counterpointer

On the other hand, India has a huge population and its inevitable that it will have more than a few geniuses/great persons

China 1.3B population

India 1.2B population

Africa 1.0B population

Surely there's a lot more here at work rather than the raw population. The environment, social culture, peers, educational opportunities, cost, language, parental expectations and lastly, great educational institutions all surely increase odds.

You didn't include the real big guy of Google(who died in an unfortunate accident later) who was Brin's and Page's professor and mentor.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajeev_Motwani

Motwani joined Stanford soon after U.C. Berkeley. Motwani was one of the co-authors (with Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Terry Winograd) of an influential early paper on the PageRank algorithm, the basis for Google's search techniques. He also co-authored another seminal search paper What Can You Do With A Web In Your Pocket with those same authors.[3]

He was also an author of two widely-used theoretical computer science textbooks, Randomized Algorithms (Cambridge University Press 1995, ISBN 978-0-521-47465-8, with Prabhakar Raghavan) and Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation (2nd ed., Addison-Wesley, 2000, with John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman).

Prior to his involvement with Google, Motwani founded the Mining Data at Stanford project (MIDAS), an umbrella organization for several groups looking into new and innovative data management concepts. His research included data privacy, web search, robotics, and computational drug design

I think Google has been first in implementing the proposed EME standard in HTML5 video. The ARM Chromebooks have been already using it to see Netflix video since a few months. Netflix can use Silverlight in IE11, but ARM Chromebooks don't have an alternative way of support and don't forget that Youtube doesn't like people easily downloading their videos like they do now.

http://hothardware.com/News/Netflix-Backing-HTML5-But-Not-Wi...

And I think Chrome nightlies had the web DRM in place but were not enabled by default? Don't quote me on that.

Anyway, I think Firefox will be forced follow Chrome and IE now to implement DRM in HTML5 video. Firefox does not have the market power it once had thanks to Chrome.

Remember how the whole H.264 in HTML5 support thing played out for Firefox? They were on the side of not supporting it, and Google said it would remove it from Chrome, but that never happened, and Mozilla finally got tired of the effects of "Firefox doesn't support this site's video, let me use a browser that does" and added support.

The same thing is pretty much guaranteed to happen with EME as sites start using EME to stream video and IE, Chrome and Safari add support.

Most imitating efforts will need to be redone or abandoned to look current. And what will happen if people try to imitate iOS 7?

Presumably, Apple has a few new patents for iOS 7’s interface and behavior. As we’ve seen, this won’t prevent copying, but it can at least increase the cost. Any efforts to copy the new UI are going to have a dark cloud of potential litigation hanging over them.

This is strange.

Lets see the design principles behind Metro:

1) Content over Chrome

2) Authentically digital

3) Concentration on beautiful typography (see how it caused Google and Apple to talk about fonts in their Holo and iOS7 UI overhauls)

4) Removal of faux realistic and 3d elements

5) Flat look

6) Tasteful, subtle animations during transitions.

See the image on the left here.

http://www.redmondpie.com/ios-7-vs-ios-6-side-by-side-visual...

Apply the above principles to it in your mind.

See how similar it is to the image on the right. Ask someone else to take their opinion.

In fact to me it appears that Apple has in some places gone more overboard with the above principles than even Microsoft.

From DHH's article http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3536-apple-the-organizational...

As we watched Apple unveil iOS7, the 37signals Campfire room quickly turned to awe of what they had achieved. A redesign so shocking and deep bestowed upon a product so popular left many mouths agape. Whether you happened to like the final product wasn’t as relevant as marveling at the vision, drive, and sheer determination to pull it off.

Apple has a way of making people feel like that.

But what followed next is at least as interesting: We all sought to explain just how they did it. Is it all Ive’s eye? Is it that they explore more ideas than anyone else? Is it never accepting “good enough”? Forgoing customer input and trusting their own instinct? Hundreds of triple-A designers and developers?

I needn't even quote Gruber.

This is not to say there's nothing new or no innovation in iOS 7(there is), or even that Apple is wrong to copy(it is not) or that I think it's an exact copy(it's not), but it makes me feel Microsoft's designers(who DHH implies are F level) are basically chopped liver who are destined to live in obscurity. There isn't even a passing mention of them!

Can you imagine the reactions of the above writers if the situation was reversed? Remember "Redmond, start your photocopiers."?

I am not sure if I am missing something here, someone new to their leanings might even mistake it to be parody or sarcasm.

This idea of "adding" sentences is ridiculous, and my guess is it's only (ab)used as a way to force people into agreeing to declare themselves guilty, and the prosecutors going "easy on them" and only asking for 30 years in prison, instead of 100, if they win.

Unrelated to this case, if you don't do that, won't it encourage people who are knowingly committing big crimes to commit smaller crimes on the way? Why would you want to essentially grant immunity because someone committed a bigger crime? Where's the deterrent?

The signing keys are the weakest link in the security infrastructure and are essentially the keys to the kingdom. We have seen this happen repeatedly, I think it's time for all companies to build a lot of safeguards around the use of their private signing keys, like making employees input it manually everytime, or even split it across multiple employees. For Opera at least, I don't think they do releases that frequently.

I like RMS(even attended one of his talks, was fun) and he has been surprising prescient about many things.

But he still seems to be falling victim to the "Smarter people are more likely to believe in false conspiracy theories" rule.

In his post against Ubuntu's local searches being sent to Amazon, he claimed as-a-matter-of-fact that Windows sends local searches to an internet server and his friend proved so. This may be true in Windows 8.1 but is certainly not true beforehand. I figure that if someone else said something similar about FOSS in the same casual way, RMS himself would characterize(rightly so) it as FUD tactics.

Still, I do think that we need more people like him rather than everyone else who seem to be aligning themselves with some or the other corporate entity and thus lose their moral compass in the process.

Only if you forget all the financial headlines during August 2008 through 2011.

Have you actually used Windows Phone or Windows 8 for any length of time? The animations are very subtle on actual devices and work very well with the flat look.

Can't speak for the animations being screencasted across the internet via streaming video though which can introduce lag, jitter, FPS drops and artifacts, especially for fast moving scenes like animations. I'll reserve my judgment till I install the preview.

Live video of the keynote at BUILD http://channel9.msdn.com/

Live blog http://live.theverge.com/live-microsoft-build-2013/

Ballmer being his usual trademark excitable self. http://d35lb3dl296zwu.cloudfront.net/uploads/photo/image/130...

Honest question, isn't there NSA written code in Linux via the SELinux patches that were integrated?

This would be much less of a problem if we could collapse comment trees like on Reddit. It would be just easy to minimize and ignore. I think someone made an extension for that.

There is only one law which says exclusively. The "primarily" thing is an interpretation of the law by IRS.

No it's more nuanced than the 51% number.

The actual law passed by Congress says "exclusively for social welfare". IRS interpretation changed that to "primarily social welfare" a few decades ago which is actually wrong since IRS cannot make laws, only implement them as written. There was a huge ruckus in congress over this matter. Can't find the video now but here's an article:

http://www.psmag.com/politics/the-irss-tea-party-tax-row-how...

That comment appears to be highly insightful and very relevant to the topic being discussed here. Low effort content eventually displaces high effort content in high traffic websites. I have seen this in every community I have been part of, I have spent the last 10 years on Slashdot, 7 years on Reddit and 4 years on HN and that comment is spot on.

I can only pray that SO doesn't fall victim to it too and I support the admins in restricting content as long as it is subject to oversight and is not overdone.

You could apply the same logic to almost any passion that a person can have. Tennis, racing, singing, pick your choice. I was up till 1am last weekend playing tennis under lights. Overdo anything, and you're likely to get messed up.

I think you're reading too much into it. It's just a pitch, effective or not and I think it relates more to deciding to go for the idea and the "Eureka!" moment rather than the weeks and months working on it after doing so.

One solution might be to link to a live blog or page which has the latest updates on the story, title it "Click here to get the latest on this story' and then make sure it stays in the first 10 or so stories and let people have fun in the comments with updates and what not.