirror
Incidentally, none of Facebook's accounts are fake. They all represent an online identity. Whether those identities maps 1:1 to physical users or not is irrelevant. There are still actual humans using the accounts, viewing ads, contributing to the usefulness of the platform, etc. There is no legitimate reason for Facebook to be concerned about these accounts that do not center around fundamental invasions of personal privacy, such as correlating user behavior outside of Facebook with what they do and say inside of Facebook.
If, as they have said, their "entire platform is based on people using their real identities", then their entire platform is fundamentally flawed. No one should be forced to use their real identity for any purposes online, and the harder companies like Facebook try to force people to do so (and the more sites that use Facebook for authentication), the more backlash there will be against Facebook, and the more traction alternative services will get.
Amazon's targeting is pretty good. It is based on products you have looked at (but not bought), products that other people who have bought the products you have in your card have bought in the same order, etc. It isn't perfect, but it is halfway decent much of the time. And you can delete items from your browsing history if you don't want them to affect your suggestions (e.g. things you were pricing for a friend, etc.).
So basically, what this new rule says is that if you don't already have a working prototype, don't bother to use Kickstarter. Otherwise, you'll have nothing visual that you would be allowed to show, and nobody will take an interest in your project. The whole purpose of mock-ups and other things is to help people quickly see the potential of your idea. Without that, the amount of effort required to sort the wheat from the chaff is excessive, and most people won't bother to donate to anything.
Make no mistake, it can certainly get awkward if people show mock-ups that can do twenty things and end up with a final design that can only do three, or that otherwise fails to live up to the expectations set by the mock-ups, but I don't see how that's any different from a textual description of what you hope to accomplish. So all this rule change does is ensure that Kickstarter is only useful for projects near the end of their product design lifecycle. And if you're that far along, you really don't need something like Kickstarter to reach the end.
So what is the purpose of Kickstarter again? Because I can't see any useful purpose for the site anymore. At this point, the entire model is broken beyond repair.
No, there really isn't. You have to start under the assumption that a not-insignificant percentage of the people arrested and jailed were railroaded by a jury because of racism or other factors. Therefore, you have to have neutral parties (read "from a different geographical area") to provide the necessary checks and balances.
By definition, the fallibility, corruption, sloppiness, and/or bias of the people doing the initial investigation is precisely why you have to have independent review, which means that nothing they can do can possibly take the place of that independent review.
Having independent labs vet the evidence is certainly a good idea, but it's not just the evidence. It is reevaluating the credibility of witnesses (including the ones the prosecutors used to vet the evidence), evaluating new evidence that was not available at the time of the original trial, etc.
Do Not Track is definitely far less damaging to ad-supported sites than ad blocking. Revenue from ads served to DNT users would be lower than tracked users because the ads wouldn't be targeted, but it would be nonzero.
One interesting aspect of DNT is that it doesn't cover tracking information gathered by the sites you visit for their own use. It covers only third-party tracking services, and only to the extent that the data is used by someone other than the first-party site. This means that Amazon can continue to track what people buy on their site. More significantly, as far as I can tell, there's nothing inherently preventing companies like Amazon from using that knowledge to serve ads based on the user's buying history on other sites, so long as they record the data only in aggregate (X site got N copies of ad Q) and do not in any way record the fact that a particular user visited the site. In that scenario, there's no tracking data being gathered according to DNT rules because all the data was gathered legitimately while the user was actually using and interacting with the (Amazon) ad network's first-party website.
Thus, the most likely result of DNT is the erosion of nameless, faceless tracking companies like doubleclick and the rise of ad networks built around sales platforms like Amazon, search networks like Google, and maybe, *maybe* social networking sites like Facebook. This is almost inarguably a good thing, as it will not only result in much better targeting of ads, but also a clear separation between your non-commerce activities on the Internet and the sorts of ads that you see.
Git is a cleaner model in a lot of ways. In particular, the fact that you have a local copy of the entire repository makes it easier to roll back mistakes you make while editing the code. This isn't always important, but if you decide you're going to do a significant rewrite of some piece of code (and in particular, if you are ever remote while you're doing so), it helps a lot.
Correction: If you starve yourself and force yourself to maintain a high activity level in spite of the extreme lethargy, you lose weight. When most people starve themselves, they maintain roughly the same weight or lose only a very small amount of weight. Then, when they go back to eating again, they gain weight because their metabolism is slower, but they are consuming calories sufficient for a faster metabolism.
What makes weight loss hard is that IIRC, your metabolism typically slows down faster than it speeds up. So reducing caloric intake doesn't make you lose as much as you gain when you remove the reduction.
It isn't a fallacy. You're trying to distort the true cost. You can't just look at the cost of the execution itself and compare it with the cost of the incarceration. You have to compare the cost of a shorter incarceration plus capital crime appeals plus execution against the longer incarceration with non-capital crime appeals and no execution.
What you're failing to acknowledge is that death penalty cases have a series of mandatory appeals because you have to be absolutely sure that somebody is guilty if you're going to execute them. Therefore, there is a significant cost after the initial conviction leading up to the execution.
By contrast, most people who are merely jailed for a crime do not appeal or do not have sufficient grounds for an appeal and so are rapidly denied that appeal. Therefore, the appeals process has a much lower cost.
Define rare. Between thyroid and parathyroid disorders, somewhere around 6% of adults have actual hormone imbalances. That rises to a whopping 23% of women 65 and older. And after pregnancy, another roughly 8% of women develop temporary thyroid hormone imbalances that go away after a few months.
Natural hormonal problems certainly don't explain all of the obesity in the U.S., but they probably explain a sizable chunk of it.
"Worse than the soda" actually isn't unlikely. Hormonal imbalances are a major cause of weight gain. If your hormones are significantly out of balance, you aren't going to achieve a healthy weight even if you practically starve yourself.
Also, soda is arguably one of the least significant sources of BPA in people's diet. Most people don't drink from cans all that often; they drink soda from 2-liter bottles (which do not contain BPA), from soda fountain tanks (which AFAIK are not lined with BPA), etc.
The average person is exposed to BPA from many, many other sources—canned foods, plastic tupperware dishes (particularly while reheating food in them), dental fillings and sealants, reusable plastic water bottles of all types, the ink used on newspapers and many cash register receipts, and so on.
Besides, it is straightforward to compensate for any bias in the data caused by the tiny portion of BPA that comes from people's soda drinking habits.
Does Street View still require Flash?
There has been a geolocation API in Safari since iOS 3, so if Google is using it, I'd expect it to work just fine....
But that was kind of my point. Hydrogen is a colorless, odorless, tasteless gas. In the absence of equipment to detect leaks, you wouldn't know that the hydrogen levels in the air had passed the 4% threshold. Then, a small spark can turn the whole building into a larger version of your high school demonstration. And even with equipment, it doesn't take very long for a building to become dangerous if you have pipes as big around as my head filled with pressurized hydrogen gas.
As for ITER, that's a tiny, purely experimental test reactor. It is nowhere near production scale. Basing the risk calculation on the amount of hydrogen in ITER is like computing the risk of dying in a plane crash based on the frequency of engine failures in model RC planes. At some level, small-scale experiments have similar behavior, but in practice, the safety systems required for the full-scale systems are much more significant because the damage caused by a failure would also be much bigger. (That, and they don't let rank amateurs fly jumbo jets, but that's a separate issue....)
It takes more than an order of magnitude less energy to ignite hydrogen than to ignite hydrocarbon fuels. A match isn't necessary by any stretch of the imagination. Rubbing your feet across the carpet can produce 10-25 millijoules of energy, which is somewhere around 600-1500 times as much energy as is required to trigger hydrogen combustion in a hydrogen-air mixture, given the right concentration of hydrogen. No flame needed. I don't consider a couple hundredths of a millijoule to be a lot of energy, personally. When you're talking about explosion risk, I consider a lot of energy to mean at least kilojoules, and I'm not entirely comfortable with stuff that explodes with fewer than megajoules. :-)
What I said was that it "pretty much spontaneously" combusts. That wording, in English, typically means that it doesn't, strictly speaking, spontaneously combust, but that it is really close. And I maintain the correctness of that statement. I mean, we're not talking Things I Won't Work With here, but you have to admit that working with it in industrial quantities wouldn't exactly be the highlight of any sane person's day.
An explosion of a fusion reactor would almost certainly be caused by a breach of containment by what is presumably high-pressure, high-temperature hydrogen gas. Once it is outside the containment vessel/field/*, it doesn't matter that it isn't as hot as the fusion process; the containment vessel is no longer between it and the outside world. :-) Even if it didn't explode at that point, a mere fire in a power plant could potentially cause millions of dollars in property damage. And at those sorts of temperatures, I'd expect something closer to an explosion than a fire. Maybe not—I mean, I've never had the opportunity to heat hydrogen up to several thousand degrees and then release it suddenly, so I'm kind of out of my element here (pun intended). :-D
How do you define "detonate" in this context? Are we talking about a building-sized explosion here (which is what I was thinking of), or are we talking hydrogen bomb test? Because the former seems quite possible even if you're just working with high-pressure hydrogen without any sort of reactor. Just release a lot of hydrogen into the air so that the concentration is anywhere from about 4% to about 75%, then let someone shuffle his or her feet across the carpet.... The latter is, of course, obviously quite ridiculous.
Come on. You guys should know by now that I'm prone to hyperbole. :-)
The phrase you need to reinterpret is "pretty much". By that, I mean that it is relatively unstable, and that it doesn't take much to trigger an explosion. Not nothing, but not much. It could be anything from a spark to a sudden change in pressure to a catalyst like platinum to.... You get the idea.
It spontaneously combines with oxygen, but at STP it usually doesn't do so at a rate that qualifies as combustion. That said, when you're working with high pressure hydrogen, sometimes it does combust, and sometimes it does so with no obvious catalyst or ignition source. Sources:
Perhaps more curiously, nobody is really sure why, as far as I can tell. Either way, the point remains that you don't have to have an ignition source.
BTW, even if you did need an ignition source, I think it's safe to say that the temperatures inside or near a fusion reactor of any significant scale would probably qualify as an ignition source....
Right. HTML5 local storage is a fairly recent addition. You might also have been able to use a cookie with the "secure" flag set, which means the cookie is sent only over HTTPS connections, but AFAIK can be accessed in JavaScript code locally. I'm not certain whether such cookies are accessible through JavaScript that arrived over unencrypted HTTP, though, so that might not work.
Regarding cross-origin XHR, it's pretty straightforward. It works just like regular XHR. The only difference is that the server has to send out an Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to indicate that the browser should be allowed to make the request. And the browser makes two requests—a HEAD request to check the ACAO header and an actual request for the URL. As a small caveat, unless they have fixed it recently, Internet Explorer requires you to use a different object, XDomainRequest.
Depends on what you're fusing. I mean, hydrogen pretty much spontaneously combusts in air, and does so rather explosively. Remember, they launched the shuttle with that stuff (at least partially).
Perhaps you're thinking of fission reactors. Those don't spectacularly detonate. Melt, maybe, or even burn if you're using a graphite moderator, but not detonate. :-)
The Nook Simple Touch is Android-based, but has no general-purpose web browsing functionality unless you root it. That said, I'm also not sure if those count in the statistics. I suppose it depends on whose statistics you look at.
Well, you might argue that the existence of a regulatory body like the FCC is part of the reason there are only a handful of nationwide U.S. carriers. That would be a somewhat specious argument (because in the absence of regulation, you'd probably also have a couple of jerks broadcasting broadband noise that makes the entire radio spectrum unusable), but many people make it anyway.
The real problem is that building out cellular infrastructure is expensive, and having multiple redundant infrastructures is expensive. This makes competition hard, and makes monopolies or oligopolies the default steady state. Without government intervention, such a market tends to be inherently anti-consumer. So you have to have either regulations that force competition or regulations that limit what the major players can do.
I could perhaps see a regulatory approach that limits the number of towers within a 30-mile radius to something on the order of one, and requires the carriers to sell off the remaining towers or spin them off into separate companies. That would result in a bunch of competing nationwide cellular networks that are forced to make roaming deals with one another in order to even function in cities. Combine this with rules that require interoperability (choose a single national standard) and rules that require RAND-ish tower access agreements, and you might actually get some real competition. Unfortunately, they'd probably choose a broken standard where handoffs between roaming and non-roaming cells isn't possible, and then you'd just make city-dwellers as cellularly miserable as folks out in the country....
Uh... JavaScript has allowed cross-site XHR for going on four years now. It does, however, require appropriate configuration on the server you're contacting. The bigger problem with that design is that if your web hosting server doesn't support HTTPS, how will the third-party server handing out authentication tokens set the token on the server side?
No, this is better handled through a DH key exchange. Then both sides have a shared symmetric key, and both sides can store it locally (with client-side storage, *not* cookies—you don't want it getting sent in cleartext over the wire). This is actually what the website I'm developing now does. With that solution, sniffing is prevented (or, in my case, injection of unauthenticated non-replay queries to the server; I'm not encrypting the requests, just signing them).
Of course, none of that prevents active tampering (modifying the JavaScript code to send a copy to a MITM server, for example), which is why HTTPS is still a good idea if at all possible. It would be helpful if more browsers supported SSL with SNI, or if browsers supported SSL with domain keys when working with DNS servers that support DNSSEC, or both.
joints?
Okay, clearly I've been in California too long.
No, the insurance is roughly half the cost of the repair bill from a single drop (although the repair is performed by replacing the device with a refurbished device that someone else dropped previously). A true replacement of the device (the cost of buying one without a contract), assuming the contract-free cost is similar to that of the iPhone 4S, is almost seven times the insurance cost. The difference in cost is because the expensive guts rarely break.