With so many people predicting the death of laptops, servers, and workstations, to tablets and smartphones...despite how stupid such a claim is...I'd imagine that over the medium term the stock is substantially undervalued. If he did steps to revive things, stocks might go up, then he'd have to pay more. Now he can take bigger risks, change things more dramatically/dynamically, etc. Being in corporate america I just cannot see how anyone who does real work would ever try to do something on a tablet. They're great for taking notes during a meeting, but beyond that...such devices are for content consumption, not content production. There will still be servers, workstations, and yes - even laptops, for years to come. Windows8 may have farked some stuff up, but all the better to maybe partner closely with Ubuntu and make a mac-like integration suite, or...?

the problem with your sarcasm is that the entire law, as someone else said, is completely garbage (I'm just being a bit more verbose). There is nothing to salvage in the "patriot" act, nothing at all. The Affordable Care Act, on the other hand...well, the items which were serious process problems have already been worked through or that money has already been spent. If they didn't do something in the ideal way but the non-ideal way is already done, well, fark it - move forward ($635M for the portal and backend interfaces, I'm looking at you).

"Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." - Albert Einstein.

Don't get caught up so much on thinking the people of one particular area are worth more than the people of another area. That's what wars are made of.

wait, really? So you consider coal mines and conventional power plants to be what, tourist attractions?

I don't even want to say apples to oranges, because in such a case both are at least still fruit. Facebook is a site where if some little thing goes missing, is out of order, some text is wrong, etc - no worries. People sign away their privacy, and they had no real need to protect it - not now, and especially not during the first 5 years. Facebook tied in with ad places, but that was only for ads...nothing major. The obamacare site on the other hand has PHI/PII issues to deal with, HIPAA, and various other security concerns. It has to share, in a secure manner, this PHI/PII information with third parties - which means designing interfaces with those 3rd parties. It has to be able to connect with various data points to get info about you. It has to be able to make accurate recommendations about very important life decisions. Was it done poorly? Yes. Is comparing it to the operating costs of facebook fair? No, not at all. Is $634M way, way more than it should have cost for something at the quality level as what we got? ......yes, definitely.

yeah, I'm a bit confused by his comment too. Is he suggesting the ext4 support is not available? Because umm...wtf does the kernel (otherwise) have to do with what formatting is "default?"

"The partnership will also work on ways to lower the amount of data necessary to power most apps and Internet experiences..."

IOW, they want a larger base of people who have fewer rights and who can't easily sue, upon which to experiment with more sophisticated tracking methods. Getting an identifying code from your phone shouldn't be too hard, after all - linking that to the facebook account logged into with the phone allows facebook to then link to what ever other sites you visit (again with your phone serial number). Notice the phone chip manufacturers on the list? Between Nokia, Qualcomm, and Samsung...what portion of the cell phone chip market is that? If the US gov would be interested in stopping a thing, they still couldn't - not when it's not happening here. But with the recent happenings here and in Europe, we know our "first world" governments are doing quite the opposite of such privacy and anti-tracking interests...

wow, does that make the other person? I remember having to fuss with it some in the 90s, but since then it pretty much just automagically works every time I have to set one up...

I should give money to the wine project. I keep a token windows laptop around for a few things, and those things are diminishing in number, but last time I used wine it really did take care of even those few things. I think the only reason I don't do it is because...well, witcher2 and bioshock infinite, honestly ;) And I only play something like that once a month or so

the one time I don't have mod points to spend...*this*, however. I can't believe someone is coming out and admitting that they judge a coder by the lines of code they write, and would judge them poorly by fixing a million lines of code other people wrote (ostensibly, without breaking the code...). Enforcing formatting is practically the only thing I like about Python (that and the interactive shell...) but hey, maybe that's just because I've had to fix other people crap code for a couple decades. I don't have the advantage of youth and most of my experience being in the classroom, enabling me to dismiss someone for not writing a million lines of code :P

DNS was created as an international standard to solve a problem that was well established, and for which less elegant solutions were already in place. Where's the equiv in this situation, for RFC805?

email her a link to a google map of that precise location, then. Create a list of locations you like - your favorite knitting, candle, and cat supplies stores - and then share that location list with your mom. Everything she needs to access those locations is already on her smartphone, most likely. The vast majority of humans don't speak english well - fark, we can't even get half the people here in the US to do it. Numbers though - those are a certainty. Telling someone to write down a series of numbers works easily, asking them to write down words they may not know is not. Those words only being useful at a specific website, which then does nothing more than give you the location... Yeah, I get it, they're trying to be for latitude/longitude what DNS is for IP space. But silly "flying.monkey.dung" names isn't the way to do that.

border, even. spelling fail to go with the geography fail. ;)

Umm...China and North Korea share a land boarder, and the capital of each is about 500 miles apart by land.

What the fark would that have to do with the Panama canal, several thousand miles away?

so, uh, you think that soaking a lit cigar with DEET (a highly flammable substance) or covering your body in olive oil were given as serious suggestions? You may want to consider the option that his suggestions were in jest.