I have one of those and the programmer should be shot. Make that at least a dozen of times. After each scan I have to make half a dozen of mouse clicks to get ready for the next scan. Close the floating window. Then it asks me whether I want to throw away the last scan. Why would I want that? And why is it the default? Then you have to go to the dock, right-click (not an ordinary click), select the proper menu item to get the floating window again. AAARrrrrrggghhh.
What it does a nice job at is recognizing single sided and double sided, as well as orientation. OK, deduct two bullets.
Bert
You're doing it wrong. Seriously. The ScanSnap has two very distinct "modes". In the default "mode" it works with sort of a wizard interface. You press the button and a box comes up asking you "what do you want to do with this?" It walks you through the process. If you disable that mode (I think it's called Quick Menu) by right-clicking on the blue S systray icon and then clicking on "Enable Quick Menu", you open up a world of awesome.
In awesome mode, you define "profiles". As many as you like. You can define a single-sided, black & white, 300dpi, save as ARBITRARY-NAME###-DATE.PDF in X:\FOLDER. You can define other profiles with other settings, including the scan-to-email and scan-to-print options that mimic the options in the Quick Menu. When you're in a profile, you press the Scan button on the scanner and... it just DOES whatever that profile defines. At most you have a single OK button to confirm what it's going to do. Changing profiles is done by left-clicking on the blue S systray icon and clicking on the desired profile.
You're using the mode for people who don't understand computers. There's a whole customizable mode for people who do.
How do you know? It's not like they pop up a window to let you know if the installation was successful.
What planet have you been on for the last decade? News flash: traditional virus threats (ie. self-propagating executables) are almost never seen anymore. For many years now the "bad stuff" that is seen tends to be very, very visible and spreads by means of compromised web servers. They rely on browser exploits and user intervention to actually "infect" a PC, and in the vast majority of the case their job is to make the computer barely usable while screaming bloody murder that the system is compromised and for $40 they'll fix it.
I manage hundreds of desktops and laptops and the number of traditional threats detected by realtime AV scanning is really, really low. Like... five instances a year. Everything else is 0-day web-distributed malware.
Tolkien had a lot of beautiful imagery and ideas, and that invited the reader to make up their own fascinating thoughts of what the world looked like, simply because the prose was really difficult to read. As a trilogy that forces the reader to envision Middle Earth in their mind, it succeeds brilliantly beyond the bad prose.
Huh? Sorry, but after the third exquisite description of a cloud, his beautiful imagery made me learn how to scan paragraphs to skip to extraneous bits. Kind of like porn in a way. The first thrust is arousing to watch. The second through tenth are titillating. The eleventh through ninetieth are increasingly routine. Eventually you may find yourself desperately bored, hoping the actors change position or fall in a vat of boiling lead, or something interesting.
I was under the impression that Pathfinder (essentially a licensed fork of D&D 3.5) was outselling Wizards of the Coast D&D these days.
It is, according to industry measurements. I wish WotC well, but I honestly don't think they "get it" why Pathfinder is doing so well. Obviously it's a combination of a lot of factors, but one of the biggest ones is what you mentioned: the license.
D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder are under the OGL (Open Game License). It's a very permissive license that allows 3rd parties to effectively reprint and use almost all the rules (and in Pathfinder's case all the rules) in development of other products. Want to take a known monster, amp it up, and include it in the adventure module you're writing? The OGL allows you to do exactly that. Just include the OGL text and keep the attributions correct, and you're good to go. Pathfinder owes its existence to the fact most of 3.5e was open. The www.d20pfsrd.com site is a huge proof to the idea that open rules licensing doesn't kill the product. Aside from campaign-setting lore, names, and artwork, all the rules are available on that web site. And yet Paizo is doing great.
On the other hand, 4e was published (eventually) under a GSL, which breaks down mostly to "you can't do anything, for any reason, and if you do it, you'll wish you didn't." WotC has maintained very strict control over the 4e rules and no longer even sells PDFs of their books.
I have no reason to believe that even if WotC does open playtesting there will be any shift in licensing terms. The product will remain closed up and DRM controlled by Hasbro. Well, sorry. No 3rd-party ecosystem, no support... the name "D&D" alone isn't enough.
In all honesty, can't they just make plenty of money off of campaign settings and miniatures? I don't really see the need to reset the rules every few years. You'd think they would have this shit down after 35+ years of D&D.
They evidently can't. Paizo on the other hand somehow managed to go from a little company that put out two magazines to what they are today, with their bread and butter being adventures.
A new line of licensed minis?
A new licensed comic book?
A new MMO video game?
Seems to me there's plenty of room for profit in add-ons without screwing with the core rules. Hopefully 5e is good, because more good is better than less good, but my groups have all been happily satisfied by Paizo's Pathfinder. All the good we can manage to play, and plenty filling my shelves that there isn't enough time to get to.
If someone want's to charge for it it is the exact same right. You don't need it that bad if you don't want to comply with the license to acquire some information - go make it yourself and release it if you want under your own terms.
It is their right. But it's not that simple. At the same time, content producers inundate the market with increasingly intrusive and expertly crafted advertisement. Basically, "we" are educated to want things we don't need, with ever-increasing force behind that education. This doesn't excuse piracy per se, but it does partially explain it. There are certainly many people who feel a very powerful want for crap they wouldn't naturally want.
Music choice, movie choices, even novels. We're told things are best-sellers, blockbusters, and hit wonders. We have cross-promotions, product placements, celebrity sponsorship, and the like.
It's no wonder that people reach out and obtain some things without paying for them. At least in some cases, it's because they're satisfying the itch embedded by advertising, not a natural want for a product. When you start becoming curious about some media because you "heard about it", you don't have a natural want.
Every web browser as auto spell-check capabilities these days. So why should there be any misspellings on something that is managed strictly from a web interface?
The real metric we need here is man-hours-of-driving-per-cell-phone-collision.
Compare that value to other common, acceptable activities. Values like "distractedness" are vague and tertiary measurements. I want to know that Big Mac eating while driving has a man-hours-per-collision of X while cell phone use while driving has a man-hours-per-collision of Y. If X is lower than Y then eating while driving is "safer".
Don't kid yourself. Man-centuries of cell phone use is going on every day during driving every day. It's inevitable there are going to be "crashed while texting" cases because the frequency of phone-in-hand is enormous. That doesn't prove causation.
I'm not saying it's not contributory. I'm saying that the degree of contribution may be dramatically different from what "we" think it is.
Requirements to run Firefox and resources required to compile Firefox aren't the same thing at all. Your attempt to conflate the two suggests you're stupid and don't know what you're talking about.
I'd say it nicer but then I'd risk not hitting +5 Funny.
What's RIM got to do with your woes? Your carrier made a custom ROM image and loaded it on your phone. Shrug.
You know... you could go ahead and load another carrier's ROM or any of a dozen hybrid custom ROMs on your phone. Either you get the functionality you're looking for or the carrier BLOCKS it.
Heaven forbid the guys responsible for maintaining the systems ask (a lot of) questions to learn what you want done and why, and to make sure existing and supported solutions have been considered.
I'm not saying the conversation you describe isn't IT being a bunch of jerks. But if you try just a little bit, it can also look remarkably like a bunch of guys who are responsible for a complicated environment trying to keep it from getting more complicated needlessly. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I got "my laptop from home isn't working. I've got it in the car. Can you take a look at it?"
I stopped going after that.
"Can I ask you a question?"
I love that. Because what I'm doing doesn't require any concentration. And because answering your the vague question involves four hours of "if... then" branching discussion of possibilities. Explaining what we do and why we do it the way we do it just frustrates people. They seriously want and expect us to tell them "oh, that's easy... go un-check the 'be a hunk of shit' option in Control Panel and you're home-free." I often use a car analogy. "An auto mechanic could rebuild your transmission but explaining to you at this party is probably not practical. Take your car to a garage."
Unless it really is simple, in which case I give them an answer.
How about a big collection of free music/ebooks/movies/art, etc? Maybe consider putting together a digital slideshow of photos and movies of family and friends, too.
I think you're by far the most insightful in the discussion so far.
I have to think that generally speaking, software that is useful (to the recipient) and free (available to the recipient already) is likely to be owned by the recipient. Sending people Firefox or Foxit Reader or 7Zip is pointless because either the don't have any clue how to or why to use it, or they already do. Yes, a generalization, but I suspect that loading up a bunch of software is just going to waste the recipient's time, forcing them to delete it all.
On the other hand, MEDIA might be cool. And the time spent checking out Creative Commons (and other sources of) music and so on rewards the sender too. Everyone wins.
Do you know how crazy that is? I have 1920x1080p resolution on my 17" laptop, and text gets insanely small. Now consider stripping 7 inches and reading that on a 10" screen. It'd be impossible!
What they need is better scaling algorithms, not higher resolutions.
Disagree. I happily have been running in 1920x1200 on my 15" Dell for six years. By insanely small, I assume you mean "appropriate for people with healthy or corrected vision". Pixel-based screen real-estate is the number one feature I base purchasing decisions on for anything involving a display these days. All the other metrics are important but I don't see all those cores or Gig of flash memory. Low-res means time lost scrolling. Might as well get a good display and slower processor at that rate.
with those specs it should be able to play h.264 the only thing that would make it not play in that resolution is a virus, or counterfeit parts. or lack of codecs.
Lack of codecs it is. The only players that try to do this basically do software decoding instead of hardware-assisted decoding. Why? Because there isn't a Tegra 2 hardware codec for H.264 high-profile.
^T (new tab)
^K (focus in search bar)
penn teller[Enter]
^F4 (close tab)
So... 14 keystrokes, three of which are Ctrl-metakeys. Also known as "11 fewer keystrokes than not looking it up".
Jillette.
Incidentally, you could even live dangerously and skip the " teller" part of the search and the fifth Google result would still give you what you need.
Nope. She's posted about it elsewhere, but basically, she saved the video in order to blackmail him. Fast forward to a week ago, and he threatens to stop allowing her to borrow his Mercedes. So she posts the video in response.
They're both horrible people: the judge for beating his daughter, and the girl for blackmailing him over it.
If she wanted him punished, she had the chance. She didn't. She wanted money from him.
Devil's advocate... as the victim of physical abuse, why shouldn't she have a say what form her retaliation should take? Specifically, what makes her a horrible person just because she decided his abuse of her should have financial penalty that directly benefits her?
Given she likely doesn't fear continued physical abuse and given he's not likely to physically abuse other people, imprisonment wouldn't be worthwhile. A nice steep fine, perhaps? With perhaps her as the beneficiary as the aggrieved party?
Blackmail, sue... what's the difference in this case, except that this way is simpler for all parties involved and lawyers don't need to get rich parasitically?
Inform away. So far you've got zero information content in either of your posts. Mine summarizes the known exploits and security topics. Yours don't. Feel free to drop the newsburger edgestuff at 11 nonsense and communicate with us. Drop down to the lesser language of English and educate me.
You act like this is either unimportant or not news. I'm not sure which.
Fact is while there's a lot of FUD floating around regarding things like RIM "caving in" and dropping BIS servers in questionable countries, there haven't actually been very many actual real-life exploits for the phones or their communications. Blackberry phone remains the only ones on the market that encrypt all data traffic by default and that encryption can't be disabled. If you're on BIS or if you're on BES, your unencrypted web traffic, e-mail traffic (even POP3) is encrypted at the device. That's still worlds ahead of the other devices.
There's reports that one exploit exists that can decrypt Password Keeper data from a phone backup on a PC. There's this report that discusses recovery of phone unlock passwords. There's the widely discussed and misunderstood reports about RIM dropping BIS MDS servers in unfriendly countries and what that allows (hint: it has zero to do with Blackberries not in those countries).
RIM's stuff is by and large still very, very secure by any comparison and their phones are unique in that regard. So the way I see it, this is both news (being a genuine security hack) and relevant (these phones being the best on the market).
It's a new age, American children need to hit the ground running out of the womb in order to compete versus the vast numbers in China and India. We have to build better everything, and that includes kids. Now if only we are smart enough not to hold these kids back as they blossom and grow under the tutelage of our machine friends. Get with the times Grandpa.
Really? You think an iPad will give Western children the competitive edge they need? Here's a free clue:
Indian and Chinese students have one deadly advantage: motivation.
Basically, Western kids can aspire to being mediocre at everything they do, knowing full well that they will thereby enough income to live comfortably well-off for their entire lives. Chinese and Indian kids know that if they aren't amongst a very small percentage of the best of their cadre, they will earn poverty.
Western kids don't need to be taught how to multi-touch gesture-smear on an $800 doo-dad. They need someone to motivate them to compete. Angry Birds and fart apps won't help with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Damnit, you win. It behooves someone being critical of anyone else to be perfect in their presentation. You caught me.
It would help if those damn Brits wouldn't use such ridiculous words. Here on the reasonable side of the Atlantic, we call them strollers.
Understand I'm a North American. So when I point out your wrongness, it's not because I'm a damned Brit.
Sprinters sprint.
Runners run.
Juggers jog.
You'd think strollers stroll.
Strangely instead strollers convey small children nestled within their confines but only because someone is pushing them along.
Know what. I'll take a word that is allocated to naming the object any day over a misleading one. The Brits got it right, we got it wrong.
Speaking of wrong, the word you're looking for is "buggy". Like... rubber baby buggy bumpers.
I have one of those and the programmer should be shot. Make that at least a dozen of times. After each scan I have to make half a dozen of mouse clicks to get ready for the next scan. Close the floating window. Then it asks me whether I want to throw away the last scan. Why would I want that? And why is it the default? Then you have to go to the dock, right-click (not an ordinary click), select the proper menu item to get the floating window again. AAARrrrrrggghhh.
What it does a nice job at is recognizing single sided and double sided, as well as orientation. OK, deduct two bullets.
Bert
You're doing it wrong. Seriously. The ScanSnap has two very distinct "modes". In the default "mode" it works with sort of a wizard interface. You press the button and a box comes up asking you "what do you want to do with this?" It walks you through the process. If you disable that mode (I think it's called Quick Menu) by right-clicking on the blue S systray icon and then clicking on "Enable Quick Menu", you open up a world of awesome.
In awesome mode, you define "profiles". As many as you like. You can define a single-sided, black & white, 300dpi, save as ARBITRARY-NAME###-DATE.PDF in X:\FOLDER. You can define other profiles with other settings, including the scan-to-email and scan-to-print options that mimic the options in the Quick Menu. When you're in a profile, you press the Scan button on the scanner and... it just DOES whatever that profile defines. At most you have a single OK button to confirm what it's going to do. Changing profiles is done by left-clicking on the blue S systray icon and clicking on the desired profile.
You're using the mode for people who don't understand computers. There's a whole customizable mode for people who do.
One: you can boot off of drive letters other than C:
Two: eliminating drive letters entirely will break a LOT of software that doesn't need to be broken.
Three: the feature is mostly harmless.
How do you know? It's not like they pop up a window to let you know if the installation was successful.
What planet have you been on for the last decade? News flash: traditional virus threats (ie. self-propagating executables) are almost never seen anymore. For many years now the "bad stuff" that is seen tends to be very, very visible and spreads by means of compromised web servers. They rely on browser exploits and user intervention to actually "infect" a PC, and in the vast majority of the case their job is to make the computer barely usable while screaming bloody murder that the system is compromised and for $40 they'll fix it.
I manage hundreds of desktops and laptops and the number of traditional threats detected by realtime AV scanning is really, really low. Like... five instances a year. Everything else is 0-day web-distributed malware.
Tolkien had a lot of beautiful imagery and ideas, and that invited the reader to make up their own fascinating thoughts of what the world looked like, simply because the prose was really difficult to read. As a trilogy that forces the reader to envision Middle Earth in their mind, it succeeds brilliantly beyond the bad prose.
Huh? Sorry, but after the third exquisite description of a cloud, his beautiful imagery made me learn how to scan paragraphs to skip to extraneous bits. Kind of like porn in a way. The first thrust is arousing to watch. The second through tenth are titillating. The eleventh through ninetieth are increasingly routine. Eventually you may find yourself desperately bored, hoping the actors change position or fall in a vat of boiling lead, or something interesting.
I was under the impression that Pathfinder (essentially a licensed fork of D&D 3.5) was outselling Wizards of the Coast D&D these days.
It is, according to industry measurements. I wish WotC well, but I honestly don't think they "get it" why Pathfinder is doing so well. Obviously it's a combination of a lot of factors, but one of the biggest ones is what you mentioned: the license.
D&D 3.5e and Pathfinder are under the OGL (Open Game License). It's a very permissive license that allows 3rd parties to effectively reprint and use almost all the rules (and in Pathfinder's case all the rules) in development of other products. Want to take a known monster, amp it up, and include it in the adventure module you're writing? The OGL allows you to do exactly that. Just include the OGL text and keep the attributions correct, and you're good to go. Pathfinder owes its existence to the fact most of 3.5e was open. The www.d20pfsrd.com site is a huge proof to the idea that open rules licensing doesn't kill the product. Aside from campaign-setting lore, names, and artwork, all the rules are available on that web site. And yet Paizo is doing great.
On the other hand, 4e was published (eventually) under a GSL, which breaks down mostly to "you can't do anything, for any reason, and if you do it, you'll wish you didn't." WotC has maintained very strict control over the 4e rules and no longer even sells PDFs of their books.
I have no reason to believe that even if WotC does open playtesting there will be any shift in licensing terms. The product will remain closed up and DRM controlled by Hasbro. Well, sorry. No 3rd-party ecosystem, no support... the name "D&D" alone isn't enough.
In all honesty, can't they just make plenty of money off of campaign settings and miniatures? I don't really see the need to reset the rules every few years. You'd think they would have this shit down after 35+ years of D&D.
They evidently can't. Paizo on the other hand somehow managed to go from a little company that put out two magazines to what they are today, with their bread and butter being adventures.
A new line of licensed minis?
A new licensed comic book?
A new MMO video game?
Seems to me there's plenty of room for profit in add-ons without screwing with the core rules. Hopefully 5e is good, because more good is better than less good, but my groups have all been happily satisfied by Paizo's Pathfinder. All the good we can manage to play, and plenty filling my shelves that there isn't enough time to get to.
If someone want's to charge for it it is the exact same right. You don't need it that bad if you don't want to comply with the license to acquire some information - go make it yourself and release it if you want under your own terms.
It is their right. But it's not that simple. At the same time, content producers inundate the market with increasingly intrusive and expertly crafted advertisement. Basically, "we" are educated to want things we don't need, with ever-increasing force behind that education. This doesn't excuse piracy per se, but it does partially explain it. There are certainly many people who feel a very powerful want for crap they wouldn't naturally want.
Music choice, movie choices, even novels. We're told things are best-sellers, blockbusters, and hit wonders. We have cross-promotions, product placements, celebrity sponsorship, and the like.
It's no wonder that people reach out and obtain some things without paying for them. At least in some cases, it's because they're satisfying the itch embedded by advertising, not a natural want for a product. When you start becoming curious about some media because you "heard about it", you don't have a natural want.
Just another angle.
Every web browser as auto spell-check capabilities these days. So why should there be any misspellings on something that is managed strictly from a web interface?
Talent?
It's the classic causation/correlation disparity.
The real metric we need here is man-hours-of-driving-per-cell-phone-collision.
Compare that value to other common, acceptable activities. Values like "distractedness" are vague and tertiary measurements. I want to know that Big Mac eating while driving has a man-hours-per-collision of X while cell phone use while driving has a man-hours-per-collision of Y. If X is lower than Y then eating while driving is "safer".
Don't kid yourself. Man-centuries of cell phone use is going on every day during driving every day. It's inevitable there are going to be "crashed while texting" cases because the frequency of phone-in-hand is enormous. That doesn't prove causation.
I'm not saying it's not contributory. I'm saying that the degree of contribution may be dramatically different from what "we" think it is.
I'm dying to know... how do you get bruises on your arms and legs from driving your car into a dog?
Requirements to run Firefox and resources required to compile Firefox aren't the same thing at all. Your attempt to conflate the two suggests you're stupid and don't know what you're talking about.
I'd say it nicer but then I'd risk not hitting +5 Funny.
What's RIM got to do with your woes? Your carrier made a custom ROM image and loaded it on your phone. Shrug. You know... you could go ahead and load another carrier's ROM or any of a dozen hybrid custom ROMs on your phone. Either you get the functionality you're looking for or the carrier BLOCKS it.
Heaven forbid the guys responsible for maintaining the systems ask (a lot of) questions to learn what you want done and why, and to make sure existing and supported solutions have been considered.
I'm not saying the conversation you describe isn't IT being a bunch of jerks. But if you try just a little bit, it can also look remarkably like a bunch of guys who are responsible for a complicated environment trying to keep it from getting more complicated needlessly. Maybe the truth is somewhere in between.
I got "my laptop from home isn't working. I've got it in the car. Can you take a look at it?" I stopped going after that.
"Can I ask you a question?"
I love that. Because what I'm doing doesn't require any concentration. And because answering your the vague question involves four hours of "if... then" branching discussion of possibilities. Explaining what we do and why we do it the way we do it just frustrates people. They seriously want and expect us to tell them "oh, that's easy... go un-check the 'be a hunk of shit' option in Control Panel and you're home-free." I often use a car analogy. "An auto mechanic could rebuild your transmission but explaining to you at this party is probably not practical. Take your car to a garage."
Unless it really is simple, in which case I give them an answer.
How about a big collection of free music/ebooks/movies/art, etc? Maybe consider putting together a digital slideshow of photos and movies of family and friends, too.
I think you're by far the most insightful in the discussion so far. I have to think that generally speaking, software that is useful (to the recipient) and free (available to the recipient already) is likely to be owned by the recipient. Sending people Firefox or Foxit Reader or 7Zip is pointless because either the don't have any clue how to or why to use it, or they already do. Yes, a generalization, but I suspect that loading up a bunch of software is just going to waste the recipient's time, forcing them to delete it all. On the other hand, MEDIA might be cool. And the time spent checking out Creative Commons (and other sources of) music and so on rewards the sender too. Everyone wins.
Except for the little part where the LTO5 tape drive costs $5000 - $10,000?
If by "$5000 - $10,000" you mean "readily available for $3000 in an external SAS enclosure", then I suppose you're right.
Do you know how crazy that is? I have 1920x1080p resolution on my 17" laptop, and text gets insanely small. Now consider stripping 7 inches and reading that on a 10" screen. It'd be impossible! What they need is better scaling algorithms, not higher resolutions.
Disagree. I happily have been running in 1920x1200 on my 15" Dell for six years. By insanely small, I assume you mean "appropriate for people with healthy or corrected vision". Pixel-based screen real-estate is the number one feature I base purchasing decisions on for anything involving a display these days. All the other metrics are important but I don't see all those cores or Gig of flash memory. Low-res means time lost scrolling. Might as well get a good display and slower processor at that rate.
with those specs it should be able to play h.264 the only thing that would make it not play in that resolution is a virus, or counterfeit parts. or lack of codecs.
Lack of codecs it is. The only players that try to do this basically do software decoding instead of hardware-assisted decoding. Why? Because there isn't a Tegra 2 hardware codec for H.264 high-profile.
And ESR
And Penn Gillette (Jillete?) WTF it is spelled.
Let's see. It's spelled:
^T (new tab)
^K (focus in search bar)
penn teller[Enter]
^F4 (close tab)
So... 14 keystrokes, three of which are Ctrl-metakeys. Also known as "11 fewer keystrokes than not looking it up".
Jillette.
Incidentally, you could even live dangerously and skip the " teller" part of the search and the fifth Google result would still give you what you need.
Nope. She's posted about it elsewhere, but basically, she saved the video in order to blackmail him. Fast forward to a week ago, and he threatens to stop allowing her to borrow his Mercedes. So she posts the video in response. They're both horrible people: the judge for beating his daughter, and the girl for blackmailing him over it. If she wanted him punished, she had the chance. She didn't. She wanted money from him.
Devil's advocate... as the victim of physical abuse, why shouldn't she have a say what form her retaliation should take? Specifically, what makes her a horrible person just because she decided his abuse of her should have financial penalty that directly benefits her? Given she likely doesn't fear continued physical abuse and given he's not likely to physically abuse other people, imprisonment wouldn't be worthwhile. A nice steep fine, perhaps? With perhaps her as the beneficiary as the aggrieved party? Blackmail, sue... what's the difference in this case, except that this way is simpler for all parties involved and lawyers don't need to get rich parasitically?
would you even care?
Yes.
just trying to inform the likes of ya.
Inform away. So far you've got zero information content in either of your posts. Mine summarizes the known exploits and security topics. Yours don't. Feel free to drop the newsburger edgestuff at 11 nonsense and communicate with us. Drop down to the lesser language of English and educate me.
news at 11...big freaking deal...
You act like this is either unimportant or not news. I'm not sure which.
Fact is while there's a lot of FUD floating around regarding things like RIM "caving in" and dropping BIS servers in questionable countries, there haven't actually been very many actual real-life exploits for the phones or their communications. Blackberry phone remains the only ones on the market that encrypt all data traffic by default and that encryption can't be disabled. If you're on BIS or if you're on BES, your unencrypted web traffic, e-mail traffic (even POP3) is encrypted at the device. That's still worlds ahead of the other devices.
There's reports that one exploit exists that can decrypt Password Keeper data from a phone backup on a PC. There's this report that discusses recovery of phone unlock passwords. There's the widely discussed and misunderstood reports about RIM dropping BIS MDS servers in unfriendly countries and what that allows (hint: it has zero to do with Blackberries not in those countries).
RIM's stuff is by and large still very, very secure by any comparison and their phones are unique in that regard. So the way I see it, this is both news (being a genuine security hack) and relevant (these phones being the best on the market).
So stuff your ignorant sarcasm.
It's a new age, American children need to hit the ground running out of the womb in order to compete versus the vast numbers in China and India. We have to build better everything, and that includes kids. Now if only we are smart enough not to hold these kids back as they blossom and grow under the tutelage of our machine friends. Get with the times Grandpa.
Really? You think an iPad will give Western children the competitive edge they need? Here's a free clue:
Indian and Chinese students have one deadly advantage: motivation.
Basically, Western kids can aspire to being mediocre at everything they do, knowing full well that they will thereby enough income to live comfortably well-off for their entire lives. Chinese and Indian kids know that if they aren't amongst a very small percentage of the best of their cadre, they will earn poverty.
Western kids don't need to be taught how to multi-touch gesture-smear on an $800 doo-dad. They need someone to motivate them to compete. Angry Birds and fart apps won't help with that.