In the same way, if things are so bad with data drives and computers being destroyed everywhere in the world, who do you think is going to give a crap about being able to play your game?
And even if they care, they aren't going to be able to, even if you've preserved your source code.
I run a small indie game company, and since source code is kind of our lifeblood, I'm pretty paranoid about backups. [...] With all the talk about solar flares and other such near-extinction events lately, I've been wondering: is it actually possible to store or protect data in such a way that if such an event occurred, data survives and is recoverable in a useful form?
I don't know, but I'm baffled by the priorities that would have you looking to preserve the source code of a small indie game company against near-extinction level events and present that as something motivated by business priorities ("since source code is kind of our lifeblood.")
It seems to me that there are a near-infinite panoply of risks that are vastly more likely to materialize that are much more fruitful to mitigate, such that the marginal benefit of mitigating that particular risk for an indie game company is very small (especially considering that mitigating the risk to your company's source code from a near-extinction level event won't address the fact that such an event would still eliminate your market, your systems of delivering goods to that market, and the financial and social systems -- including property rights regimes -- underpinning that market.)
Amazon and Azure use different API's, if you use one vendor's API, you're locked into that vendor.
Of course, TFA acknowledges that there are several (both public cloud and open-source software for private-cloud implementations) alternatives that support Amazon APIs, but dismisses them as unlikely to actually work with real apps no substantive reasoning presented.
It really looks like the author had a conclusion in mind before even beginning to look at the facts.
I'd also put that they aren't actually encouraged to have their own opinions and views. I
Maybe, but what you describe here doesn't sound like that's the problem.
I remember being given an assignment, years ago, about writing why "Crispy Cream" was ethical as a business, but from my POV they weren't being ethical at all. Having that counter opinion cost me most of the credit on the paper.
There is value to being able to find, evaluate, and present the best arguments for a particular position whether or not it is your own. So, I can both see why the value in being assigned to right an argumentative essay for an assigned point-of-view, and see it as perfectly reasonable that failing to do so effectively when it conflicts with your personal POV results in a lower grade.
In fact, I remember a number of classes with similar assignments (some written, some oral) where both the subject and which side of it particular students were to take were randomly assigned.
None of this conflicts with students being encouraged to have their own opinions or views, its about students being able to understand others opinions and views, and is part of the foundation on which the ability to critically evaluate others' viewpoints, and their own, is built.
Call me old fashioned. But this whole idea throwing personal and corporate data to the "cloud" doesn't resonate well with me. I find the entire concept to be... well, unsettling from a security standpoint. Online systems have been and do continue to get hacked.
If your computer is connected to the internet it is, as much as anything in the cloud is, an "online system" and subject to the "online systems have been and do continue to get hacked" problem. So, there's that.
If your computer isn't connected to the internet, you probably aren't storing data from it in the cloud in any case.
Either way...
More seriously (though the above is not non-serious, just somewhat less serious) storing data on the cloud rather than on your own computer which is sometimes exposed to the internet obvious has some amount of increased security risk. It also has some usability advantages, particularly if you use multiple different devices -- say, you prefer your desktop when you are in the neighborhood of your desk, but prefer your tablet when you are away from your desk -- and want to keep them in sync.
There's a cost/benefit balancing to be done as to whether to use cloud storage and what particular content to use it for (and what particular cloud provider to use, including -- particularly for business -- self-hosted cloud storage as an option.)
Neither "no one should ever use the cloud to store anything because of the potential security risks" nor "everything should be tossed off on to the first free cloud storage service you stumble across" are particularly thoughtful ways of addressing that cost/benefit consideration.
"OK, now that folks value crowd-sourcing over professional editorial reviews, let's corner the market on professional editorial reviews."--Google
I don't think that its established that people value crowdsourcing more. People may use it more because crowd-sourced tools have been easy to integrate into online mobile services without expending money (besides that to build the service) to acquire the review content. And what people do value is reviews that they have no-cost, direct access to in online mobile services.
Professional editorial reviews from top-reputation outlets -- where the traditional firms have revenue models based around selling guides -- haven't been available in that venue.
Why the hell are they doing a firmware update from ~225,000,000 km away??? One would think they would have, I dunno, tested this shit before flinging it at another fucking planet.
Updating software on space probes / rovers / etc. that are already on their mission is something NASA's been doing for decades. Obviously, they test them before they launch, but like any other software system, sometimes either bugs or opportunities for improvement are identified after they are launched, and its a lot cheaper to send new code to a space probe or rover than it is to put the new code in a new space probe or rover and launch it from Earth.
One of the things they test, of course, is the ability to do the remote upgrades.
Just as a note of correction... Mars is about 35 million miles away at its closest point... which is pretty much now.
Well, except that the recent close approach in (in March) was about 100 million km (~60 million miles) -- and was 5 months ago, or about 1/5 the period between close approaches (so we're "close" to the most recent close approach in roughly the same way the ides of March is close to New Year's Day.)
The minimum distance of a close approach is roughly 35 million miles, but not every close approach is that close (it requires opposition to occur when Earth is near aphelion and Mars near perihelion.)
When they do launches to Mars, they want it to be at its closest point, for obvious reasons.
No, they generally don't. The most efficient path for a journey between two planets isn't a straight-line path from the location of the starting planet to the location the target planet is located at the time the voyage starts. You'd need ludicrous thrust for it to even be possible (much less efficient) to have a transit for which that was even a reasonable approximation.
(It's possible for two planets to be at a distance where coincidentally you'd have an efficient transfer orbit available at the time the two were closest together, but its not true either in the general case, or in the Earth-to-Mars case specifically.)
As far as I know the iphone doesn't use full disk encryption. It's not that difficult to get all the data off it.
Since the 3GS, the iPhone uses full disk encryption -- but instead of requiring an externally provided key (provided, e.g., by hashing a password), the key is stored on the device and automatically used to decrype data whenever data is requested from the device. The encryption system exists to enable the instant "remote wipe" feature (which is accomplished by simply deleting the key stored on the device), but does nothing to prevent anyone from accessing data on the phone if it is not connected to the network once they acquire physical control of it (or if the user is prevented from issuing a remote-wipe command, as might well be the case if the seizure of the device is concurrent with the user's arrest.)
My understanding was that Google was going to operate Motorola almost as an independent company so as to not step on the toes of their other OEMs. I would expect Motorola to have to go through the same selection process of Asus, Samsung and everybody else.
They can say that all they want but I don't really see how it would be possible.
Its quite easy. You just appoint leadership to the Motorola division, and then Google deals with them for most purposes just like they would any other hardware manufacturer.
Google will have to compete directly with their partners at some level - there really is no way around that.
The above post doesn't say they won't compete with their partners. In fact, as soon as they completed the purchase of Motorola Mobility, which competes directly with some of Google's partners, they were doing that. (Of course, if you look at the membership of the Open Handset Alliance, a lot of Google's partners are already people Google competes with fairly directly in one area or another.)
77% of the profits in the smartphone market go to Apple. I always think it's funny when people ignore this rather insignificant detail!
It is actually a fairly insignificant detail for most purposes. I mean its nice in a "go team" kind of way for Apple fans, but for actually things that you'd make decisions based on, the percentage of profits in the current market is fairly useless.
If you are investing in any but the shortest term based on position in the smartphone market, you probably don't want to look at that as much as you are things that show where the market is heading.
If you are directing investment in some other field that depends on platform strength, you want to look at your opportunities for profit, not the platform vendors current profit share.
68% of the market is occupied by almost all the other smart phone companies put together. In other words, they're all tiny minorities. The iPhone rules.
Ignoring the fact that Samsung alone is shipping more Android smartphones than Apple is shipping iPhones (Samsung makes up nealy half of the Android handset sales, and total Android handset sales are around four times Apple's), even if Apple sold more handset than any other manufacturer that still wouldn't necessarily be a great sign for them with large number of competitors selling phones that are based on the same platform (just as their biggest-single-hardware-vendor position in the desktop market still leaves them a footnote beside the Windows ecosystem.)
The health and attractiveness of the software and content ecosystem (App Store, iBooks, etc.) where much of the real money is depends more on the relative deployment of iOS vs. Android as platforms than on the relative strength of Apple vs. HTC vs. Samsung vs. (etc.) as handset manufacturers.
Apple also has the iTunes store that makes money off the back end. The other makers don't have that.
Well, clearly, Google (corporate parent of Motorola, and also selling Nexus-branded phones) has a full phone, OS (Android), application/content store (Google Play) stack.
Arguably, given the Microsoft to Nokia payments relating to Windows Phone, the Microsoft-Nokia partnership has the same full stack, as well.
They're jealous but failed. Apple's making it.
Android is failing in the mobile space against Apple the same way that Windows failed against Mac OS.
(No, I don't have an iPhone, just observing.)
I do have an iPhone. But that doesn't get in the way of my "observing".
That's like saying how bad a law is depends on how its used.
No, its not. It would be like that if the claim was that whether software patents are a bad idea depended on how they are used.
But when your talking about whether a particular corporation getting a particular software patent is bad -- given an environment in which software patents are permitted and often (whether or not in theory they should) overlap in coverage -- you really have to consider how the patent can reasonably be expected to be used over the course of its term.
One can agree that a regime which allows the kind of software patents the present US patent regime allows is bad, while at the same time holding that the situation would be worse if the only firms that sought and received software patents were the ones most inclined to ruthlessly use patent litigation, or its threat, to aggressively prevent competition.
So its a bad analogy.
Laws which allow authorities unfettered rights to spy on citizens are good, provided the government doesn't use that power to persecute.
Wrong.
Laws which allow authorities unfettered rights to spy on citizens are bad BECAUSE they could be used by governments to persecute.
Actually, that's wrong, too. Such laws are wrong because they (assuming, also, a regime which prohibits ex post facto laws categorically, which is desirable for other reasons) prevent effective remedy when government officers choose to spy on citizens for the purpose of persecution. They may also be wrong to the extent that they thereby encourage government misuse of surveillance for persecution.
But the law which makes it legal for them to arbitrarily use the means of surveillance at their disposal doesn't actually enable them to do anything they couldn't do if the law prohibited it; what allows them to abuse surveillance mechanisms is having those mechanisms, not the legal privilege of using them without limitations as to cause and application. So, your example is a bad illustration of the bad analogy.
Windows 95 was "fantastic" by comparison to Windows 3.x, but not really by comparison to OS's outside of Microsoft's own little world.
Was it completely unlike anything we'd ever seen? No, it was WIMP-driven like any other GUI. It was just way -better-.
No, it really wasn't. NextStep by the time of the NextStation in 1991 was, I think, at least as good of a GUI -- and OS -- as Windows 95. Win95 might have been a big leap forward in GUI/OS combinations bundled with inexpensive consumer-grade hardware, but that's not because it was a leap forward in OS's so much as because of the advances in cheaply-producable hardware to run consumer OS's on.
I don't think that's all that important to them, directly.
But they definitely want the Windows Store to succeed, and the leverage they are using to get people to distribute apps through the Windows Store, rather than through the mechanisms used for Windows desktop apps previously, is that Metro-style apps can only be delivered: 1. Via the Windows store, or 2. To "enterprise side-loading enabled" versions of Windows (Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows 8 Server, but none of the consumer-targeted editions), or 3. By acquiring a special product key to sideload Metro-style apps on to a non-"enterprise sideloading enabled" version of Windows 8.
And yet, from a UI perspective, Win7 and Vista were very nearly identical.
The Aero UI wasn't the thing people complained about in Vista.
That's exactly the point that Cowboy Neal is trying to make... Win8's interface has radical departures. Unless they are willing to backtrack... yeah, Win9 will refine them. But you might as well start getting used to them.
Or not. And if enough people choose "or not", Microsoft has to either backtrack, or make new and more appealing radical departures than the ones they did in 8. Or stop selling (whether or not they are still offering) desktop OS's altogether.
Of course, "new" is not necessarily "good," and in this case I think the jury is definitely out on whether Metro is good.
Metro was a great set of design principles and guidelines with applications far beyond mobile, and you probably good build a good UI for a desktop OS with inspiration from it.
The actual formerly-known-as-Metro-style UI in Windows 8 is not, from everything I've seen, that good UI, though.
While there were lots of complaints about, say, the implementation of UAC in Vista, the Aero UI in Vista and 7 -- despite its changes from XP -- wasn't the focus of much negative reaction. (Unlike, say, the Metro/Modern/Win8/whatever-they're-calling-it-now UI in Windows 8, or the Ribbon-style UI when it was added in Office 2007.)
And, while the same basic model was retained, the UAC implementation in Vista was refined in Win7, and the things that were complained about most strenuously about the Ribbon UI implementation in Office 2007 (notably, the lack of an easily locatable, self-explanatory equivalent to the File... menu with its very-commonly-needed used tasks) were addressed in Office 2010.
I suspect that a lot of the issues people have with the Win8 desktop implementation of the UI-style-formerly-known-as-Metro will be similarly be addressed in the next major version of Windows.
While for any new thing in the computing world you'll find some people on Slashdot that don't like it (because Slashdot is full of people with strong, and divergent, opinions on technology), you'll notice that -- as was the case with the Vista in-your-face UAC and the Office 2007 Ribbon -- the issues aren't just a Slashdot phenomenon, and they are much more specific than just being a problem with novelty.
Yeah but will Windows 7 run on some future Intel i11 machine with the latest 4320p graphics card?
I suspect that when there is a serious issue with machines Windows 7 won't run on, Windows 9 (or whatever Windows-after-8 is called) will be available.
Lots of customers -- individuals and institutions -- skipped Vista and stayed with XP until jumping to Win 7. The same can happen with Win 8.
Reading comprehension 101: Read ALL THE WAY to the END of a sentence.
I did.
stop handing over cell records to any tin-star sheriff if that were legally possible.
How can you quote something and STILL miss it?
I didn't miss it. Telecom companies share personal information with government (including law enforcement) far more easily than is the minimum legally required (that is, if they were going to stop if it was "legally possible", they would be doing less than they do.) They do so because for PR and other reasons (including the fact that in some percentages -- but not all -- of the cases where they currently voluntarily share information without compulsion, they would be ultimately be compelled to share information) it serves the corporations interest in maximizing profits to do so.
And now think about how many extra miles each of those vehicles will be driving.
With good routing software, very little, and with high enough utilization (and since they'll be able to utilize loading areas more efficiently, they'll reduce peak parking demand, and consequently parking space requirements -- which increases trip lengths for both automated and human-driven vehicles.)
Slashdot Mirror
And even if they care, they aren't going to be able to, even if you've preserved your source code.
I don't know, but I'm baffled by the priorities that would have you looking to preserve the source code of a small indie game company against near-extinction level events and present that as something motivated by business priorities ("since source code is kind of our lifeblood.")
It seems to me that there are a near-infinite panoply of risks that are vastly more likely to materialize that are much more fruitful to mitigate, such that the marginal benefit of mitigating that particular risk for an indie game company is very small (especially considering that mitigating the risk to your company's source code from a near-extinction level event won't address the fact that such an event would still eliminate your market, your systems of delivering goods to that market, and the financial and social systems -- including property rights regimes -- underpinning that market.)
Google is also both IaaS and PaaS: Compute Engine (currently in limited preview) is Google's IaaS offering.
Of course, TFA acknowledges that there are several (both public cloud and open-source software for private-cloud implementations) alternatives that support Amazon APIs, but dismisses them as unlikely to actually work with real apps no substantive reasoning presented.
It really looks like the author had a conclusion in mind before even beginning to look at the facts.
Maybe, but what you describe here doesn't sound like that's the problem.
There is value to being able to find, evaluate, and present the best arguments for a particular position whether or not it is your own. So, I can both see why the value in being assigned to right an argumentative essay for an assigned point-of-view, and see it as perfectly reasonable that failing to do so effectively when it conflicts with your personal POV results in a lower grade.
In fact, I remember a number of classes with similar assignments (some written, some oral) where both the subject and which side of it particular students were to take were randomly assigned.
None of this conflicts with students being encouraged to have their own opinions or views, its about students being able to understand others opinions and views, and is part of the foundation on which the ability to critically evaluate others' viewpoints, and their own, is built.
In that case, its a success, because the only non-alarming manner I can think of delivering warheads is crashing long before the intended target.
Well, non-alarming to the target, at any rate.
If your computer is connected to the internet it is, as much as anything in the cloud is, an "online system" and subject to the "online systems have been and do continue to get hacked" problem. So, there's that.
If your computer isn't connected to the internet, you probably aren't storing data from it in the cloud in any case.
Either way...
More seriously (though the above is not non-serious, just somewhat less serious) storing data on the cloud rather than on your own computer which is sometimes exposed to the internet obvious has some amount of increased security risk. It also has some usability advantages, particularly if you use multiple different devices -- say, you prefer your desktop when you are in the neighborhood of your desk, but prefer your tablet when you are away from your desk -- and want to keep them in sync.
There's a cost/benefit balancing to be done as to whether to use cloud storage and what particular content to use it for (and what particular cloud provider to use, including -- particularly for business -- self-hosted cloud storage as an option.)
Neither "no one should ever use the cloud to store anything because of the potential security risks" nor "everything should be tossed off on to the first free cloud storage service you stumble across" are particularly thoughtful ways of addressing that cost/benefit consideration.
I don't think that its established that people value crowdsourcing more. People may use it more because crowd-sourced tools have been easy to integrate into online mobile services without expending money (besides that to build the service) to acquire the review content. And what people do value is reviews that they have no-cost, direct access to in online mobile services.
Professional editorial reviews from top-reputation outlets -- where the traditional firms have revenue models based around selling guides -- haven't been available in that venue.
Updating software on space probes / rovers / etc. that are already on their mission is something NASA's been doing for decades. Obviously, they test them before they launch, but like any other software system, sometimes either bugs or opportunities for improvement are identified after they are launched, and its a lot cheaper to send new code to a space probe or rover than it is to put the new code in a new space probe or rover and launch it from Earth.
One of the things they test, of course, is the ability to do the remote upgrades.
Well, except that the recent close approach in (in March) was about 100 million km (~60 million miles) -- and was 5 months ago, or about 1/5 the period between close approaches (so we're "close" to the most recent close approach in roughly the same way the ides of March is close to New Year's Day.)
The minimum distance of a close approach is roughly 35 million miles, but not every close approach is that close (it requires opposition to occur when Earth is near aphelion and Mars near perihelion.)
No, they generally don't. The most efficient path for a journey between two planets isn't a straight-line path from the location of the starting planet to the location the target planet is located at the time the voyage starts. You'd need ludicrous thrust for it to even be possible (much less efficient) to have a transit for which that was even a reasonable approximation.
(It's possible for two planets to be at a distance where coincidentally you'd have an efficient transfer orbit available at the time the two were closest together, but its not true either in the general case, or in the Earth-to-Mars case specifically.)
Not on its own, legally speaking, in the US, where the definition of treason (unique among all crimes) is specifically limited by the Constitution.
Since the 3GS, the iPhone uses full disk encryption -- but instead of requiring an externally provided key (provided, e.g., by hashing a password), the key is stored on the device and automatically used to decrype data whenever data is requested from the device. The encryption system exists to enable the instant "remote wipe" feature (which is accomplished by simply deleting the key stored on the device), but does nothing to prevent anyone from accessing data on the phone if it is not connected to the network once they acquire physical control of it (or if the user is prevented from issuing a remote-wipe command, as might well be the case if the seizure of the device is concurrent with the user's arrest.)
The article said it increased the duration by 30 times, which is not the same thing as to 30 times its starting value.
So you should be asking "Since when does 100 picoseconds * 31 = 1.1 nanoseconds?"
Its quite easy. You just appoint leadership to the Motorola division, and then Google deals with them for most purposes just like they would any other hardware manufacturer.
The above post doesn't say they won't compete with their partners. In fact, as soon as they completed the purchase of Motorola Mobility, which competes directly with some of Google's partners, they were doing that. (Of course, if you look at the membership of the Open Handset Alliance, a lot of Google's partners are already people Google competes with fairly directly in one area or another.)
It is actually a fairly insignificant detail for most purposes. I mean its nice in a "go team" kind of way for Apple fans, but for actually things that you'd make decisions based on, the percentage of profits in the current market is fairly useless.
If you are investing in any but the shortest term based on position in the smartphone market, you probably don't want to look at that as much as you are things that show where the market is heading.
If you are directing investment in some other field that depends on platform strength, you want to look at your opportunities for profit, not the platform vendors current profit share.
Ignoring the fact that Samsung alone is shipping more Android smartphones than Apple is shipping iPhones (Samsung makes up nealy half of the Android handset sales, and total Android handset sales are around four times Apple's), even if Apple sold more handset than any other manufacturer that still wouldn't necessarily be a great sign for them with large number of competitors selling phones that are based on the same platform (just as their biggest-single-hardware-vendor position in the desktop market still leaves them a footnote beside the Windows ecosystem.)
The health and attractiveness of the software and content ecosystem (App Store, iBooks, etc.) where much of the real money is depends more on the relative deployment of iOS vs. Android as platforms than on the relative strength of Apple vs. HTC vs. Samsung vs. (etc.) as handset manufacturers.
Well, clearly, Google (corporate parent of Motorola, and also selling Nexus-branded phones) has a full phone, OS (Android), application/content store (Google Play) stack.
Arguably, given the Microsoft to Nokia payments relating to Windows Phone, the Microsoft-Nokia partnership has the same full stack, as well.
Android is failing in the mobile space against Apple the same way that Windows failed against Mac OS.
I do have an iPhone. But that doesn't get in the way of my "observing".
No, its not. It would be like that if the claim was that whether software patents are a bad idea depended on how they are used.
But when your talking about whether a particular corporation getting a particular software patent is bad -- given an environment in which software patents are permitted and often (whether or not in theory they should) overlap in coverage -- you really have to consider how the patent can reasonably be expected to be used over the course of its term.
One can agree that a regime which allows the kind of software patents the present US patent regime allows is bad, while at the same time holding that the situation would be worse if the only firms that sought and received software patents were the ones most inclined to ruthlessly use patent litigation, or its threat, to aggressively prevent competition.
So its a bad analogy.
Actually, that's wrong, too. Such laws are wrong because they (assuming, also, a regime which prohibits ex post facto laws categorically, which is desirable for other reasons) prevent effective remedy when government officers choose to spy on citizens for the purpose of persecution. They may also be wrong to the extent that they thereby encourage government misuse of surveillance for persecution.
But the law which makes it legal for them to arbitrarily use the means of surveillance at their disposal doesn't actually enable them to do anything they couldn't do if the law prohibited it; what allows them to abuse surveillance mechanisms is having those mechanisms, not the legal privilege of using them without limitations as to cause and application. So, your example is a bad illustration of the bad analogy.
Windows 95 was "fantastic" by comparison to Windows 3.x, but not really by comparison to OS's outside of Microsoft's own little world.
No, it really wasn't. NextStep by the time of the NextStation in 1991 was, I think, at least as good of a GUI -- and OS -- as Windows 95. Win95 might have been a big leap forward in GUI/OS combinations bundled with inexpensive consumer-grade hardware, but that's not because it was a leap forward in OS's so much as because of the advances in cheaply-producable hardware to run consumer OS's on.
I don't think that's all that important to them, directly.
But they definitely want the Windows Store to succeed, and the leverage they are using to get people to distribute apps through the Windows Store, rather than through the mechanisms used for Windows desktop apps previously, is that Metro-style apps can only be delivered:
1. Via the Windows store, or
2. To "enterprise side-loading enabled" versions of Windows (Windows 8 Enterprise and Windows 8 Server, but none of the consumer-targeted editions), or
3. By acquiring a special product key to sideload Metro-style apps on to a non-"enterprise sideloading enabled" version of Windows 8.
The Aero UI wasn't the thing people complained about in Vista.
Or not. And if enough people choose "or not", Microsoft has to either backtrack, or make new and more appealing radical departures than the ones they did in 8. Or stop selling (whether or not they are still offering) desktop OS's altogether.
Metro was a great set of design principles and guidelines with applications far beyond mobile, and you probably good build a good UI for a desktop OS with inspiration from it.
The actual formerly-known-as-Metro-style UI in Windows 8 is not, from everything I've seen, that good UI, though.
While there were lots of complaints about, say, the implementation of UAC in Vista, the Aero UI in Vista and 7 -- despite its changes from XP -- wasn't the focus of much negative reaction. (Unlike, say, the Metro/Modern/Win8/whatever-they're-calling-it-now UI in Windows 8, or the Ribbon-style UI when it was added in Office 2007.)
And, while the same basic model was retained, the UAC implementation in Vista was refined in Win7, and the things that were complained about most strenuously about the Ribbon UI implementation in Office 2007 (notably, the lack of an easily locatable, self-explanatory equivalent to the File... menu with its very-commonly-needed used tasks) were addressed in Office 2010.
I suspect that a lot of the issues people have with the Win8 desktop implementation of the UI-style-formerly-known-as-Metro will be similarly be addressed in the next major version of Windows.
While for any new thing in the computing world you'll find some people on Slashdot that don't like it (because Slashdot is full of people with strong, and divergent, opinions on technology), you'll notice that -- as was the case with the Vista in-your-face UAC and the Office 2007 Ribbon -- the issues aren't just a Slashdot phenomenon, and they are much more specific than just being a problem with novelty.
I suspect that when there is a serious issue with machines Windows 7 won't run on, Windows 9 (or whatever Windows-after-8 is called) will be available.
Lots of customers -- individuals and institutions -- skipped Vista and stayed with XP until jumping to Win 7. The same can happen with Win 8.
I did.
stop handing over cell records to any tin-star sheriff if that were legally possible.
How can you quote something and STILL miss it?
I didn't miss it. Telecom companies share personal information with government (including law enforcement) far more easily than is the minimum legally required (that is, if they were going to stop if it was "legally possible", they would be doing less than they do.) They do so because for PR and other reasons (including the fact that in some percentages -- but not all -- of the cases where they currently voluntarily share information without compulsion, they would be ultimately be compelled to share information) it serves the corporations interest in maximizing profits to do so.
With good routing software, very little, and with high enough utilization (and since they'll be able to utilize loading areas more efficiently, they'll reduce peak parking demand, and consequently parking space requirements -- which increases trip lengths for both automated and human-driven vehicles.)