I'd be happy if everyone knew how to use Excel.

Just understanding that you can automate a ton of pointless crap by using Excel formulas would remove so much trivially stupid data entry work out there.

Considering under the last pope (Benedict) there was a noticeable shift in diocesan policies towards conservative* agendas, I wouldn't be surprised to see a shift back towards liberal* policies in line with Pope Francis' guidance. Granted, the subtle changes made by Benedict took time, and most didn't really come into effect until his term was almost over, and there was a lot of popular stuff John Paul II did that he couldn't touch. So yes, the longer Pope Francis sits on the papal throne, the more of his moral compass will affect individual diocesan practices world-wide.

*conservative and liberal used within the context of Roman Catholic dogmatic spectrum, not the American political terms

If you have a gizmo that does A, B, and C, then you can patent it, and how exactly it meets these claims in terms of technology is irrelevant.

Actually how a gizmo does A,B,C is critically important for a patent. As another device can do A,B,C, but in a different way, and it would not violate the patent.

The overall problem with software patents is they define the What (A,B,C) but not the How. So any implementation that accomplishes goals A,B,C is suddenly in violation.

I doubt conceal-carry or right-to-defend laws will protect someone if used in defense of a cop-killing incident.

The Spiderman people aren't talking to the Avatar people

Bullshit. Clearly someone knows nothing of the VFX industry and has never heard of SIGGRAPH.

Not to downplay what Dropbox does, but I don't think they offer 10 times the product that Reddit does.

Why not? Dropbox offers a file storage service that works across a myriad of wildly differing device types and platforms using native platform development. Not to mention they store many orders of magnitude more data than Reddit.

Meanwhile, Reddit only provides community-moderated plain-text discussion threads via a lightweight web interface.

Just because Reddit has more content that is specifically valuable to you, how do you make the jump to assume that what they're doing is on par or more difficult than what Dropbox does?

What's so impressive about this isn't in the summary. The cool part is that they developers have already considered (and built prototypes) of all kinds of interactive models that this could support. Remote control, tactile user interfaces, light and color manipulation, soooo much more than "bring me my phone".

The video blows the summary out of the water.

Ban the artificial bastards. Butter's better anyways.

A brand name isn't worth anything anymore when you've killed the brand.

Except to a lot of people, they don't realize it's a brand. To the non-tech savvy, there's no difference between a branded service (like Skype or Twitter) vs. an open service (like email). Notice the GP mentioned old people going into Best Buy and asking for the tools to "Skype" not the tools to "video chat on the web".

All they know is that there's some kind of thing you can do on computers, and they want to make sure they can do that thing with the people on the other end that are important to them. They don't know (or care about) the difference between a proprietary toolchain vs. an open one.

We've made considerable progress in 15 years. 15 years ago, nobody thought the internet was much more than an academic curiousity

Bullshit, 15 years ago, AOL was sending floppies and CDs to everyone in America. The internet was still novel for most people, but it had grown orders of magnitude outside of academic circles.

The biggest reason why the major players of 1997's Internet aren't major players in 2013's Internet are because most of them* went under in the Dot-COM bubble.

*Amazon.com re-branded/launched in 1995 and by 1997 was already the biggest online retailer except for perhaps EBay (also 1995). BTW, why didn't EBay make your list (or for that matter, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, Disney/Go.com, Slate/MSNBC, or a slew of others)?

Just stop showing national borders entirely. They matter less and less in the modern world.

Until you try to cross one.

Especially when you try to make it operate like Java.

You know what's fun? When a so-called Java expert runs a PHP project...

Nothing but him bitching about how PHP sucks, and then discovering his code has factory factory factories in a central component that everything extended from (even when obviously unnecessary). And we wondered why we were having such performance issues.

You can use any email client you want with GMail using IMAP.

Ever use email? Dropbox? Online games from your XBox or PC? FTP? VOIP? Bittorrent?

All these and thousands more are internet protocols that don't use WWW.

And, by the way, we do have multiple Internets (with a big I). Read up on Internet 2. And there's lots and lots of internets (with a little i) that you don't know about because they're not connected to the Internet (with a big i)