Do you really really believe that a 5000 year old civilization with nearly 1.5 billion people, the highest average IQ in the world and lead by engineers, won't figure out how to design a CPU?

China indeed appears to be led by engineers rather than lawyers (maybe being a champion debater or orator isn't that useful in a single party state). As for "highest average IQ", I doubt that China's average IQ score would be much higher than the US since China has a greater base, where low scorers could pull down national average.

Results of my casual googling has turned up lists topped by countries in north-east Asia that include Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan, countries whose average income per person is much higher than China's (which can imply, among other things, better nutrition and education).

Disagree. Not because I think it's good computer science (fiction), but because ID has other issues. If we're willing to believe that advanced aliens would travel light years just to squish us like bugs underfoot, then all bets are off. Anything is technologically probable.

Aliens advanced enough to junket across star systems should be advanced to ignore us. There's no resource they need to "steal" from us, whether fuel (most likely some element abundant everywhere or more so in space, a gas giant, or star than in a rocky planet like Earth) or living space (they have the rest of the universe for that).

The reason Bonobos are perceived to be matriarchal is that females tend to collectively dominate males by forming alliances. The females also use their sexuality to control males.

Well, if you hate the Gnome and Ubuntu interface changes, here's another. MS(huttleworth) has announced that the next (Natty) version of Ubuntu will have disappearing scrollbars. Basically, the Natty scrollbar will be a moving scroll button that only appears when you need to vertically or horizontally pan a window.

The so-called "overlay" scrollbars will be shipped in a special "liboverlay-scrollbar" package.

To be sure, there will still be a permanent indicator to show relative position within a window. But this narrow indicator, which kind of resembles the tube in an analog thermometer, itself won't be clickable. The blog post includes a video illustrating the concept. It looks cool, but I don't know how it will work in practice (how near must you be to the scroll indicator before the scroll button appears?).

You think that will run on the netbook that he owns?

Well, if it can run on the notebook s/he owns, s/he can simply use the default Apple speech synthesizer, which probably works just as well as anything that runs under GNU/Linux/BSD. Unfortunately, for visually impaired people, MS Windows is probably still the best platform for running graphical applications (i.e. applications that haven't been specially written for blind users).

For users not tied down to using graphical programs like LibreOffice, there are pure console or command line programs like emacspeak and edbrowse, both of which are written by programmers who are themselves visually impaired.

The author of edbrowse, a program inspired by the classic Unix "ed"-itor, has this to say about screen-reading programs:

I believe, and I am in the minority on this one, that totally blind users should employ command-line applications, rather than pasting a screen reader on top of full-screen programs. Manipulating the cursor via speech is irreparably inefficient. To this end I have written a combination editor + browser + mail client that is command-line interactive. You type something and the computer responds. There is no screen, anywhere, ever.

It looks to me more like a way for HP to phase in a product without taking too much of a risk (burning their bridge to Microsoft before they've erected their skyway to the cloud).

Remember how for the longest time Microsoft continued to developed DOS while they were trying to perfect their Mac System clone called "Windows"? Until Win 95 came out, Windows was one mess of a barely good enough graphical interface.

Ditto for Google and their seemingly perpetual "Beta" offerings.

I suspect HP's first goal is to develop product awareness. When enough people are aware, they have the option of using WebOS as their one and only desktop operating system. Of course, this all depends on the positive reaction that WebOS would get from the tech media or social networks. If they market it correctly, then they just might beat Google to the first widely deployed Internet-centric (aka cloud, App-based, network) computer.

Microsoft might have to shoot itself in the foot to compete, as it chooses between maintaining lock-in support for its cash cow Office suite or developing an App-based OS.

Sadly, some people thought they were voting for a non-right-wing party. Now that the curtain has fallen they are realizing that indeed every politician comes from the same party now.

Maybe this is something the ruling elite of de facto one-party states[*] can learn from. By alternating at the top, they could give the people the illusion of regime change without jeopardizing their own privileges.

In a one-party system, there's only one party to blame when things go bad (an economic downturn or a disastrous war). With two parties, you can play good cop/bad cop with popular discontent by installing the other party. It's only important that neither party would seek an end to their mutual political privileges but would only clash on the numeric details (a 5% vs. 10% tax cut).

[*] Countries where only one party officially exists or where one party overwhelming dominates each election.

China says it will step up administration of the Internet this year

If politically, the US is a nation of lawyers, then, as a single-party state, the PROC is effectively a nation of administrators. The US Congress might debate about network neutrality, but in China all issues pertaining to the Internet are viewed as problems of administration (management). China, Inc. makes more sense than the old Japan, Inc.

The PC World article references a downloadable PDF translation of Premier Wen's report to the National People's Congress from the Wall Street Journal. The part about administering the Internet comes from a section titled "Vigorously enhancing cultural development".

We will develop the press and publishing, radio and television, film, literature and art and archives. We will step up the use and administration of the Internet. We will deepen reform of the cultural management system and actively push forward the transformation of cultural institutions that are operating as commercial entities into real businesses.

The word "administration" occurs at least 15 times throughout the document, chiefly in the construct "social administration" and goes well with an image of Wen as some sort of company president or CEO delivering his annual stockholders' (party) report.

Geek note: The ~3 MB PDF appears to be a series of scanned pages overlaid upon the OCR'ed text version of the document. So you can actually cut and paste the text.

You forgot the amount of data that mankind wants to keep grows and no end is in sight [...]

Maybe it's about time we develop a form of neural compression, a system that would compress whole files based on their similarity to other files. I know, the most "efficient" (in terms of size not speed) compressors already do this using pattern-based dictionaries. But here we apply the dictionary to the entire filesystem or maybe even across a distributed filesystem with a built-in version control mechanism that works like DNA, discarding aberrations like American Idol while retaining the good stuff (performances of the Bolshoi Ballet and the later Beatles).

Okay, for this to be a reality, we need to get 3-D printing down to at least the cellular, if not molecular, level. (Would quantum uncertainty effects render this impossible?) But this is a nice idea, cleverer than the idea of a Star Trek style transporter. It would be the 3-D equivalent of faxing a letter. Unlike "beaming", 3-D "faxing" does not imply the destruction and subsequent recreation of the original. A 3-D fax produces copies.

This raises a moral dilemma. If I fax myself, let's say, to Alpha Centauri, who then is the real Me, the spaceman or the one who stayed behind? Do I have the right to kill(switch) my other self (the one who stayed behind)? Would I be guilty of murder? Would it even count as suicide? Or could it simply be a form of hi-tech amputation or surgery, getting rid of an unnecessary body (part)?