Guesses

Since the top left icon has what looks like switches on it, I'm going to guess it's for "settings".

The top right icon has rectangles that look like the iPhone itself, but in different colors. So that's likely to be "personalization".

The bottom left icon seems to be a sort of color wheel, so it may have to do with choosing colors too, even though that ought to be covered in "personalization".

But you're absolutely right that people shouldn't have to guess like that; instead, there should be legends under the icons so that people know what they're doing.

Odd

Why did they have to spend money hiring a consultant for assistance? Couldn't they just pick up the phone and dial the police, who presumably would then immediately remove and arrest the trespassers?

The Innovation We Need Is Already Here

We already know how to produce just about as much energy as we want without carbon emissions. But we're not in the process of building nuclear power plants to replace all the fossil-fuel electrical power plants in service. Compared to that, ingenuity in finding ways to be more energy-efficient will only have a small effect.

Economics

If gasoline were more heavily taxed, then the economic advantages of electric cars would win...well, that's true enough, but that's hardly an inherent economic advantage of the electric car. Government intervention, such as taxes, is what makes things happen in defiance of the laws of economics.

However, taxes that compensate for externalities are legitimate. Whether on putting carbon into the atmosphere by burning gasoline, or by burning coal, oil, or natural gas to generate electricity.

So, first, all the electric power generating capacity that isn't hydro or nuclear needs to be switched over, presumably to nuclear. Then we can start worrying about electric cars.

Talent Pool

Well, this gives Samsung the opportunity to hire unemployed experts in mobile phone design from Nokia, since it is closing things down there... so I think it's wonderful this opportunity is being provided.

Likely Outcome?

I suppose it all depends on whether the customer has a choice. If they can get new video games running on a platform with up-to-date technology from a competitor that doesn't do this, then, except for a few to whom this issue doesn't matter, and who prefer the Xbox, Microsoft's new console will find few takers.

But if Nintendo and Sony decide to do the same thing, the consumer is likely to just accept the change as inevitable.

That bullet-proof?

I would think that if the lives of police informants are put in jeopardy, no site is bullet-proof - the principals for that site would be headed straight to jail in almost any country in the world. Possibly after regime change, even.

The Obvious Solution

It's really simple. Guantanamo would no longer be needed if the American justice system could be fixed, so that while the rights of the accused are safeguarded, people who can clearly be proven to have committed serious crimes will not - ever - be turned loose because of technicalities irrelevant to their actual guilt or innocence.

If you rape, if you murder, you will pay the penalty - and if some police officer along the way made a mistake, he may face charges, but that's not going to lead to your victim being denied his or her right to justice.

Once that is done, Guantanamo won't be needed. Until then, as terrorists can cause too many deaths with one blow, we can't chance their being turned loose by a legal system which has lost touch with common sense, reality, and public safety.

Back to the Drawing Board

The six year old was the intended operator of the gun in question, so putting a chip in it so that only he could fire it would not have saved his four year old sister.

However, keeping guns out of the hands of poor people, or people who have no officially declared taxable income (so if they're not poor, they must be dealing drugs or something) would indeed significantly reduce crime. So this isn't as utterly loony an idea as it may seem to some, even if it has potential problems - such as it not being impossible to remove the technology from stolen guns to let them fire again.

Movie and Book

Had everyone in the world only read Harry Harrison's "Make Room, Make Room", a science-fiction novel in which Soylent Green was made from soybeans and lentils, as one might expect, there would be no problem.

Given the movie, however, this is obviously a joke of the April Fool's variety.

I'm Pleased

With Windows Vista, users had to buy Windows 7; here, the UI changes that give the users back the convenience of the Start menu are a free-of-charge update to Windows 8. This is a good thing. That the new features of Windows 8 will still be present is all right, now that they will no longer get in the way.

I'm willing to be reasonable, now that I've heard the good news that Microsoft is being reasonable for its part.

Nutritional

Well, it may not be sound to reject eating insects from a nutritional point of view. But what about the fact that they're generally rather unsanitary creatures? After all, they're so small, they pretty well have to be eaten whole.

Two-tier Web

With a standard, you have a two tier web - one tier for free content, accessible from open-source software, and another tier for paid content, accessible only from browsers made by major companies that are allowed to sign NDAs for the DRM secrets.

Without a standard, there is one web - except for those seeking DRM, who are consigned to the outer darkness of having to make up their own software and do without interoperability.

I'm not sure that such a standard will actually be all that bad, but I certainly can see why it is being objected to, as it at least appears to threaten making open-source browsers second-class.

Why

Well, before the Turks came, the Holy Land belonged to the Arabs. But the Turks invaded and conquered it. They let the Arabs live there, but now they had to pay rent on the land they once owned. And then the Turks sold some of that land to the Jews, throwing Arabs off their farms. So that won't made for good relations.

But after that, for which one would think the Turks, not the Jews, were to blame, what was the story?

Before 1948, Arabs rioted doing violence to Jews. So the UN partitioned Palestine, creating the State of Israel.

After 1948, the surrounding Arab nations invaded Israel, trying to drive it into the sea. So the Israelis defended themselves, and wound up with borders considerably larger than those of the partition.

In 1967, with weapons purchased from behind the Iron Curtain, Egypt built up a massive military machine with the aim to be in a position to wipe Israel off the map. Israel reacted to prevent such a fatal blow from being struck, and gained control of the Sinai and the West Bank.

And then, first there were the suicide bombers - and only then came the wall around the Palestinians.

The Israelis were criticized for the blockade around the Gaza Strip - and yet it wasn't tight enough to prevent Hamas from shooting a large quantity of missiles from there recently.

So it seems obvious that the territorial gains of Israel, or the worsenings of the conditions of the Palestinians, are all the consequences of violent attacks on Israel. Seems like the Arab world could learn to cut its losses? Maybe many people there would - but the few who endanger our lives decide what we have to do to protect ourselves.

After September 11, 2001, I certainly have little patience with the discrimination against non-Muslims in places like Egypt and Pakistan. People who think that is the natural order of things won't understand that Jews have the right to refuse to live like black people did under segregation - and thus they'll think God will stand by them in the effort to put the Israelis back under Islamic rule.

Yes, many innocent Palestinians are suffering from injustice, but in general, the idea that Israel is bad and their foes are good seems to me to be an obvious moral inversion.

Lanthanum oxide

Lanthanum oxide doesn't make glass more transparent. But it does allow the production of glasses with high refractive index and low dispersion, which are desirable characteristics for designing lenses which produce good images (the lens doesn't split the colors as much, so it doesn't need as thick a flint correcting element, and the lens doesn't need to be as thick itself to bend the light for a given focal length). High-quality astronomical eyepieces, therefore, often use elements which contain that material.

Birefringent

It's a pity that sapphire's birefringent. It has a high refractive index, but low dispersion, so it would otherwise be an ideal material for lenses.

Indeed

Atoms change energy levels when electrons descend from one shell to another. This is what happens when fluorescent lamps or neon lights shine. If radioactive decay took place, the watch would run out of gas eventually as the gas changed to another element, or at least another isotope.

After seeing so many watches that set themselves via short-wave time signals, I was waiting for a watch like this to go beyond quartz. Too bad it's so expensive. Hope that a cheaper, slightly less accurate, but more stable, rubidium version comes out soon.

Good Idea

Given that Windows 8 alienated many by imitating a tablet interface, if OS X goes after desktop power users instead, it will be offering an attractive alternative, and could gain a few new customers. Unfortunately, though, there really isn't anything out there - OS X or Linux - that's really ready to replace Windows for most people, who instead will feel they have no choice but to suffer with whatever Microsoft does.

Question

Although it's an old site, are you quite sure it doesn't work with a current version of Firefox?

Of course, they should have designed it to work on Mosaic - then it would work on any browser, not using any special browser features.

What Concerns Me

If a conviction is achieved, will all of those who have incurred out of pocket expenses as a result of this unlawful activity be able to recover their expenses from him?

Terrible Mistake

The PC business was so price-competitive, IBM risked compromising its reputation for quality by staying there. In the case of servers, X86 benefits from the large desktop market bringing down prices - whereas the PowerPC and the z/Architecture platforms do not. So it would be a huge mistake to be left only with non-competitive entries in the server market; a niche premium-price market will in time shrink, even if it's profitable for the moment.

Instead, IBM should be looking at the declining PC market and the surging laptop market, and the demand for energy efficiency, and it should add a lineup of ARM servers to its offerings sometime in the near future. It doesn't have to be the first - in fact, some other companies are already doing it - but when the ARM server makes sense, IBM should be there.

Puzzled

From the headline, I thought maybe IBM was going to fire those of its engineers who aren't able to change the laws of physics. IBM invented the hard disk and set the standards for magnetic tape for a long time; and twice it's been responsible for significant innovations in PC hard disk density.

But this isn't about their cutting-edge activity; it's about routine disk servers, and for that, of course the cheapest adequate product will win for most customers, even if IBM's traditional reputation for and emphasis on reliability keeps a loyal customer base.

If I were IBM, I'd be content with that niche rather than damage the brand by trying to compete in the cut-price market, especially given IBM's exit from the PC field. The alternative will leave those seeking high-reliability storage with no place to go. But, on the other hand, neither IBM nor any other company should ever be content with selling product not much better than the next fellow's at inflated prices, so a critical examination of their server line-up is not a bad thing - as long as it has a sensible plan behind it.

Lifetime

But flash memory has a strictly limited lifetime in write cycles. So, while it's fast, there are a lot of applications for which it is not well-suited.

Another Target

Since Oracle in the end lost the case, the fact that it offered to settle should be irrelevant; it is at fault, no court case would have existed had it behaved rightly. The only other party at fault is the employee who was the actual harasser. An offer to settle that leaves the plaintiff out of pocket can hardly be called compensatory, and hence the plaintiff should not be penalized for being unreasonable and needlessly burdening the legal system.

Aluminum and Heavy Water

Why can't they just locate their facilities in places like Norway or Colorado or Ontario where the power comes from hydroelectricity? That way, it would be cheaper as well as environmentally virtuous - or at least carbon-free.

Legendary Car

I think we've finally found the next Batmobile.

Weather

This is Iran, where they banned weather forecasts on the TV, because only God can see the future. So it is the last place I would have expected a story like this to come from. Russia is full of silly-season stories like this, on the other hand.

Fuels

I thought the V2 ran on hydrogen peroxide and kerosene - not liquid hydrogen for oxidizer, and certainly not ethanol diluted with water as fuel. Some people might seem to use that latter substance as fuel... but there's no need to dilute ethanol with water for safety reasons when using it as fuel.

They may have left some water in with the hydrogen peroxide, though, even if what they used was stronger than hair bleach.

Sounds Familiar

They used to be a Norwegian company that made tape recorders. Now, apparently, they were bought by Cisco, and their products deal in data storage.

Good News?

Maybe this will be the start of a new era in computing. Perhaps South Korea will abandon SEED, and even develop its own highly secure operating system to finally put an end to all the shenanigans on the Internet.

Amstrad PPC 640

I think that the Amstrad PPC 640 deserves an honorable mention here, looking like something out of Space: 1999.

Valkyries

And here I thought it was well settled that Tolkien drew his inspiration from the Ring of the Nibelungs. Still, having seen an actual artifact, with a curse on it, yet, would have affected him, even if the one in the Nibelungenlied made from Rhinegeld is a bit closer in details, it (the Roman artifact) might have helped to decide him on using that other source of inspiration.

I Was Wondering

Knowing the meaning of "NSFW", and not being aware that there was a Unix process by that name, I wondered about this, but not very strongly... it really didn't occur to me that this could have been an April Fool's joke, not being crafted to be obvious enough not to cause harmful confusion.

Amiga 500

I'm just amused that the headline for the article was illustrated by a picture of a really old computer, an Amiga 500.

I'm Not Surprised

As SPARC chips had RAS features, competing head-on with IBM in providing their own hardware for the Oracle database seemed like the obvious reason for buying Sun - the only one with synergy to their core business.

Now that Intel has the RAS features originally confined to the orphan Itanium available on some x86 Xeons, though, which was announced shortly after the Sun purchase, I felt that the purchase was a waste of money - Oracle could have done just as well to compete with IBM with commodity mainframes, and that would avoid vendor lock-in fears by customers as well.

But since Oracle now owns Sun, it needs Sun to succeed and be profitable too, so as not to have lost money. So putting Oracle on SPARC helps to do that.

I think that Oracle faces great challenges - and so does IBM, since, at least on the zSeries machines, it's trying to do the same thing as Apple - use their popular software to charge premium prices for hardware. That's difficult to keep up for long when other people know how to build and program computers.