uh oh, wait. Cold? Fusion? It aint gonna work noway nohow.

Take a look at evolution. Sexual reproduction has so many hurdles to jump through before a beneficial mutation could find a toehold. In asexual reproduction individuals can rapidly and radically adjust to the changing environment and pass on the beneficial mutations to the next generations. They produce teeming masses of viruses, bacteria, fungi, insects, and at most reptiles. (A confirmed case of parthenogenesis of a shark sent shock waves through the biologists. But I think it has never happened among mammals).

Sacrificing backward compatibility and interoperability for radical changes would lead a large population of rapidly mutating code and runtime environment. You see this both in biology and software. Malware proliferates, ditches backward compatibility and interoperability and tries to adapt as quickly as possible to exploit newly discovered vulnerabilities. Giant organisms and big pieces of software change slowly, spend enormous amount of energy and effort in maintaining a thriving eco-system.

Radical changes (saltations) has its advantages but also limitations. Slow incremental changes has its limitations but also advantages.

Well, for starters it will protect your client side script from choking on an unreasonably large input.

I can't think of a legitimate reason why anyone would want to cut and paste a arbitrarily long texts into any form of any sort anywhere. There should always be an upper limit based on what the legitimate needs are.

Just look at the usernames in slashdot. They all make very good passwords. Take my username, please. It is a damn good password. If I can casually waste it as user id, imagine how many more goodies where it came from. 263Bhaskar 264Kuppa 261Shyam 260Thomas 259Raghu 258Siva ... Passwords just make themselves...

They probably have a client-side script that makes it hard to submit a long password.

Those of you who think that there mustn't be a limit to the size, consider what happens when some joker opens a text editor, types a word and then does this repeatedly a few times:

Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, Arrow key down, Ctrl-v

Thanks, I stand corrected.

The apocryphal story goes, the fountain pens with ink did not work well in zero gravity. So NASA invented the pressurized ball point pens. Russians switched to pencils.

Someone has to say it.

IIRC you needed a stylus to write effectively on those, no?

Microsoft may actually have made some genuine progress in signal processing and machine learning to allow you to write with your fingertips.

Wiktionary is your friend: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/...

AMD CPU:s reportedly return exactly the same values as Intel CPU:s. I'm guessing they do so for compatibility reasons, so that any workarounds that software developers have implemented work as expected.

Give us model E, the 40 K sedan. The rich people have paid enough money and you have built the credibility. Continuing to make play things too expensive for the masses is not how you are going to have long term impact or create disruptive technologies.

Maybe people are catching on to the fact that a lot of what passes for advanced technology these days only amounts to the arrangement of pixels on screens.

Previous waves of technologies liberated us from hard work. The Internet wave, while impressive, has not really been able to do that.

And no, sites that help wealthier people buy services such as cooking, cleaning and driving from poorer people don't count, since the work is still done by a human. I'm talking about machines or devices that physically make work easier, or does work automatically. Like the washing machine. The washing machine is so far probably the best machine, or robot really, that we have invented in terms of how much work it saves per dollar. A 1930's invention, which predates computers. It's sad when you think about it.

I hope the breakthroughs are just around the corner and that soon we will have our self-driving cars and our household robots that do chores and what not. Until then I doubt we will see much excitement from the general public.

I oppose this idea, especially out of care for the children. I think the giant fusion reactor would have to be situated too close to schools and nature preserves and other sensitive areas and I don't think the radiation risks have been thoroughly analyzed and quantified.

Look, I'm not opposed to giant balls of hydrogen as long as you build them in suitable places. There are many examples where they have put them light-years away from Earth, where there aren't any schools or preschools, and I'm all in favor of those ones.

If you think your security appliance is bad, wait till the management hears about the tech support appliance used by your IT. It seems to consist of posting a vague statement to Slashdot and hoping to get a solution. It is not how IT is done, buddy.