Freedom of speech!

So we aren't going to talk about what might be talked about, because we (Intel) really like freedom of speech, so let's not talk about anything unpleasant?

D••n, this makes tech seem so much simpler than real life....

Why's your bugzapper sitting on the ground?

"Ants"

You don't use bugzappers for ants!

"Watch..."

Wow, look at that thing sparkle....

"... Branson plans to be aboard ... along with his two children, "if my wife allows.""

No sane person would put all his little ducklings and himself on the same experimental aircraft on its first full-scale flight. Even if it doesn't end up wiping out his posterity, the mere fact of doing this will be an indelible comment that he thinks he's a Hollywood movie rather than being in the real world. The biographies would always end with "... and a fool."

Someone please do a poster of Obi-Wan saying

I felt a great perturbance in the heuristics, as if millions of lines suddenly ...

Oranges and pips

"... shows ebook sales accounting for 22.55 per cent of all revenue ..."

"Still, the fact that nearly one of four books sold last year was an ebook is ..."

The linked article talks about %age of revenue. You then extrapolate to proportion of copies sold. Wrong. Or at least, precise only to the degree that publishers are screwing their customers. With the too-often seen current situation, where a $20 book is a $17.95 ebook, then they unfortunately approach equivalence.

But oh we wish that publishers would get a clue. If my friend Foo says "The life of Bar" is a great read, I might splash $5 on such a recommendation. But $15 or $20 or more is a no-go. I'll buy so many more copies at fractional prices than the greedy full prices. The volume will go higher if you lower the barrier. Give me a bargain and you'll make a mint.

Sky's the limit

I'm afraid this hits my limit on public disclosure and it is plain irresponsible to do this. Always assume there are people out there much cleverer than you are. This jerk's work of 3 years might just be reproducible in 3 weeks by someone else. Once realizing that small fact he'll be rather sleepless too. Nothing like having your name publicly associated with "how could that disaster happen?" Ahh, fame at last.

"The hacked aircraft could even be controlled using a smartphone's accelerometer to vary its course and speed by moving the handset about."

Assuming the handset would need to be in proximity to said aircraft, as in inside, this would be the classic mad scientist's belated education in unintended consequences, as having moved the handset and induced a reaction, the reaction would induce a further reaction in the now flailing handset, culminating in the now doomed passengers telling said sad sack "we could have told you that would happen - don't you ever watch movies?"

Give it a beat!

The mistake was having it merely monotonic... so boring. Change it to be specified like SVG's dasharray: on for 2, off for 3, on for 1, off for 1, on for 4, etc. Add in a time signature and "audible: yes", and we making music! Now that they support canvas and SVG, I can see MS doing a rotating mirror ball and inviting Chairman Bill to the party!

BTW: Was it intentional not to scrub the <blink> tag </blink> from the repeated article text at top of comments area? No... Yes... No... Yes...

Satish Jha

I do wish we had the ability to create a placeholder comment posting here on behalf of Mr. Jha, so that we could upvote his position that bullshit in lieu of actual progress is eminently recognizable, in spite of what the eminent sputter in denial.

Fixed that for you

"Presumably, we may yet see a Windows 8.2, 8.3, or further before Redmond finally delivers a version deemed worthy of being called Windows."

Our *3*, no, our *4* greatest weaknesses are ...

Please look up "facepalm" in these languages: Catalan, Basque, Spanish, Portugese.

Bonus points: Which one doesn't read like the others?

We got the hosing perfected...

... now we need to learn about this thing they call "fuzzing".

Hopefully they will now understand the usefulness of throwing "crazy data" at all their hardware/software interfaces, just to see if it really is bullet proof. Isn't this the fundamental that MS also figured out _eventually_?

I'm "planning" to be rich someday...

Let's see....

Purchase price not stated, and certainly not compared to whatever outlay Element Power might have already spent. So good possibility purchase was at a fire-sale price.

Land for plant is leased from the state. Wonder how much (little) that price is? And how many other power plants has the state fostered with low rents?

Plant hasn't been built yet. Will be built with a particular technology which _should_ be cheaper than previous technologies. _Should_ produce at a certain rate. So true costs and production are all future topics for realization.

And which future reality might inform a new pleading for a _higher_ proposed rate per kilowatt-hour at a future point.

But hey, it makes a great press release now, doesn't it? Who's going down when the reality is not as advertised? Not the rates fershur.

Shock Misty!

(Not so) strangely, there was a Misty Shock at Microsoft for awhile, perhaps when they were developing the documentation that happens to mention misty@contoso.com ?

"Misty Shock grew up in Port Orchard and developed a lifelong devotion to Kitsap County, before coming to the big city of Seattle to attend the University of Washington. After school, she worked at Microsoft as a Technical Editor."

Not the revolution you were looking for

This is all so wrong - a street performance artist rather than an artist with any insight into the subject matter.

We've already got more than one computer language per week for 50 years. Now you want to compound that by my Scheiß vs. your merde ? بذاءة!

"As a result, all of the most popular programming languages, libraries, and APIs in use today are built with commands based on English words, such as "function," "for," "if," "loop," and so on. That can make learning programming especially difficult for students whose native language doesn't even use the Latin alphabet, for whom the keywords are little more than abstract symbols."

They're keywords, they represent abstractions. It does not matter what symbols you use as long as they succinctly represent the idea. Does using "如果" really change anything? How about "assuming"?

Oh, look, "إفعل" is "do", "إذا" is "if", "حدد" is "set" (see qlb/qlb.js), "قول" is "say" (qlb/primitives.js), etc. Not a revolution here I think.

The only possible hook this argument might have is that the first education in a new area should be as 'comfortable' as possible for the student. That's why introductory texts are in native languages? However, nothing you can do will make learning programming less difficult for the majority of people.

""If we are going to really push for coding literacy, which I do; if we are going to push to teach code around the world, then we have to be aware of what the cultural biases are and what it means for someone who doesn't share that background to be expected to be able to reason in those languages," Nasser says."

Examples would be helpful, as this looks like drawing pictures with waving flashlights in the dark.

I fail to understand how computer languages are based on human languages to such an extent that this is a worry. The only things essential are consistency and sequentiality. Is this some hangup over SVO vs. SOV or abverb/verb and adjective/noun ordering? Hey, does he know about Forth?

"What makes قلب unique, however, is that it allows Nasser to write programs that are not only functional, but also visually pleasing. By varying the lengths of the lines that connect the Arabic letters that make up the language's commands, Nasser can reshape the appearance of his code without altering its function, producing programs that are both practical and artistic."

ORLY? Okay, maybe not Python, but you can alter the appearance, the layout of code in many languages at will. That is, if you are perverse enough. "That's ART" you fool!" Ah, my mistake, I thought it was supposed to be readable.

Strangely, looks like code to me, just with Arabic symbols. Sorry, I'm unconvinced.

Conway in qlb

Fibonacci in qlb

Whose 'fault' ?

Now what doesn't get mentioned is who is going to put the money back into the bank account. Is the phone company going to do anything other than 'adjust' the bill for that month's service? Is the bank going to say "hey we just used the phone number you told us to use"?

So this poor sot used the gold standard of two-factor security and gets taken anyway. And likely nobody is going to make the failure good.

That's the IT angle. What do we do now for security?

But it's not 64-bit so you can't have it?

Good grief. Just tried my copy of NT pinball.exe on Win7 and it runs just fine. Running as a 32-bit program works. So what the hey?

Oh... It was Vista's problems running 32-bit programs that stopped them. Yes, Now I remember tweaking weird options to make old programs run under Vista.

Great, now you've ruined me for hours... stewing on Vista I'll have to zone out playing pinball...

Cue the Googlumpers

They always accuse Google of stealing their personal data to sell more ads, that they were the product. Now with Kurzweil helping them, when the Googlularity comes, they will be the product and the ad fused into one.

I saw what you did there...

"sticky WCIT"

wicked!

Phantom voters are phantom users

"Over the next week, over 30 per cent of Facebook's billion users must place their ballots ... Given that quorum in a vote has yet to be achieved by Facebook's diverse global user base, ..."

Given that a quorum in a vote has yet to be achieved, it seems certain that the count of actual continuing users is vastly inflated. If they can't get a quorum - ever - it has to be a black eye for Facebook and a tacit admission their counts are BS.

Does anyone know of any other site that doesn't qualify quorum size by the number of accounts that have logged in 'recently', such as most recent 6 months? Amazing that FB is using their phantom users as a "silent majority".

Oh what a whirled!

Well, well, and well. Now let's move on to whether the bodger's bid for fame is spelled "kludge" or "kluge", and then by the bye we can find out the whimsical ways the out-of-touch pronounce this gem.

Really, it depends on whether your pronunciation came via assumed reading/definition, or was transmitted orally. Golly, I can see the 'graphics' construction, but I think you're gypping yourself to insist on it.

BTW: yes, definitely "kicks", though recently a long-past-that-stage (she's lawyer now) CICS/Cobol programmer asked me what I meant by "kicks". Later, she kicked me when I tried pronouncing "IANAL". Lif iz liq þat zumthymes.

Freedom only for the deserving?

"... but it's a pretty savage indictment of the American legal system that he was able to make such a fuss based on such shoddy evidence and past character."

Whoa dude! Think about what you just said. If you're a low-life, or might be a low-life, you have no or limited rights?

Sorry guy, even prostitutes can have someone arrested and convicted for rape, given the evidence supports the case. The case is what should be judged, not the person bringing the case.

Of course when the evidence is found to be cooked and the case was fraudulent to begin with, throw the book at the fraudster indeed! I wish more nuisance lawsuits had negative results for the idjits trying the 17th time to make trouble for someone they don't like.

BTW: the above, anyway, knowing someone who sued the local council for being arrested, at a public meeting, for recording said meeting, where the council was agreeing to something illegal, and she lost the case, and $23K in legal fees down the drain, even though the judge agreed she had the truthful evidence! Justice is not done sometimes even when you're in the right. She felt getting the contradictions and collusion into the record worth the money. It ain't justice accomplished, but at least she got the trial.

We'd all be rail thin if...

PR people wrote everything we could read.

"The 10.6 inch Gorilla 2.0 glass is designed to be the perfect size to display the Windows OS ..."

How many times does someone have to practice saying things like this, before they can repress the urge to throw up?

This is almost as bad as Samsung's "made for humans". (Of course, what's the down-side? - I bought an S3 anyway)

The name of the game is...?

"If you were hoping Microsoft's partner OEMs would rise to the occasion and beat Redmond at its own game, prepare to be disappointed."

Perhaps the 'game' is that MS has asked OEMs to *not* compete with it? Perhaps anachronistic, but I remember days when OEMs would ask what MS would like them to do, and did that, out of fear of displeasure from the beast.

Anyway, I'm wondering who's playing who here?