This sounded really cool about 10 years ago, but what real appeal does this have over laptop+tablet? What are the use cases where this kind of flexibility actually matters?
If I'm using a tablet I'm either on the road or at home - I never see a case for doing "tablet" style stuff at work. Considering "Thinkpad" is an enterprise brand, what need does this fill other than fulfilling Microsoft's desire to turn their Windows userbase into a tablet userbase?
I'll leave aside the fact that almost no one wants Windows8 for it's Metro interface (as witnessed by the Surface RT's spectacular sales failure).
Would be nice if our culture just became weary of entertainment cartel offerings, and people could once again take up more productive pastimes: making things, group outings and sports, exercise, hobbies...anything besides sitting on butts and watching brain numbing nonsense (yes, I'm as guilty as anyone)
Sad thing is, it doesn't have to be an XOR function between the two sets of activities. What really sucks is that a large part of our cultural output is seen as entirely entertainment oriented. Perhaps what we're seeing is that the upcoming younger generations see this and come to our same conclusions - and thus the disappointing flops.
Maybe instead of trying to artificially create the memes and hashtags on the social networks, Hollywood ought to listen to what's being said and take that for inspiration? I guess that's just really much more effort than rehashing the same damn blockbuster formula over and over again.
In other news, the economy aint doing so swell either - and my Netflix queue is quite long...
No moreso than a police officer firing at an American citizen, so long as the American citizen fired first.
To be fair, you'd have to demonstrate the drone was in danger of actually being shot down or that someone else's life was in danger from the act of firing into the air. But that wouldn't be too hard if you're in a populated area firing at the sky, because there's a small but significant chance that bullet's going to land on somebody.
Disagree. Police officers are humans. Humans have judgement. Drones are unmanned. No danger of human life being ended when someone fires on a drone (just cost/damage). If such a device retaliates on humans, it will appear unjustified and inhumane. The proper way of handling this would be to camera ID the shooter and bring them up on charges of property destruction. Armed drone retaliation will be deeply unpopular.
Guests wear pins that automatically adjust temperature, music, and lighting based on guest's preferences upon entering a room.
Excuse me, but that's just ridiculous and gaudy. Clearly a gimmick intended to impress the bigwigs he hosts. Home automation to me means optimizing home features to improve comfort. Having a guests music follow them around the house is just creepy.
e.g.: automatic blinds/shutters that, combined with lighting automation can vary the rooms lighting intensity and color temperature either based on a heuristic (ie, maximal temperature color possible up to a given value) or mood preference.
e.g.,redux: automatic windows and whole house fan integrated with heating and air conditioning and humidifiers to guarantee overall and local temperature settings with an eye to maximizing comfort by adjusting proper appropriate flow of warm/cold/fresh air. Also let me switch between them with a simple control as opposed to me walking around the house opening windows (or forgetting to close them) so I can get fresh air.
The way I read it (yes, I read the article) is that they put a marker of some kind into the chemical brew being slugged into the ground, and found no sign of that marker in ground water. Now obviously there are still questions to be raised, but still, in and of itself, this seems a pretty reasonable way to determine groundwater contamination.
How is that even reasonable? Why not measure the actual contaminants and check elevation levels?
Here's a question that immediately comes up for me: What if the markers have different rock/soil permeability compared to the chemicals used in fracking? Are those markers closely enough in characteristics to the chemicals used as to be valid for purposes of testing exposure/pollution?
How about another one - why is the DoE doing this test as opposed to the EPA (who are likely more versed in measuring pullution)?
Not testing the presence of the actual chemicals/pollutants doesn't pass the sniff test for me. Something stinks here.
"nearly free" = "hidden from the uncurious customer." Apple customers pay for the whole experience - from rounded corners to the hardware to the OS to the online services.
It's a non-product. You can't "buy" iOS - it's a consequence of you buying an Apple product. A market that Microsoft not only can't compete in (demonstrably from Windows RT's complete adoption failure), but also a market that they simply don't comprehend. I literally see Ballmer scratching his head when he wonders about how Apple profits from it.
It seems to me that there's nothing _wrong_ with Windows RT - if they had got there first, it may well have been adopted in the same way as the iPad.
Apple had trodden the hard path for 15 years before the iPad ever hit the shelves on the Apple Store. While Microsoft was busy soaking up all the enterprises and small businesses leveraging their Office monopoly into a desktop OS monopoly and then into a sizeable portion of the backoffice/server markets, Apple focused on mobile and consumer market. First the (failed) Newton, then later on with the iPod, iTunes, retail Apple Stores to bypass retail channel cock-blockers, then iPhone, App Store, and finally the iPad. Apple fucking makes their bread and butter on this shit. All these steps are ones that organically grew a company designed to support and promote the iPad to make it successful.
Microsoft ignored that vision and business model for years until they realized it could threaten their profits and could endanger the PC market. So they created a Windows Phone that didn't quite catch on, and Microsoft Stores that primarily showed off their Xbox and Kinect, Now they think that their cargo-cult mimicking of Apple's look and feel (hey that worked once before) will help them steal Apple's market?
Meanwhile Android is busy soaking up the entire lower-end of the market (mainly with the cheap Chinese hardware), leaving no breathing room for anything non-Apple, non-Google based, and is encroaching on Apple's turf as well. Microsoft should be far more concerned about Google's moves - Android tablets and Chromebooks will cripple or replace the PC market long before Apple encroaches on that turf. Perhaps the best move now would be for Microsoft to co-opt Android like Amazon did. Kindle Fire seems to be doing ok (say compared to the Surface RT).
That's a good point - can the iPad's 300% price premium be justified over a Chinese Jelly Bean tablet by some criteria?
There are about a hundred reasons why schools would prefer iPads over cheap chinese android pads. The number one reason being that iPads are promoted, supported, secured and have a major company backing them... not to mention the bigger app-store available.
Your cheap imported droid-pads do not have this option. If you're willing to do *all* the support, security and customization required (how many school IT shops have this time and flexibility in their roles?) then it might make sense to not take advantage of what you get when you're going with a known quantity.
It's not like "300%" premium (debatable that it's so high for equivalent hardware) gets you nothing.
Shoot at these things enough and they will get equipped to shoot back. And their aim's a lot better.
An armed drone firing at an american citizen on american soil might be a PR bigger victory for the anti-drone libertarians than taking down the drone itself. Of course, I'm not sure I'd want to be the one to get precedented.
Do you really think that Google is going to be fetching your phone backups, hoping for a wireless password, then driving to your house and connecting to your wifi so that they can... sniff your traffic? Impersonate you on the internet?
Whether or not someone thinks they want to, the question I have is that if you're running a Google O/S, with a good chunk of your stuff available using Google software via Google products, why in the world would Google ever need your wifi password to access your wifi network?
If Google wants to fuck over an Android user (and I'd bet that even Kindle users aren't 100% immune), they almost certainly can. It might be via internally-identified Chrome exploits or something, but I have no doubt they could come up with something.
They are probably unlikely to maliciously use this information. BUT IT EXISTS - and the NSA can ask for it - or a very determined intrusion team could get at it - all of it.
It's like a company that stores your CC information in plaintext on their servers - not a sign of maliciousness, but stupidity that someone could leverage to their own gain and your loss.
You know there's PCI compliance requirements that punish and fine companies for doing shit like that. There should be something similar for personal actionable information like SSNs and WiFi passwords.
This only works for Jailbroken devices. AFAIK, iOS6.1.3+ is not capable of jailbreak. How are you going to get the keys from my iOS devices running iOS6.1.3?
Strangely missing from the summary is the fact that this only affects Android devices, as far as I read in the article. While most phones allow you to easily "show" aka decrypt and view your wifi password for a network you hopped in ages ago, I happen to know that all desktops and laptops with Windows XP-7 do the same. They're also easily recoverable by third party instant decrypts too. So if you think plaintext or reversible encryption storage of passwords is the problem, that's all devices everywhere, with or without Google. The problem is Google actually having your password.
Untrue. Apple's Keychain encrypts it with your login password. So on-disk it's encrypted appropriately, and in-memory it's locked as soon as you lock your computer. You also get this behavior with ssh-agent which is one thing that makes OSX better than most linux distros.
The Dev in question happens to work for a competing phone manufacturer
The developer's name is Rémi Denis-Courmont [1], and while he's the lead developer for the VLC app, also worked for Nokia at the time, and thus the conflict of interest in his revocation of VLC iOS app.
How is the Watergate break-in worse than bugging the campaign office of Mitch McConnell? How is creating an "enemies list" worse than targeting your enemies through the IRS, the EPA, and other federal agencies, and have the NSA spy on them and on reporters?
That's a whole lot of assertions where [cite needed]. Got links from non-partisan sources?
"...Franz von Holzhausen, can barely contain himself as he talks about the design of the Model S. “It’s like the leap of faith Apple (AAPL) took with the iPhone,” he says, explaining why the car has a touchscreen instead of the usual physical buttons."
This is monumentally wrong. Touch screens succeed on a phone because a phone is a portable device and the touch screen is lighter and smaller. Physical controls are preferable for humans because they model the physical world to which we've adapted. In a car, you need to use the controls without taking your eyes off the road. This means location by feel is important. A touch screen can't provide that.
It seems the entire design world has this backwards, include appliance manufacturers. I hate the buttons on my oven.
Both you and the article are wrong - the Prius had touchscreens in their cars 10 years ago. It works because the location is fixed, you don't have tons of apps, and the interfaces you know have button positions that are invariant, giving you muscle memory though not haptic feedback (mine beeps).
What's nice is that there isn't useless chrome - you can fit dozens of control interfaces in a 7" screen (on the Prius), and not have the driver's seat look like a airplane cockpit.
Signed PDFs can be read in any reader, but the signature will be still validated (if the reader is not defective.) Encrypted PDFs will not be even readable if they are not encrypted to you. Password-protected PDFs may require the password to be readable, let alone printable or changeable.
In other words, PDFs are not designed for wanton modification. Some of them can be modified, but others cannot. This means that you cannot build a reliable method for converting suspect PDFs into safe PDFs.
Encrypted PDFs can be broken, quite quickly - a quick search pulled up some tools - one of which I had to use a while back for work [1]. I decrypted about 40k documents in less than a day with GuaPDF, with only about 300 or so that couldn't be cracked - 99% success rate. Combine with the JS detection method noted in another comment [2], and you can still tell if there's a dangerous PDF most of the time.
If you need to protect your populace (i.e., at the mail server level), combining the two above and either blocking (with a "see IT" note) or warning users for uncrackable/JS-detected pdfs sounds like a good win. Especially since cracking is almost instantaneous.
The book you want is Huxley's Brave New World. Instead of overlords controlling people through power and domination, people allow themselves to be controlled in exchange for the pleasantries of modern life - sex, entertainment, and other trivialities. As long as they get as much of those as they want, they don't give a damn what else is going on in society or who is controlling it. As the saying goes, you attract more flies with honey...
Another good take is the role-playing game Paranoia - which made the surveillance state amusing (and insane) [1]. In addition to big brother, brave new world-ish mandatory uppers and downers combined with a Kafka-like maze of rules that can never all be respected - you are forced to betray, backstab, lie and cheat faster/better than the other players.
This, along with games like Diplomacy [2], should be mandatory for all 10y+ kids so they can become accustomed to shit that others will pull on them with more real-world painful consequences.
No matter how eloquent it is, Java(ECMA)Script still blows.
Laugh (or cry) all you want - it's taken over the web, and will take over the world. EMCAScript is getting better every year, it's got functional features, prototyping a la Self, is extensible as hell and has the most deployed interpreters/VMs (and JITs) in the world. With NodeJS and BackboneJS it's going to take a chunk out of server-side programming as well.
Yeah, JS is shit, just like HTML. It's also the lingua-franca of the modern web (along with HTML, of course) and it's growing faster than C or Java (leave alone C# or ObjectiveC)
Though I may sympathize with Sarah's viewpoint, I think that it's counter-productive to antagonize (whether justtfied or not) the founder/leader of the largest open source project (equivalent to CEO of Fortune50 company). Instead the better move would be to appeal to the benefits of changing the culture, and attempting to play to the founder's strengths and beliefs to empahsize and lend validity to your point. e.g: "For a better, more productive environment, we should avoid verbal put-downs and taunts, as this would improve cooperation and involvement"
When I try to do this - sometimes I find myself talking myself out of what I was about to say - because I find a rationale for the undesirable conditions that I can't accommodate with my idea, e.g.: "Linus doesn't have time to be worry about being nice without sacrificing timeliness, efficiency and efficacy".
Of course, framing your argument with the neutral point of view doesn't make waves or make the/. frontpage.
It's like the war against government watch groups - the idea that by limiting what the government does (and increasingly the crony corporations that have cropped up to help it expend it's reach) - not fighting, but just calling out and limiting it, you are an enemy of the state and you need to be removed.
Exploits are bought/discovered and kept as armaments to be used on industrial/state espionage, and also for internal clandestine operations. So clearly anyone "invalidating" one by disclosing it is restricting the power of the government.
Slashdot Mirror
Having one device tends to be more convenient and often cheaper.
Not in this case - $1800 is more than a 11" macbook air + iPad (and those are the more expensive options for laptop+tablet).
This sounded really cool about 10 years ago, but what real appeal does this have over laptop+tablet? What are the use cases where this kind of flexibility actually matters?
If I'm using a tablet I'm either on the road or at home - I never see a case for doing "tablet" style stuff at work. Considering "Thinkpad" is an enterprise brand, what need does this fill other than fulfilling Microsoft's desire to turn their Windows userbase into a tablet userbase?
I'll leave aside the fact that almost no one wants Windows8 for it's Metro interface (as witnessed by the Surface RT's spectacular sales failure).
Would be nice if our culture just became weary of entertainment cartel offerings, and people could once again take up more productive pastimes: making things, group outings and sports, exercise, hobbies...anything besides sitting on butts and watching brain numbing nonsense (yes, I'm as guilty as anyone)
Sad thing is, it doesn't have to be an XOR function between the two sets of activities. What really sucks is that a large part of our cultural output is seen as entirely entertainment oriented. Perhaps what we're seeing is that the upcoming younger generations see this and come to our same conclusions - and thus the disappointing flops.
Maybe instead of trying to artificially create the memes and hashtags on the social networks, Hollywood ought to listen to what's being said and take that for inspiration? I guess that's just really much more effort than rehashing the same damn blockbuster formula over and over again.
In other news, the economy aint doing so swell either - and my Netflix queue is quite long...
No moreso than a police officer firing at an American citizen, so long as the American citizen fired first.
To be fair, you'd have to demonstrate the drone was in danger of actually being shot down or that someone else's life was in danger from the act of firing into the air. But that wouldn't be too hard if you're in a populated area firing at the sky, because there's a small but significant chance that bullet's going to land on somebody.
Disagree. Police officers are humans. Humans have judgement. Drones are unmanned. No danger of human life being ended when someone fires on a drone (just cost/damage). If such a device retaliates on humans, it will appear unjustified and inhumane. The proper way of handling this would be to camera ID the shooter and bring them up on charges of property destruction. Armed drone retaliation will be deeply unpopular.
Guests wear pins that automatically adjust temperature, music, and lighting based on guest's preferences upon entering a room.
Excuse me, but that's just ridiculous and gaudy. Clearly a gimmick intended to impress the bigwigs he hosts. Home automation to me means optimizing home features to improve comfort. Having a guests music follow them around the house is just creepy.
e.g.: automatic blinds/shutters that, combined with lighting automation can vary the rooms lighting intensity and color temperature either based on a heuristic (ie, maximal temperature color possible up to a given value) or mood preference.
e.g.,redux: automatic windows and whole house fan integrated with heating and air conditioning and humidifiers to guarantee overall and local temperature settings with an eye to maximizing comfort by adjusting proper appropriate flow of warm/cold/fresh air. Also let me switch between them with a simple control as opposed to me walking around the house opening windows (or forgetting to close them) so I can get fresh air.
The way I read it (yes, I read the article) is that they put a marker of some kind into the chemical brew being slugged into the ground, and found no sign of that marker in ground water. Now obviously there are still questions to be raised, but still, in and of itself, this seems a pretty reasonable way to determine groundwater contamination.
How is that even reasonable? Why not measure the actual contaminants and check elevation levels?
Here's a question that immediately comes up for me: What if the markers have different rock/soil permeability compared to the chemicals used in fracking? Are those markers closely enough in characteristics to the chemicals used as to be valid for purposes of testing exposure/pollution?
How about another one - why is the DoE doing this test as opposed to the EPA (who are likely more versed in measuring pullution)?
Not testing the presence of the actual chemicals/pollutants doesn't pass the sniff test for me. Something stinks here.
"nearly free" = "hidden from the uncurious customer." Apple customers pay for the whole experience - from rounded corners to the hardware to the OS to the online services.
It's a non-product. You can't "buy" iOS - it's a consequence of you buying an Apple product. A market that Microsoft not only can't compete in (demonstrably from Windows RT's complete adoption failure), but also a market that they simply don't comprehend. I literally see Ballmer scratching his head when he wonders about how Apple profits from it.
It seems to me that there's nothing _wrong_ with Windows RT - if they had got there first, it may well have been adopted in the same way as the iPad.
Apple had trodden the hard path for 15 years before the iPad ever hit the shelves on the Apple Store. While Microsoft was busy soaking up all the enterprises and small businesses leveraging their Office monopoly into a desktop OS monopoly and then into a sizeable portion of the backoffice/server markets, Apple focused on mobile and consumer market. First the (failed) Newton, then later on with the iPod, iTunes, retail Apple Stores to bypass retail channel cock-blockers, then iPhone, App Store, and finally the iPad. Apple fucking makes their bread and butter on this shit. All these steps are ones that organically grew a company designed to support and promote the iPad to make it successful.
Microsoft ignored that vision and business model for years until they realized it could threaten their profits and could endanger the PC market. So they created a Windows Phone that didn't quite catch on, and Microsoft Stores that primarily showed off their Xbox and Kinect, Now they think that their cargo-cult mimicking of Apple's look and feel (hey that worked once before) will help them steal Apple's market?
Meanwhile Android is busy soaking up the entire lower-end of the market (mainly with the cheap Chinese hardware), leaving no breathing room for anything non-Apple, non-Google based, and is encroaching on Apple's turf as well. Microsoft should be far more concerned about Google's moves - Android tablets and Chromebooks will cripple or replace the PC market long before Apple encroaches on that turf. Perhaps the best move now would be for Microsoft to co-opt Android like Amazon did. Kindle Fire seems to be doing ok (say compared to the Surface RT).
That's a good point - can the iPad's 300% price premium be justified over a Chinese Jelly Bean tablet by some criteria?
There are about a hundred reasons why schools would prefer iPads over cheap chinese android pads. The number one reason being that iPads are promoted, supported, secured and have a major company backing them... not to mention the bigger app-store available.
Your cheap imported droid-pads do not have this option. If you're willing to do *all* the support, security and customization required (how many school IT shops have this time and flexibility in their roles?) then it might make sense to not take advantage of what you get when you're going with a known quantity.
It's not like "300%" premium (debatable that it's so high for equivalent hardware) gets you nothing.
Shoot at these things enough and they will get equipped to shoot back. And their aim's a lot better.
An armed drone firing at an american citizen on american soil might be a PR bigger victory for the anti-drone libertarians than taking down the drone itself. Of course, I'm not sure I'd want to be the one to get precedented.
Whether or not someone thinks they want to, the question I have is that if you're running a Google O/S, with a good chunk of your stuff available using Google software via Google products, why in the world would Google ever need your wifi password to access your wifi network?
If Google wants to fuck over an Android user (and I'd bet that even Kindle users aren't 100% immune), they almost certainly can. It might be via internally-identified Chrome exploits or something, but I have no doubt they could come up with something.
They are probably unlikely to maliciously use this information. BUT IT EXISTS - and the NSA can ask for it - or a very determined intrusion team could get at it - all of it.
It's like a company that stores your CC information in plaintext on their servers - not a sign of maliciousness, but stupidity that someone could leverage to their own gain and your loss.
You know there's PCI compliance requirements that punish and fine companies for doing shit like that. There should be something similar for personal actionable information like SSNs and WiFi passwords.
...And how is the keychain "easily snooped"? That's news to me. Please elaborate....
https://github.com/ptoomey3/Keychain-Dumper
This only works for Jailbroken devices. AFAIK, iOS6.1.3+ is not capable of jailbreak. How are you going to get the keys from my iOS devices running iOS6.1.3?
Strangely missing from the summary is the fact that this only affects Android devices, as far as I read in the article. While most phones allow you to easily "show" aka decrypt and view your wifi password for a network you hopped in ages ago, I happen to know that all desktops and laptops with Windows XP-7 do the same. They're also easily recoverable by third party instant decrypts too. So if you think plaintext or reversible encryption storage of passwords is the problem, that's all devices everywhere, with or without Google. The problem is Google actually having your password.
Untrue. Apple's Keychain encrypts it with your login password. So on-disk it's encrypted appropriately, and in-memory it's locked as soon as you lock your computer. You also get this behavior with ssh-agent which is one thing that makes OSX better than most linux distros.
Yeah, lets be clear about this apparently...
The Dev in question happens to work for a competing phone manufacturer
The developer's name is Rémi Denis-Courmont [1], and while he's the lead developer for the VLC app, also worked for Nokia at the time, and thus the conflict of interest in his revocation of VLC iOS app.
[1] http://www.tuaw.com/2011/01/08/vlc-app-removed-from-app-store/
How is the Watergate break-in worse than bugging the campaign office of Mitch McConnell? How is creating an "enemies list" worse than targeting your enemies through the IRS, the EPA, and other federal agencies, and have the NSA spy on them and on reporters?
That's a whole lot of assertions where [cite needed]. Got links from non-partisan sources?
"...Franz von Holzhausen, can barely contain himself as he talks about the design of the Model S. “It’s like the leap of faith Apple (AAPL) took with the iPhone,” he says, explaining why the car has a touchscreen instead of the usual physical buttons."
This is monumentally wrong. Touch screens succeed on a phone because a phone is a portable device and the touch screen is lighter and smaller. Physical controls are preferable for humans because they model the physical world to which we've adapted. In a car, you need to use the controls without taking your eyes off the road. This means location by feel is important. A touch screen can't provide that.
It seems the entire design world has this backwards, include appliance manufacturers. I hate the buttons on my oven.
Both you and the article are wrong - the Prius had touchscreens in their cars 10 years ago. It works because the location is fixed, you don't have tons of apps, and the interfaces you know have button positions that are invariant, giving you muscle memory though not haptic feedback (mine beeps).
What's nice is that there isn't useless chrome - you can fit dozens of control interfaces in a 7" screen (on the Prius), and not have the driver's seat look like a airplane cockpit.
Signed PDFs can be read in any reader, but the signature will be still validated (if the reader is not defective.) Encrypted PDFs will not be even readable if they are not encrypted to you. Password-protected PDFs may require the password to be readable, let alone printable or changeable.
In other words, PDFs are not designed for wanton modification. Some of them can be modified, but others cannot. This means that you cannot build a reliable method for converting suspect PDFs into safe PDFs.
Encrypted PDFs can be broken, quite quickly - a quick search pulled up some tools - one of which I had to use a while back for work [1]. I decrypted about 40k documents in less than a day with GuaPDF, with only about 300 or so that couldn't be cracked - 99% success rate. Combine with the JS detection method noted in another comment [2], and you can still tell if there's a dangerous PDF most of the time.
If you need to protect your populace (i.e., at the mail server level), combining the two above and either blocking (with a "see IT" note) or warning users for uncrackable/JS-detected pdfs sounds like a good win. Especially since cracking is almost instantaneous.
[1] http://pcsupport.about.com/od/toolsofthetrade/tp/pdf-password-remover.htm
[2] http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3985927&cid=44314295
The book you want is Huxley's Brave New World. Instead of overlords controlling people through power and domination, people allow themselves to be controlled in exchange for the pleasantries of modern life - sex, entertainment, and other trivialities. As long as they get as much of those as they want, they don't give a damn what else is going on in society or who is controlling it. As the saying goes, you attract more flies with honey...
Another good take is the role-playing game Paranoia - which made the surveillance state amusing (and insane) [1]. In addition to big brother, brave new world-ish mandatory uppers and downers combined with a Kafka-like maze of rules that can never all be respected - you are forced to betray, backstab, lie and cheat faster/better than the other players.
This, along with games like Diplomacy [2], should be mandatory for all 10y+ kids so they can become accustomed to shit that others will pull on them with more real-world painful consequences.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paranoia_(role-playing_game)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)
embrace.extend.extinguish anyone?
Wouldn't developers.developers.developers be more appropriate to the current CEO?
Read blow for the rest of Michael's review.
No matter how eloquent it is, Java(ECMA)Script still blows.
Laugh (or cry) all you want - it's taken over the web, and will take over the world. EMCAScript is getting better every year, it's got functional features, prototyping a la Self, is extensible as hell and has the most deployed interpreters/VMs (and JITs) in the world. With NodeJS and BackboneJS it's going to take a chunk out of server-side programming as well.
Yeah, JS is shit, just like HTML. It's also the lingua-franca of the modern web (along with HTML, of course) and it's growing faster than C or Java (leave alone C# or ObjectiveC)
Though I may sympathize with Sarah's viewpoint, I think that it's counter-productive to antagonize (whether justtfied or not) the founder/leader of the largest open source project (equivalent to CEO of Fortune50 company). Instead the better move would be to appeal to the benefits of changing the culture, and attempting to play to the founder's strengths and beliefs to empahsize and lend validity to your point. e.g: "For a better, more productive environment, we should avoid verbal put-downs and taunts, as this would improve cooperation and involvement"
When I try to do this - sometimes I find myself talking myself out of what I was about to say - because I find a rationale for the undesirable conditions that I can't accommodate with my idea, e.g.: "Linus doesn't have time to be worry about being nice without sacrificing timeliness, efficiency and efficacy".
Of course, framing your argument with the neutral point of view doesn't make waves or make the /. frontpage.
The Nobel peace prize, unlike the other Nobel prizes, s often given while a peace process is under way, as an encouragement. Yes, they often fail.
It's almost as if the prize was a trap or muzzle. hmm... Should Snowden accept such a prize even if it's awarded?
Gartner says that these PC shipment numbers include Windows 8 tablets, but not Apple’s iPads.
Because... clearly the iPad isn't a tablet. WTF?
Crazy anti-gay activists deserve tolerance.
Us non-crazy folk tolerate him - and his right to say what he wants. Toleration doesn't mean that actions can't have consequences.
If he wants to spout the crazy, let his works suffer association. No one is denying him his rights; There is no "right to profit".
...and whistleblowers.
It's like the war against government watch groups - the idea that by limiting what the government does (and increasingly the crony corporations that have cropped up to help it expend it's reach) - not fighting, but just calling out and limiting it, you are an enemy of the state and you need to be removed.
Exploits are bought/discovered and kept as armaments to be used on industrial/state espionage, and also for internal clandestine operations. So clearly anyone "invalidating" one by disclosing it is restricting the power of the government.