Re: if media companies could turn back time...

They'd also try to charge you extra for listening to music on black loudspeakers as well as wood-grained ones, or indeed for listening in the kitchen as well as the lounge.

Not for me

My local sorting office is on a busy road with no parking available. That makes picking up bulky items really quite problematic.

Turn it round

Windows does make it fairly easy to turn your monitor through 90 degrees, if your hardware will cope. Then on a 9:16 screen, you need something to fill the vertical space, because A4 isn't 9:16, so the ribbon makes eminently good sense there.

Editing documents on a portrait-format screen is rather good.

"Informed Consent" is a bonkers standard in this context

"Informed Consent" is a totally inappropriate standard to apply here anyway.

It comes from the world of medicine, where the surgeon has to make sure you understand the implications of that vasectomy before relying on your signature as permission to apply the scalpel to your goolies.

We don't apply anything like as high a standard in other walks of life: that mortgage you signed up for is a weight around your neck, whether or not you understood how compound interest works. With a few restrictions around 'unfair contract terms' etc., caveat emptor applies.

Informed consent is just the wrong standard in this case (even 'click the box' consent is a bit strong, for the reasons others have pointed out).

Apps and Support

You're right: if the device does exactly what you need, out of the box, then it's fine.

However, sooner or later you will want to install different software - new apps, for example. And those apps will not be available for that device.

Worse, we have come to expect bug fixes - for security if nothing else - and these will not be available for an unsupported device. Of course, few hackers will be investigating vulnerabilities in WebOS - except perhaps disgruntled purchasers - so you may survive through obscurity. But immediate obsolescence is never a good thing.

@Giles Jones: missing the point

If the reviewer had made that point, it would have enhanced the article. To overlook such an issue entirely in this comparison just misses the point.

AFAIK, the HP offering has even fewer tablet applications than Andriod, so the point stands. The more interesting question is which platform is likely to get more, sooner, and how long HP will carry this product if it doesn't rapidly gain enough market share to make the platform attractive to developers. As long as it's in third place behind iOS and Android, the beauty contest won't look pretty.

Open up the DNS

Seriously, there's no reason why there has to be just one. Start your own, get a few ISPs on board, offer plebs instructions on how to start using it, and bob's your uncle. Now you can define your own TLD policy, and peer with the 'mainstream' DNS whenever you wish. Or, make client software which uses its own resolver implementation.

I'm kind-of surprised that Google, Apple, and Microsoft haven't already done this. A tick-box in the browser config to say 'use Google-DNS' is all that it would take to divert most users' queries most of the time. There's no reason why ICANN has to be a monopoly provider for name resolution.

Not good... but not that bad

You're with the wrong carrier, then.

poorly projects

In my defence, poorly could be an adjective as well as an adverb, especially where Government projects are concerned. Making clear that it qualifies the following adjective doesn't seem so unreasonable to me. So 'tis a grammatical slip to be sure, but from the best of motives, and without introducing additional ambiguity (which is, surely, the point of grammar).

That's not what he said at all

Security is about risk management. The biggest threat to you from eavesdropping arises on the local segment, particularly when that is wireless. Encrypting that segment reduces the threat: no one claimed it eliminated it altogether.

That's all very well

I take as my starting point that vendors can write more-or-less whatever they like in their licence terms, and the buyers can take it or leave it.

But the situation is a mess: if you're old-fashioned enough to buy a CD or a DVD, most of what you're paying for is the licence to the content, and yet you get to treat it like a 'thing' which you can re-sell. Why is a CD containing a digitized warbling of some pop star logically different from a CD containing the digitized rambling of some programmer?

LOL @ missing the point

It's the rest of the moderate right that are upset. Call the EDL whatever you like: just don't imply that the Tories (etc.) are 'EDL-lite'.

If you're referring to me, I resent that

I'm no apologist for those people. I'd go a long way to avoid an EDL demo.

The left/right labels are near meaningless, but the casual use of the label "far right" has every potential to smear the moderate right - to a much greater extent than the label "far left" smears the moderate left.

Knee-jerk reactions and trite labels have the danger of over-simplifying the argument. That is my sole point. It's convenient to pigeon-hole people, but doing so carelessly carries the danger that you fail to understand what's really going on, and get overwhelmed by events.

No

And nor do I want to. But the politics of the right have to do with free-market capitalism.

The EDL have nothing to do with that, and associating them with it is nothing but a smear.

*thinks*

Well, there's an uncommonly thoughtful response in a sea of knee-jerk reactions.

Censorship is bad. Breaking the internet's design is bad (where do the net-neutrality folks stand on the filtering out of porn-providers' content?).

Promoting standards which add meta-data to content so that a client-side filter can stop me and mine seeing things I don't care for, is good.

touché

Fair point.

But certain parts of the media *do* like a hue and cry these days, and do tend to instil fear in the innocent as well as the guilty.

You have an over-active imagination

I'm not one to roll over and let the state - or the police force - do whatever it wishes, but, really, of all the things to worry about ... the obstacles to making this a practical reality are really quite great.