Living in the ass-end of nowhere is a choice. No one made you do it.

It's beyond me why people confuse operating systems with web-browsers.

Because if we can turn the web browser into a real, workable OS (not the half-assed imitation it is now), then we can break the monopoly of Microsoft Windows once and for all.

I want it to live on my local computer where companies can't charge me $5, $10, or $250 per month or I lose access to all my critical data.

But they can already do this even if the app does live on your local computer. See: Adobe Creative Cloud.

No! WebAssembly is designed to be a complement to, not replacement of, JavaScript. While WebAssembly will, over time, allow many languages to be compiled to the Web, JavaScript has an incredible amount of momentum and will remain the single, privileged (as described above) dynamic language of the Web....

That's disappointing. JavaScript is an absolutely terrible language, and it's insane that it has been the only choice for client-side Web scripting/programming up until now. Hopefully this is just diplomatic BS. Once WebAssembly is updated to support access to the DOM (the current version can't do that), then there is no good reason for anyone to use JavaScript for anything ever again.

That's completely, utterly irrelevant. Unless the woman who made it is the Archetype who speaks for all women and whose opinion is globally considered to be the final word.

Well then, you can't claim feminists speak for all women either. Not when polls have repeatedly shown that less than one in four women is a feminist.

I recall 20 years ago when Deep Blue won against Kasparov, people said that an AI would never be able to brute-force Go well enough to beat a human master. It may not have used only brute-force techniques, but AlphaGo surely did win. I expect that arrangements are being made for the AI to face off against the #1 world Go champion (Sedol was #3 IIRC) and it may even take some tweaking for it to triumph. However this raises the question: where do we move the goalposts to next? What does AI have to accomplish to change how we fundamentally think of it, and consider it as 'real AI'?

Go is just a board game. It may be harder to brute-force than chess, but it's still a conceptually simple game with straightforward rules. An algorithm to beat it may have to be more complex and adaptive than a chess algorithm, but it still doesn't come close to what the average person would consider "artificial intelligence".

I'd be far more inclined to see it as a step towards "real AI" if we had a computerized system that could write songs, stories, or poems which met human standards for quality and originality.

I'm no fan of Hillary Clinton by any means, but I find it very disturbing that the NSA apparently outranks the Secretary of State. WTF?

the base spec at academic is more in line with the lack of power. recently we bought the 5k 27" imacs at a base price of £1245 I think. overpriced but compared tro the arse fucking that dell indulges in with its 'partners', not shocking.

It might be overpriced if you're only looking at the CPU, GPU, and RAM. But don't forget that the 27" iMac includes a 5K panel that supports wide gamut and is by all accounts excellent in calibration and color reproduction. A Dell 27" 5K monitor by itself is over $1,500 - compared to that, getting an equivalent monitor plus a whole computer for about $1770 US (based on the British price you listed above) seems like a bargain.

And if the university is full of creative types running the Adobe apps, then they probably really do need quality monitors.

Apple has pretty decisively broken ranks with Nvidia. This was shown by their use of AMD's aging Cape Verde GPU in the 2015 MacBook Pro, even though a Maxwell chip like GM107 would have provided better performance and efficiency. Partly this is because of legal battles between the two companies, and partly because Apple is going all-in on OpenCL (which AMD supports better).

If there's a Mac Pro refresh this year, expect Intel Broadwell-E CPUs and AMD Polaris GPUs.

The Mac Pro. The old Mac Pros used to have the ability to use RAID. This one? One SSD, and that's it? For a computer that will cost you $4000 for something with reasonable specs, this is just unacceptable. It also is a bitch to rack, requiring a third party kit.

You're supposed to be keeping your bulk storage on a NAS, not the local machine. That's the modern way of doing things. About the only task this isn't adequate for is video editing, so that may require an external RAID box. But why should everyone else need to buy a massive, bloated tower when only a handful of workstations actually need it?

And why would you want to rack-mount this system? It's a workstation, not a server.

From a big-picture perspective, this is an incredibly boneheaded move. Microsoft has put a great deal of emphasis on "the cloud" in recent years, making it a major part of their business strategy, yet they are now sending a clear signal that their cloud offerings can't be trusted.

For that reason, I doubt that Nadella made this decision personally. This looks like the kind of thing that was probably done at the middle-management level. We know that Microsoft's internal corporate structure is highly siloed, with divisions often refusing to cooperate and even trying to sabotage one another. Probably the grand poobah of cloud services was upset that his quarterly bonus wasn't as high as he wanted, so he ordered his underlings to find any possible way to cut costs and boost profits, and this is what they came up with. I wouldn't be all that surprised to see Nadella have to walk this back in a couple days due to the backlash.

A movie about Drizzt Do'Urden (D&D Forgotten Realms) with a decent director, direct involvement by the writer R.A. Salvatore, and some decent actors (Game of Thrones cast?) could make it not suck.

That would probably be the best shot, but the Forgotten Realms violate modern Intersectionalist dogma, so it won't happen. (Good light-skinned elves and bad dark-skinned elves? The SJWs would throw a fit. Never mind that Drizz't doesn't fit that stereotype, they'll just say that is tokenism. Same reason that C.S. Lewis's The Horse and his Boy will never be made into a film.)

If you're going to take into account the whole supply chain for electric cars, you have to do the same thing for gasoline cars. This study doesn't do that. It calculates the CO2 cost of electricity generation for electric cars, but assumes that gasoline just magically shows up at the pump and doesn't incur any environmental costs in getting there. The CO2 emissions resulting from extraction, refining, etc. are completely ignored.

Congress should make a decision about which laws should apply: I think probably some laws about employees and some laws about independent contractors should apply.

The laws are already quite clear on this subject. Misclassifying employees as contractors is nothing new or "innovative". The only reason we're hearing about this is that the Uber founders were arrogant enough to believe that the law didn't apply to them because they were running their gypsy taxi service with new technology. But the law doesn't care about that.

This is exactly how the service departments work at automobile dealerships, down to the requirement that the mechanic provide a certain class of tools, codes of conduct towards customers, wear a dealership logo'ed coverall, collects time and attendance data (contractors are paid by hours worked in the contract, so this has to be collected), attendance data (reserving a bay is expensive, and you want contractors who are eager to be present; you also have to collect this information to know how much liability insurance to carry), maintains umbrella insurance for the worker based on worker liability for faulty repairs, or injury while on the dealer premises), and issues checks (they aren't actually paychecks unless the worker is on a payroll; they're just checks). All work products remain the property of the contracting agency (in this case, the auto dealership).

Under IRS regulations, mechanics working under these conditions are clearly employees and not contractors.