Some will say that Apple's iPad is the be-all and the end-all of portable computing. I say nay.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Apple. But look at the history. Datapads are not a new idea - Alan Kay's DynaBook and Mark Weiser's ideas of Ubiquitous Computing - both from the 1980's, with Weiser explicitly using the term Pad - predate the iPad by almost three decades. As much as I generally dislike Microsoft, their push for the "Tablet PC" probably led to some advances in hardware. Amazon's Kindle and Sony's reader both pushed hardware makers to build better screens and raised the bar on users' expectations.

And one important thing that Weiser advocated in the 1980's is still missing (full disclosure: I admit to being in the field long enough to have read his papers when they were originally published). In Weiser's world you could just slide a task you were working on from a handheld pad to a wall-sized whiteboard or to a wristwatch-sized device for storage, and things like active TCP/IP connections would automatically move onto the new computing platform. While you may be able to drag a project from a Mac OS application to a USB stick for storage, this is a far cry from having running applications movable from one computing device to another. People are indeed working on this problem, but a general solution is not yet at hand, as far as I know. It's not something you can buy today from Redmond or from Cupertino, at any rate.

Until this happens, our computers will remain isolated islands in the stream. Even if they are iPads.

After a very long and uncomfortable silence, Oracle, having passed the last(?) regulatory hurdle to their acquisition of Sun Microsystems, today announced that the JavaOne conference will in fact go ahead - this year. It will be co-located, but not merged, with Oracle OpenWorld; this year's dates are September 19-23 in San Francisco. That means there is still time for the refereed-paper approach that has been used in past JavaOnes. Partly since Moscone cannot hold all the attendees who would take part in both programs, and partly to reinforce the fact that it's not merged, JavaOne will be held in three hotels near Moscone (the huge keynotes will however be held in Moscone). I was heartened to hear Justin Kestylin of Oracle say that they want to "maintain the soul of JavaOne." We shall of course be watching to see how well they do at that.

JavaOne will also be going on the road: the "Sun Tech Days" program will be replaced by regional JavaOne conferences; the initial locations over the next year will be China, India, Russia and Brazil.

There is an FAQ coming within the next day on Oracle Developer Network. The following programs will be preserved: java.net, java.sun.com, Java Community Process, and others.

Watch otn.oracle.com for the FAQ - I'll update this with the link once it's available.

Here we go again:

1. FBI fabricated "terror emergencies" to justify illegal monitoring of phone calls
2. Bruce Schnier reveals how U.S. demands for monitoring capabilities lead to the Chinese(?) hackers hacking Google
3. ACTA, who taketh away the rights of the world
4. The trial of Peter Zengel
5. Case-maker Shuttle provides standard format for interchangeable laptop components, long overdue!
6. Google Nexus One review, not for the Nexus info but for the thoughts about the review process!

According to a BBC report on the latest security theatre, airline customers are now to be subject to the following indignities for in-flight entertainment:

• Customers to remain seated during final hour of flight;
• No access to hand luggage and a ban on leaving possessions or blankets on laps during this hour.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't find this very comforting. The thought of being forced to sit still is inculcated in obedient citizens from kindergarten (a German word meaning roughly "vegetable garden to grow kids"). But at a certain point things like bladder pressure will win out. And what happens if you're in mid-whiz at the one-hour mark? Do you get shot by the air marshall while trying to return to your seat? (Watch the news for this one, folks). The entire process is utterly ridiculous. If the bomber had tried to light his fuse at the 45 minute mark into the flight, who can doubt that they'd ban visiting the toilet between 37 and 52 minutes after takeoff?

Remember the shoe bomber and how airport security made everybody take their shoes off before flight? Didn't stop the next religious fanatic with a fuse to light, did it?

The notion of an allegedly civilized nation dancing its "security" policies in the wind every time there's a real or perceived threat, to so vastly inconvenience its population while at the same time making no difference to the actual terrorists, is so laughable it's earned the term "security theater" - putting on a big show, but doing nothing for actual security.

It's not just me saying so. See Bruce Schnier's many writings on this topic, and his essay The Psychology of Security. Bruce is a well-known cryptology and security researcher; he knows whereof he speaks. TSA, not so much.

This article has been withdrawn from the blog; a revised version of it is hopefully going to be published on a commercial web site this month.