No, they're really more talking about the interface. The underlying nuts and bolts are already pretty much the same, in that Windows, Windows RT, and Windows Phone all share the same NT kernel. But above that there is plenty that's different from platform to platform. What Nadella wants to do is unify the development model and allow developers to create apps with UIs that react and readjust depending on the screen size of the device they're running on, much like how modern websites can support multiple screen sizes. All this talk about "one version of Windows" stems from a single, oversimplified comment Nadella made on the earnings call. When asked about it later, he completely backtracked and said there would not be any such thing.

Unfortunately for you, the actual article says the exact opposite of the summary (so what else is new on /.?): Other than the kernel and the app development model, there will be no unified version of Windows. There will always be different flavors of Windows for different kinds of devices and even multiple SKUs of the same version of Windows for different markets (consumer, SMB, enterprise, etc.)

Indeed. Concentration camps soon to follow. Oh, wait...

You are doing this wrong. This is not about friends of the government that may have done the one or other evil thing. It is about all the people the government does not like.

You are naive. There are maybe something like 20-30 active terrorists in the world. They could not be a threat to the US if they tried really hard. This is about mechanisms to mark "undesirables" and make their life miserable in order to keep all the sheep in line.

It is the logic of totalitarianism and it has nothing to do with "protecting Americans" (not that that is somehow inherently more desirable than, say, protecting Europeans). It has everything to do with creating and maintaining a vast, diffuse threat from "the outside" to keep the population quiet and in fear and behind their leaders. This is a very old tactics, perfected in the 3rd Reich. The Nazis also documented this approach well, and what has been going on in the US for more than a decade now is straight from their playbooks.

I do not think it is "groupthink". IT showed up some years ago and it has (had) US business hours. A discussion would take off reasonably, moderations were reasonably, but then, at the start of the US work-day, suddenly everything changed with postings down-modded from 5 to -1 in a short time, trollish comments, sometimes straight out of a psyops manual, and the like. They have gotten more subtle, but my guess is this is commercial, paid-for "opinion" manipulation.

Where I live the power and water company is required by law to give me a paper bill and payments are universally bank transfers. Also, if they have instructions for their customers, they must come on paper. As to payment, not the whole world is backwards as the US. I used a paper check the last time about 12 years ago (because some US organization paid me money that way), but otherwise paper checks have been out of use for about 25 years here and banks have stopped issuing them. Electronic interbank-transfers are so cheap ( 1 cent per) that you usually do not pay for them at all.

The problem is that the whole computer eco-system is built on the premise that whoever is buying doesn't have a clue what the fuck they are doing. Most of the niche and custom software (think PeopleSoft which comes as a set of basic HTML blocks and a database) is something that can be built much better for a company in less than 6 months by a team of dedicated and decent programmers.

Yet, the person buying doesn't have a clue what they are doing so they throw a few million at it and 2-3 years of H1B's and overpaid (for their qualifications) contractors to come up with a system that is more broken in the end than when it started. The same happens everywhere and at every level. Desktop software: Throw a few millions at Microsoft and Dell so everyone can browse the web and receive the occasional e-mail on a system that could run Crysis 5 when it comes out in 2020 even though a Raspberry Pi would be good enough for most of the fleet. Web software: throw a few millions in the directions of Oracle and IBM in order to serve out 99% static pages.

Hell, if I put a Raspberry Pi inside the scooped out guts of ENIAC, it would be just like ENIAC was streaming a movie... right?

I'm thinking of pulling the beads off an abacus and throwing a Raspberry Pi to show how an abacus can stream movies... and then maybe hollowing out a stone and showing how cool streaming could have been in the Neolithic...

Sarcasm mode off

Check your house's breaker box. Most likely you DO have 240V/60Hz coming in. And with any digital inverter worth it's salt, 50Hz is just a matter of a jumper or switch.

I do not watch videos done by the power company or the water company.

And that is a different story discussed in a different place. This discussion here is about zero-days in Tails, not about TOR vulnerabilities.

Of course CERN had problems - this is not engineering, but science. The big difference between the two being that you call it engineering, when you know in advance how to do, and science when you don't. No doubt, the first time a simple van-der-Graf accellerator was built, they had to overcome a number of problems; now, it is something you'd let a student do, because all the technical problems have been ironed out. And when/if China builds this new cyclotron, they will run into a large number of technical problems; of course they will. No need to start constructing fables about "all the corruption"; all that says is that you are suffering from petty envy.