CalmQuiet

Since the details on his "credit card replacement" were sparse, what caught my eye as more disturbing was:

>Addressing "creepy comments": Schmidt laughed off questions about recent comments he made about Google "knowing where you live and what you do." His take: "In the new world, you have to label jokes."

I'd like to be laughing about that, but just can't quite.

Moodle is OSS. Why not get involved and contribute there?

And Gizmo claims that Frank Shaw at MS says:

"At any given time, we're looking at new ideas, investigating, testing, incubating them. It's in our DNA to develop new form factors and natural user interfaces to foster productivity and creativity. The Courier project is an example of this type of effort. It will be evaluated for use in future offerings, but we have no plans to build such a device at this time."

> based on income and assets

In other words, "Sure, you can leave. Just send us a chunk of yourself... even if you made it on foreign soil and using foreign resources."

>> A bit more sleuthing reveals several "webkit" (the foundation of the iPad's and iPhone's mobile Safari browser) calls after peeling open the CSS

Now that I web-surf with Click-to-Flash installed, I am really struck by how many landing pages depend on Flash-based content all over them: from key corporate info to (of course) ads: a situation that I find most depressing.

Perhaps the iPad will provide the extra boost that HTML5 video has been needing?

You could say this is bad news for developers... or good news... if more jobs are created by news sources wanting to court the iPad crowd.

But in the larger scheme, if this trend continues, it could bring a tipping point where major sites start to look for non-proprietary development platforms other than Flash. None too soon for this consumer.

Seems more likely than that they would hack themselves.

Actually, I appreciate having the comments available on TC - so that perceptive readers can occasionally take them down a peg or two.

Critique Steve what you will. Point out iPad's lacking features what you will... The point to learn from decades of digital naysayers who proved clueless is:

Predicting how people will use (and how many will buy) is not as easy as it looks. No where as easy as Monday morning quarterbacking. And Apple/Steve certainly have no 100% track record. But they have batted >.500 - in a ballgame (CE & PCs) where batting >.300 is impressive.

True, sadly. Headline-writing seems to be its own domain - and one charged primarily to be effective baiters (i.e., marketing specialists).

So those who care enough about the impact of news-reporting have to develop some of the same (marketing) skills. The OP here seems to have done a good job with it (i.e., "Damning verdict...")

Similarly, for a truth-supporting effect, "Obama is not a Muslim" might have to be rewritten something like, "Media distortions conceal Obama's Christianity" - but rather more clever than I can pen.

Maybe there is need to develop means/skills for it to work in more jobs. As Pascal hyperbolized:

"All human evil comes from a single cause, man's inability to sit still in a room. "

[If not all human evil... at least we can now append: "burden of transportation infrastructure + CO(2)."]