fjorder

I've hated iTunes for over a decade now, and that's not just because it's horrible, bloated software with a terrible interface. Almost any other method of buying an album will send more money to the artist than iTunes does. If you like a band enough to buy their music, why not put a little effort into supporting them? (e.g. If they sell their album through their own website, use it!)

It is a nice shortcut, but I think they added it mostly because they belatedly realized how much metro sucks for accessing settings from the desktop.

If you're a keyboard and mouse user working primarily in the desktop, it is very jarring to jump into the full-screen metro interface every single time you want to do something start-menu related. Metro isn't well optimized for keyboard & mouse users either. e.g. With the Win7 start menu, you could type in "computer management" hit enter and get that panel. In Win8 you must additionally mouse over and select the settings search category (I'm on a Win7 machine, so I'm not sure that computer management even shows up properly in metro without tweaking!). Effectively, for desktop users Metro is less efficient in addition to being jarring.

Install classic shell (classicshell.net) and your problems are over. It puts a start menu back into Win8, and it works pretty well. There are no search categories, and the cheese metro hides from you is in plain sight! Once this is on your machine Win8 is basically Win7, only better. Highly recommended!

If you're setting up a new Win8 box, classic shell is available through ninite as well, which is pretty handy.

Here's an interesting line of reasoning:

Had Adria posted the photo of the two men and made her claims about their conversation anonymously, would they have been taken as seriously?

Probably not. How many people are fired over a harmless photo and unsubstantiated anonymous claims? It was Adria's reputation and position that lent weight to her claims and got mr-hank fired. Now, let's follow up with another question:

The next time Adria Richards makes a similar claim, will it be taken seriously?

Almost certainly not.

The negative effects of Richards' actions were only made possible by being tied to her identity, which is now basically discredited. This is interesting, because it shows that social media is really starting to settle down and behave like more traditional manners of human interaction. Completely anonymous interactions are still possible, but lack power. Conversely, identity carries power, but if that power that is misused it quickly dissipates.

When I first read the reactions to this incident, I initially felt sympathy for mr-hank and outrage over his firing. This naturally led to anger against Richards, and I had to wonder if this anger might cause people to overreact and shame her excessively. However, this is exactly what would happen in a traditional human social setting, and it's healthy. She abused her power and hurt another person, failed to show any form of remorse, and now this reaction by the community is disarming her so that she can't immediately harm others. She will have to earn that power back, and it's not going to be easy. This is as it should be. The HN community also appears to be rallying around mr-hank and trying to see that he's looked after. Again, this is very heartening to see.

Like nature in Jurassic park, established patterns of human interaction in a community setting seem to find a way.

Interesting article. Allow me to add a few fun details...

Early agriculturalists actually had it much rougher than this article implies for a real kicker of a reason:

Wild plants suck as crop plants.

Maize was domesticated from a bushy grass called teosinte (Agriculture arose independently in the Americas a little later than in the Middle East). Google that and see how closely it resembles the big juicy corn-cobs you're used to. Where corn has giant cobs crammed with hundreds upon hundreds of big juicy kernals, teosinte has a miserly amount of sad, pathetic, and tiny little kernals. You'd have to grow an entire field full of teosinte to equal the output of a small patch of corn. If a modern farmer saw one of his fields being overgrown with teosinte he'd probably spray it with herbicide. If some contagion wiped out all of our crop plants and we had to go back to wild crops we would be absolutely humped as a species. Now, imagine how difficult it must have been to come up with the idea of settling down and growing crops to live on when the crops you could grow were basically weeds!

In fact, teosinte was so far from being a viable crop that some have proposed theories about intermediate steps. For example, consider the Beer (or chicha) theory of civilization! Somehow, somebody discovered that you can ferment teosinte into something that tastes weird and makes you act even weirder. Fun stuff! While teosinte was not a crop you could build a viable farm on, maybe some hunter-gatherers stumbled upon the process of making chicha. At first, collecting wild teosinte would have taken a lot of work. Far too much for the calories yielded. However, they probably had the time for the occasional novelty! Being lazy, these hunter-gatherers probably realized they could scatter some of the seeds they collected in a specific spot, continue their wanderings, and find a much denser patch of wild teosinte in the same spot a year later. They might even have started selecting which seeds to scatter, either fortuitously preferring the smaller ones for flavor or being smart enough to deliberately select the mutants with higher yields to sow for next year. Perhaps the first steps towards agriculture (in the new world at least) were taken by the paleolithic equivalent of frat-boys! Actually, no archaeologist would ever say that. They would instead say, "priests and shamans" used the beer for religious ceremonies. (Hot tip: If archaeologists have no clue what something they find is for, they usually say it has "possible religious significance".) It makes no real difference what their reasons were. In this theory, the selective breeding of teosinte to produce maize can start long before people actually have to rely on maize to supply much in the way of calories. Humankind's urge to get plastered may have ultimately led to civilization!

Wait! There's more! Proponents of this theory have also pointed out that beer solves a lot of problems early civilizations probably had. Take water quality for example. If a lot of hunter-gatherer's with no concept of germs or hygiene were to settle next to a river, you can bet that the river would be pretty deadly to drink out of before too long. Fortunately, if you take some water, combine it with grain and ferment it, the result is a tasty fermented beverage that is safe to drink thanks to the wonders of alcohol! (Early fermented beverages probably had a pretty low alchohol content and packed a healthy dose of calories. Perfect for quenching the thirst and nourishing hard working agriculturalists from dawn till dusk!) I could go on for a while...

TL;DR - Beer, rather than being an evil byproduct of civilization, may be what gave us both agriculture and civilization! Beer is good.

Ham-fisted attempt to tie this back into all-things entrepreneurial: The development of agriculture was a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg problem. You can't have agriculture without crop-plants, but how could we have developed crop plants without agriculture? Beer. Sometimes, something that looks like a total waste of time becomes the foundation of very serious things (TM), such as the whole of human civilization. Thanks to the adderall-fuelled march of progress we now get to see this process play out in a matter of years or even months! Keep your eye on frivolous crap!

Contrary to the claims of the extremetech article, they have not closed all loopholes in this experiment. Specifically, the detection loophole has not been closed. This loophole is caused by not being able to detect a high enough portion of the photons your source emits. A paranoid person might argue that the ones you do detect are not a representative sample. For example, some devious third party could be choosing which photons you detect in such a way that your results are skewed. Yes... This is a paranoid suggestion, but closing loopholes is all about satisfying the paranoid.

In this paper they invoke the assumption of "fair sampling". i.e. They assume what they do detect is representative. Ergo, they have not closed the detection loophole in this experiment. Fair sampling is a perfectly reasonable assumption to make and is very commonly used, so this should not be interpreted as invalidating their results. It just leaves room for improvement in the future, since single photon detectors with sufficient efficiency to close the detection loophole do now exist (They are very bleeding edge).

Note that the paper is correct and does not make the claim that "all loopholes" have been closed. The extremetech article got it wrong.

They test a CHSH Bell inequality in this paper. This rules out local hidden variable theories. Non-local hidden variable (NLHV) theories are another matter entirely. Indeed, some NLHV theories may reproduce the predictions of quantum theory exactly.

Hollywood is famous for playing so fast and loose with tax-loopholes that I just can't trust any of the numbers quoted. Practically every Hollywood blockbuster loses money on paper when it comes time to pay taxes, so you have to wonder if they're reporting those same cooked numbers to drum up sympathy. Let's also not forget that Hollywood films are filmed all over the place to save money, and usually in places where studios are heavily subsidized. Governments see a local film industry as a cultural gem, and pay through the nose to attract productions. I find it difficult to believe that all those free-rides aren't having an impact on the bottom lines of film companies.

That article is not good. Biased reporting based on a biased study. Yes, all writing is biased, but sometimes evidence suggests it's worse than usual, and this is one of those cases. From the cradle of the study to the grave of your mind, everything in the chain producing this article has a clear bias.

Study: Published by the "Post Carbon Institute". They're not even trying.

Article: Written by an author whose only credentials are a pretty face and a B.Sc. in biology. Can she spot bad stats? Probably not. Is she likely to take any damning claim about the oil sands the study makes at face value without a second thought? Yes.

Publisher: insideclimatenews.org. They're a little more cagey about revealing their biases than the Post Carbon Institute, which is to say they're still about as subtle as a club to the head.

Now, don't get me wrong. I live close to the oil sands and will pay a greater price than most reading this for that oil. I am not in the O&G industry, but I have deep concerns about how the oilsands are being extracted. Specifically, groundwater seepage from tailings ponds is probably one of the nastiest local consequences. Perhaps even more concerning is that accountability is going down as foreign ownership climbs. Just as no Hollywood blockbuster makes money on paper these days, my concern is that once the oilsands are no longer commercially viable, parent companies will quietly abscond with the profits while the oilsands companies go bankrupt and fail to follow through on the long-term cleanup that will be necessary.

However, all this is no excuse for giving a pass to blatantly biased articles. When we give attention to articles such as this it detracts attention from well-researched independent studies reported on by people who actually have the chops to spot bad stats and tease apart biased studies. It makes those who are against oilsands development look like a bunch of clueless tree-hugging hippies!

Let me rephrase the question in way that is probably more likely to be thought about by a second-term president:

"Given that you obviously feel you can kill foreign citizens in their own countries along with an "acceptable" number of innocents without fear of reprisal, do you feel you can do the same in your own country where you have complete authority?"

While I feel many of Obama's policies are laudable, I think his wanton disregard for international law is reprehensible and ultimately doing more harm than good. Extraterritorial strikes are based on the classic notion of attrition warfare. i.e. If you kill enough of the enemy eventually there won't be any left. This strategy failed in Vietnam, failed in Iraq, and is in the final stages of failing in Afghanistan. What should make Pakistan any different? If it weren't for the Taliban's own atrocities (e.g. The shooting of Malala Yousufzai), anti-American sentiment and pro-Taliban support would be at an all time high due to outrage over the regular violation of Pakistan's sovereignty by drone attacks.

These strikes also set a very ugly precedent. As private use of UAV's begins to take off, it's going to become increasingly hard to prevent foreign interests from using them on U.S. soil. e.g. How will police be able to distinguish a tacocopter in San Francisco from a UAV packing a charge of explosives for an assassination? If foreign countries have the capability of killing U.S. citizens on U.S. soil who are inconvenient to their interests, what legitimate protest could the U.S. possibly raise against the practice at this point?

I sincerely hope Google keeps the cap where it is. That just might motivate copyright holders to reduce the number of erroneous take-down notices they issue.

It's a way to point out how wasteful spending on the TSA has become. People lack intuition for numbers on the scale we are talking about. Does $8.71 billion seem huge compared to $8.70 billion? (I'd sure like to be making $0.01 Billion a year!) By suggesting something specific be done with the funds one can give some impression of the potential that is being wasted.

For the record, I'm not disputing the fact that airport security is ncessary. I'm just arguing that it's only good in moderation. The TSA is both too intrusive for the security they provide and extremely wasteful. Back-scatter X-ray machines are a great example of this. The first models used were not adequately tested and proved to be easily defeated. The solution? Replace them, at tremendous expense, with a new generation of machines that have also not been adequately tested. At the same time, x-ray back-scatter vans are being rolled out on a truly alarming scale. It's a cash bonanza for someone!

The TSA's budget is just a tad short of half that of NASA's. Cutting back on the little-old-lady-molesting budget and giving the cash to space-explorers seems like a no-brainer to me. However, I'm not an American.

Re: Pricing Fairness

The article claims that if the Cable industry offered pricing based on what is fair, it would offer very cheap plans for little old ladies who barely use their connections. This definition of "fair" assumes that what you pay is proportional to how much you use it.

The real world almost never works this way.

Does a new car cost less if you drive it less? Perhaps a little in terms of maintenance and gas, but the initial cost is still the same. Does a banana cost less if you only eat half of it? Does a comb cost less if you're bald?

This leads us to the other definition of "fairness", which is also not often closely associated with real-world prices. i.e. What you pay is proportional to the cost of producing it. If Cable plans were priced this way, a Granny plan would be just a few dollars cheaper than the super-high-use plan. Why? Bandwidth is cheap compared to last-mile installation and maintenance costs. The cost of getting the first bit to grandma is astronomically more expensive than getting the last gigabyte to a heavy bandwidth user.

So how does the real world work? In the overwhelming majority of cases, companies charge whatever people are willing to pay. This price frequently has little or no correlation to actual cost. This is why airlines typically lose money while cable providers do pretty well for themselves. The NCTA's claims that "fairness" is the motivation behind usage-based billing is complete BS. People who use more bandwidth are willing to pay more. That's the reason for usage based billing. Fairness has nothing to do with it.

Others have said it, and they're right. Skeuomorphism has become dated and Apple is now playing catch-up with Android and Windows. Apple has been playing catch-up with Android in terms of features for quite some time now, so this is not new.

This is, however, so new to Gruber that he is apparently still in denial. While it's far too early to say, one has to wonder if Apple is headed for a period of uninspired decline, similar to what they experienced in the 90's. Could Gruber end up like the mac-zealots of the 90's who proclaimed the superiority of OS9 when, in fact, it was inferior in every way to its competitors?

It bothers me when people say that science conflicts with religion. It certainly conflicts with specific religious dogmas, such as young-earth creationism, but the frontiers of science fall well short of proving or disproving the existence of any possible deity.

If you go strictly by evidence, agnosticism is a tenable position, but both theism and atheism require leaps of faith beyond scientific fact. As such, atheists who claim science is on their side bother me almost as much as young-earth creationists.

It is being used in commercial systems (e.g. idquantique). Practical implementations are prone to vulnerabilities, but none have been found that cannot be remedied. Some techniques such as device independent or measurement device independent QKD offer to make it far more difficult to come up with attacks in the future too.

The #1 advantage of QKD is not that the methods being used today will be immune to all attacks found in the future. It's that quantum states are unclonable, so there's no way to archive cipher-text for future attacks, as can be done with classically encrypted messages. e.g. If you send encrypt a message and send it via email today, the encryption method has to stand up to advances in algorithms and computational hardware for as long as the information remains sensitive. If you send something via QKD, an eavesdropper must break the protocol at the moment you send the message or it will be safe for all time.

Authenticating strangers, as in credit card transactions, is something that quantum computing may disrupt. QKD can be used safely by people who have met at some point in the past, but we probably have a bit of time before CC transactions need to be encrypted by QKD. i.e. While you should probably not send medical records or state secrets via many classical encryption protocols now, your CC info will change in a couple years so it's not as big of an issue if your transactions are cracked a few years after that.

I think it was Margaret Atwood who described civilization as the intelligent trading of "freedoms to" for "freedoms from". For example, you can trade the right for everyone, regardless of criminal background, to buy automatic assault weapons for freedom from the extreme violence that comes with that freedom to.

The U.S. already has some gun control laws, but the data presented here suggests they don't go far enough. However, gun control laws are always going to come down to how much people value their freedom to versus their freedom from.

The last I checked the MTBF on SSD's was substantially longer than for hard-drives. Barring firmware bugs you should probably strike that off your list of reasons for not using a SSD.

Even if you do think SSD's are horribly unreliable, they're so fast that they're still worth using. Just put your OS and programs on a SSD and store your data on a HD. If the SSD fails, you've lost nothing you can't reinstall easily. I started doing this a couple of years ago and there's absolutely no going back.

The author of this article seems to be very concerned about something, but I'm not entirely sure I understood.

He implies that, under Obamacare, doctors will be compelled to provide services to patients at rates far lower than is currently standard, similar to how the cardiac surgeon was trying to compel the author, as an anesthesiologist, to work at a rate he considered too low.

Under Obamacare, will doctors be compelled to do work at sub-standard rates, or will they merely have the option to do so? In Canada, the government pays doctors specific fees for each patient seen or each procedure performed. Doctors can therefore take on as much, or as little, work as they wish and are paid accordingly. This system does have its drawbacks, but nothing like what the author of this article is describing occurs.

If, under Obamacare, doctors had the option of taking as much work on as they want at government-set rates, supply and demand would soon force the government to offer competitive rates. If doctors are instead legally compelled to offer care at substandard rates, then there could be a problem as the author claims.

The truth probably lies somewhere in between what the flaming fanboy and Mr.Disgruntled are saying.

Apple seems to make the most money when they open up a new market and lock out the competition for a long period of time, as they did with the iPod. The iPhone's dominance was challenged quicker than the iPod's, and the iPad's quicker still. If you consider 7" tablets their own market, Apple is actually late to the party. Why are other manufacturers catching up quicker or even taking the lead? They all remember the iPod.

So what does this mean for Apple? The profits aren't going to come as easy as they did before because the competition moves a lot quicker than they used to. If Apple opens up a new market they're going to face competition in it almost immediately because the competition knows they have to move fast and is capable of doing so. No more decades of dominance and easy-money. Does that mean Apple is doomed? Absolutely not. Apple is still wildly profitable even though they are no longer completely dominant in even one market they make products for. Their production chain is lean enough that they can compete in markets dominated by commodity pricing. That focus on production efficiency is not going to change under Tim Cook. Quite the opposite!

There does seem to be evidence that we'll see an extended period of decline for Apple under Cook though. In the last couple years Apple has released several half-baked products and polish seems to be declining. e.g. OSX Lion and Mountain Lion have both had an aberrant number of bugs, even by the standards of other OS's. Jobs, unlike what many people think, was never an idea man. His value was in knowing who to copy and when to say "No", and Cook needed to say no to things like Apple Maps, or at least give them more time to bake. Even if Cook has truly horrible tech instincts it will probably take a very long time for Apple to decline to the point of losing money. Despite how far MS fell in some people's eyes, they never failed to turn a profit. Apple is also sitting on such a gargantuan pile of cash that they could lose money hand-over-fist for decades before running into real trouble.

Apple might not continue to be the leading juggernaut it's been for the last decade, but they're in no danger of going out of business.

As Neil Young put it, "Piracy is the new radio".

A pirate torrent site providing promotion for artists at the artists' request is not something new. Private music torrent trackers have been doing this for several years now.

For example, take Anamanaguchi (a NY based band). Their 2009 album, "Dawn Metropolis" was featured, at Anamanaguchi's request, on Waffles and soon became the #1 most downloaded album on that tracker. A year later Anamanaguchi was cutting the soundtrack for Scott Pilgrim vs the World. Yes, this kind of promotion really works.

What scares the big record labels is not that piracy is the new radio, but that they don't control it. It becomes very difficult to predict what will become successful if music trends are left to arise organically from the listeners themselves rather than board-room focus groups. A lack of predictability is bad for an industry that is in the habit of throwing millions of promotion dollars behind artists in order to manufacture success. If the labels can't predict the trends, how do they know which horses to back? While theft of music is certainly an issue, I think it's of secondary concern to labels. It's the unpredictability that piracy is injecting into popular music that is really going to mess up their business.

I was rather encouraged by the headline, only to discover that instead of ripping out unnecessary security theater they're actually just wasting more money on new machines. Man do the companies making those things ever have good lobbyists! By screwing up they actually get even more business!

This article critiques the theatricality of MS's release process quite thoroughly and concludes that it is not the same as Apple's.

This is true, but nobody should give a crap.

What's important is that Windows 8, the surface, etc. are actually good.

Until Apple came along and turned computers into fashion accessories, brand image didn't matter so much. Now it clearly does. What the author ignores is that brand image is a product of many things, with press releases being only a small part for most companies (They are a somewhat larger part of Apple's brand). A long track record of high quality and innovative products coupled with clever advertising is what makes or breaks a brand like Apple's more than anything else.

Microsoft's brand is currently rather mediocre. Missteps over the last decade have really hurt it, but Windows 7 did go a long way to help it recover. Vista, as maligned as it was, was actually a really good OS saddled with some bad default settings (e.g. The overly obtrusive UAC). Windows 7 brought some minor innovations to the interface, greatly improved the default settings, and added a little bit of "cool" with details as subtle as just adding some unusually funky and artistic default backgrounds. Windows 7's default backgrounds made OSX look like the bland, boring corporate OS that Apple has long tried to brand Windows to be!

Movie studios often keep stinkers under strict wraps until opening weekend. If they advertise enough and prevent the film from being savaged by critics until the day of release they can still get a good opening weekend out of a poor film. Good films are frequently shown to critics or at film festivals well in advance of general release. This "festival route" builds word of mouth.

If MS had kept Windows 8 under wraps until a big press event this month and then hyped it as the most awesome thing ever, just like Apple does with their products, few people would likely believe them. By broadly distributing a release candidate for Windows 8 and showing the Surface publicly prior to release, MS took the "festival route" and built a big word-of-mouth effect. MS's brand isn't what Apple is, and they were smart enough to realize they have to do things differently, and did.

Myhrvold is thinking about printer "piracy" in exactly the same way that RIAA thinks about music "piracy", and we all know how productive that's been! Placing artificial legal limits on distribution technology simply doesn't work. Makers of objects that are 3D-printable need to learn from the recording industry's mistakes. Instead of trying to legislate away "piracy", they need to find ways to provide enough perceived value to consumers that they can compete. They need to learn from companies like Apple, Amazon, or Valve, not BMI, Sony, or Warners.

3D-printing is going to be rather limited at first. You're not likely to be able to 3D-print something as simple as a thermos-mug for quite some time! However, there is going to be room to use materials and construction methods that make traditionally manufactured goods distinct and desirable. There will also be ample opportunity to provide services surrounding the sale of 3D models, as Valve, Amazon, and Apple currently do for software sales.

One thing that is different from the music industry is that there will likely be a big market for bespoke designs. People are going to want items that are unique and tailored to their needs. Designing for mass production could give way to designing for individuals and industrial design could become a cottage craft. In this scenario, designers would make most of their money off of bespoke commissions. There may actually be an explosion in demand for designers since traditional manufacturing processes are not really suited to produce more than a few designs at a time. While bespoke designs may wind up being shared by buyers with "pirates", buyers will pay the cost of losing the uniqueness they paid for if they do share models. This is quite different from music. While people want their friends to listen to the music they like, they generally want to have distinctive items from them.

Similar to the labels that used to serve as distributors for music, manufacturers who only produce goods that can also be 3D-printed will be the big losers. Just as Artists who have treated "piracy" as the "new radio" have benefited, designers could also greatly benefit in a world with ubiquitous 3D printing. e.g. If a coffee mug you designed is trending on the "pirate" sites, you'll probably get a lot of bespoke commissions!

The prospects provided by 3D printing are especially enticing for consumers, and not just because it will be possible to find free designs and (presumably) save money. Consumers will have direct contact with designers and freedom from the constraints on design imposed by mass production. We are going to see the design of 3D printable models evolve to meet consumer needs faster and more effectively than at any point in human history. Whatever you're doing, the tools are just going to get more and more dialed in and perfect. You also won't need to go looking for a new design when you have an old design that was perfect, as we so often have to do now.

The only reason for DRM to exist is to protect the dinosaurs. Hopefully we've learned enough from the music and movie industries that we can be happy just letting them evolve or die.

I meant for "little" to refer to practical results. I wasn't trying to bring up corruption or inefficiencies in procurement. I was trying to highlight the U.S. military's obsession with tech to the point of neglecting low-tech solutions that actually work. e.g. How much has the F-22 Raptor program really helped in Iraq in Afghanistan, and how much better off would the situation in both countries be now if that money had simply been spent on more troops?

The U.S. relationship with war is evolving in a difficult to predict fashion. Most nations operate on the premise that the best way to win a war is not to get into it in the first place. However, war serves a useful purpose for the U.S.. It gives them a chance to test out the latest tech, make their contractors some money, reduce unemployment, and give the latest batch of west-point kids their manhood rights. The U.S. will likely keep getting involved in wars periodically no matter how flimsy the pretext for them is. What nature those wars will take is what is really interesting.

Obama's "we can kill anyone we want, anywhere we want, anytime we want" policy really does put an interesting spin on things. If extraterritorial strikes had been commonplace ten years ago the Afghanistan war might never have happened. Assuming bin Laden hadn't gone to ground by that point, they might simply have executed him without the Taliban state's permission, just as he was eventually killed without Pakistan's knowledge or permission. Avoiding a war might have been worth the dubious legality of such an action, but it would have let a truly nasty genie out of its bottle (one that the U.S. later released anyways without stopping a war!). What will happen when other nations inevitably follow the U.S.'s example? Also, it's one thing to execute terrorists in this manner, but could the U.S. eventually pursue "regime change" this way? How many pentagon generals are currently chomping at the bit to send drones out after Ali Khamenei?

In the end , the root of the problem really is that war is good for business and the U.S. political system is a thrall to business interests. Fix that and everything changes!

The problem with focusing on all people is that KDE will never be used by such a broad group until how Linux is distributed is fundamentally changed. Maybe it's good to be ready for the unlikely scenario in which KDE one day comes installed on tablets being marketed to your mom, but perhaps KDE can become more useful to those who use it if those developing it recognize that it's appeal is inherently limited.

In order to be useful, hand gestures are not something that should be tied to a specific input device as they have been up until now. The goal should be for a vocabulary of gestures to work consistently across all devices. e.g. You should be able to adjust volume by turning an imaginary knob whether you're working with a tablet and using this wrist-sensor, sitting at a desk with a web-cam, or sitting on your couch in front of a Kinect sensor.

Microsoft is positioning itself to be the author of leading OS's running in all of these environments, so they should build in gesture support that uses any form of gesture capture available and possibly even pools all devices available in a given instant to improve fidelity. e.g. These wrist devices are unlikely to be perfect, nor are Kinect devices, but both of them working together should be able to improve overall fidelity.

If Microsoft does this well enough, it may one day seem strange to think of a computer that cannot "see" you. Perhaps that's a bit creepy...

I'd like to see some kind of vision, focus, or specific goals for the future on that page. Being nice to each other and concentrating on the end-user are certainly good things, but where is KDE going next? Broad strokes here. Is it going to focus on being the best desktop environment out there or is it going to try to include tablets? What kind of user is it going to focus on? Is it in a race to the newbie filled bottom with Unity and OSX or is it trying to appeal to power-users? What weaknesses most urgently need to be addressed?

Nobody has to lay down the law and say what can and cannot be done with KDE projects, but expressing specific aspirations to motivate developers would be very helpful to the platform.

One thing that always amazes me about the U.S.'s defense spending is how little they seem to be able to buy with it.

Yes, they have all sorts of cool gadgets, but the U.S. military can't even establish order in a primitive backwater like Afghanistan, and that's with help from a dozen other nations! The "shock and awe" campaign in Iraq (a.k.a. terror bombing, as it would have been called in WWII) was a tremendous display of military might, but what did it accomplish besides ensuring that there would be lots of rebuilding work for contractors and royally pissing off the populace? Any hope for U.S. forces to be greeted as liberators went up in Tritonal-fueled fire with that campaign. Old-fashioned boots on the ground with constant close contact with civilians might have helped with damage-control, but that's not the U.S. military's way. The U.S. military's way is to bunker down and send out choppers and mechanized patrols that shoot up anything that looks remotely suspicious, only to be blown to bits by an IED the locals would have told soldiers about if they had walked through instead. Iraq is still in the grasp of terrorism (5 killed today: http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=8545451) and is more anti-American than ever.

The latest technology to be abused is drones. They're deadly. They're sexy. They're completely safe (for Americans)! It must seem like a coup to military brass to be able to blow terrorists into a hot mess of crispy giblets without sending a single human being within a hundred kilometers of the target. Meanwhile, civilians are killed, sovereignty of allies is violated, and enough anti-American sentiment is sown to more than make up for the deaths of a few terrorists in the long run. Then some American pundit asks, "Why do they hate us?".

This is just the latest chapter in the U.S. military's long obsession with technology. The Vietnam war didn't turn out the way the U.S. wanted for a host of reasons. Just one was that the military thought they could control territory by flying from hotspot to hotspot without bothering with permanent forces on the ground. A site would be labelled as a hotbed of enemy activity so the military would fly in several choppers full of troops and airlift in some artillery. Those forces would typically not stray from the safe radius of artillery coverage, so all the NVA had to do was get outside that radius if they didn't want to engage. The U.S.'s obsession with technology functionally handed complete initiative to their enemy.

The U.S. military needs to stop viewing wars as a proving ground for the latest high-tech killing devices and start focusing on results. Put the toys away and focus on what works. Get out of the humvees and apaches and walk through those contested regions, talking to people. Yes, some will get sniped, but this is the only way to establish order, and that will save more lives in the long run. Instead of spending billions on drones to kill terrorists in Pakistan, spend a few millions to make Pakistan want to hunt them down themselves. In short, stop trying to solve everything with new hardware and use some brains!