"our trust of text messages"

I think I've discovered your problem...

Not sure but I have a Surface Go 2. Terrible Windows device, barely usable. Initial update took something like 6 hours.

Running Linux, it blazes. It's basically the perfect little Linux tablet. It's got some minor annoyances as hardware goes, but nothing I've found hinders day-to-day use. Toss a tiling WM and some gesture support on there and you can make a nicer UI experience than a lot of other things (though it definitely won't look pretty).

Maybe keep an eye on https://github.com/linux-surface/linux-surface for new device support though before splurging.

They added a feature. Despite the whiners, it's not taking anything away, and if someone doesn't like it, they don't have to use it.

I would like to see resale (or at least trading) of games, but this isn't a bad feature and certainly has its uses. Going on vacation or something? Let a friend play your stuff. Etc.

Actually, no it isn't.. Your assuming CPU instructions always behave the same.

Wow, you're an idiot. Obviously if you're paranoid that somehow not only has the NSA solved the halting problem and included code analysis on the chip that detects if you're checking randomness (and that this would take such a trivial amount of space on the silicon that intel could even manage it), you can always copy the data elsewhere and check it. Unless you believe they've done the same for every chip. Which is no more stupid, because it's that stupid to begin with.

(This applies equally to anything that "detects what you're doing with the random data" (making an SSL connection, generating a key, etc) and weakens it.)

Don't let perfect become the enemy of good.

How is ignoring the lesser issues in favor of the glaring issues "perfect" over "good"? This is not about twiddling with the colors of the buttons and the size of fonts. Those aren't the big issues, unless you're a bad manager. This is about fixing the critical vulnerabilities and terrible bugs and ignoring the trivial, perfectionist stuff.

What you and everyone else is missing (possible Billy G too) is that all of these problems he's trying to address is caused by dictatorships, despots and other forms of corruption and tyranny.

I don't see the GP missing this at all, merely pointing out the less-than-philanthropic side of The Gates Foundation. The GP is saying more that the foundation is a front for Gates' personal profit than actually doing something good.

Your point is more applicable to Gates' statement itself: Google's providing wifi, thus education, and hopefully thus good health, is more useful than second- and third-world countries becoming dependent on first-world drugs. Ideally, information on things like purifying water, health, etc can be provided to establish self-sufficiency. Of course, this may not work out ideally, but it's something more toward the root of the problem than establishing control by drugs.

You're overlooking the bigger picture in an attempt to rationalize your portfolio. Your "good investment" makes money when people want the stock, which generally means when the company does well (or just looks good). The company and its board own the majority of those shares. A windfall for you is a massive increase in their net. Anytime you make money from them, they are making tons of money doing probably-bad things and passing those profits on to willing investors. You.

If everyone on the other hand tried to sell the stock, the value would crash and the company would go under because everyone was trying to jump ship and sell to squeeze the last bit of profit out of it. But they don't, because people, yourself included, are completely supporting them doing bad things, because they give you money. Rationalize all you want, but you are a supporter.

This kind of thing shouldn't be hard at all. You don't need complicated logic puzzles or any such thing. You just need something that's hard for a computer to figure out, but easy for a human.

For instance, render a 3D scene and ask a question about perspective. "What is the person holding in her right hand?" "What is the person looking at?" and similar such questions. Trivial to render. Hard to figure out, because it's far beyond simple image recognition: you have to see and interpret what's going on in the scene. It doesn't have to be confusing or hard at all. (And rendering is super cheap these days.)

Definitely funny, but not exactly ... you could have a Zombie Preparedness Plan or Alien Invasion Plan or Ant Uprising Plan ... you might even write it yourself, but that doesn't mean you actually believe it's going to happen. It's just what you'd do if it did happen, quite probably involving a speech where you utter your surprise that it actually happened.

RIM, whether they like it or not, is transitioning into a services company.

I wonder if this is the route we will see MS take. As relevant to the story they've already been doing Office as a service (most likely to compete with google), though I don't know how good or useful this is. I'm sure they could be doing this for other businessy/enterprisey products. Mostly they need to figure out they really aren't a leader or top dog, and focus on what they can do well, not try to compete with everything poorly. I doubt without a culture change (starting at the top) this will happen, though. MS has seen everyone as a competitor that needs shut down from day 1, so this would require huge sweeping change.

I fully expect to see BingBook+ before this is all over though, years after even Google stops caring about social networking.

Disagree. They've been losing relevance for a long time, and we're noticing now that they're struggling to find any relevance. They did have a lot of relevance to lose, as they squandered away what relevance Windows had, trying for markets they were weak in (server) while neglecting markets they were strong in (desktop), all while continuing to be so far behind the curve they just don't get what's going on until it's years too late (mobile).

They might have been a strong player in the game console market, but then they pulled an XBone.

Business is still pretty big, but with Windows losing day-to-day familiarity with users, their last bastion is going to erode quickly as users start asking "why can't we use something else?" I fully expect them to throw billions at trying to find relevance for years to come, though. This all might be foreshadowed by RIM and Blackberry: originally king at business, trying to fit in elsewhere, disrupted by technology they didn't grasp, falling behind, throwing money at trying to stay relevant, while everyone else wants to move on.

Well hooray for you, but I have to reboot win8 (game machine) constantly. Apparently, it has a well-known bug where it sends a reset command to the hard drive under certain conditions. This can cause the drive to go away until you power-cycle the machine (even the bios doesn't see it). It's not a BSOD: everything just stops working and you lose anything you were doing, because the drive it was running off is now gone. (It also blows away UEFI stuff, but fortunately you can get it booting grub again from the windows side.)

Happens extremely randomly on two entirely different systems with three different drives. Lots of reports. No fix.

Bluetooth? I'm sure it will have bluetooth .. do you mean "able to make calls"? That'd be nice, but I don't see anything about it.

However, their philosophy is more "a wide range of devices for every need" than Apples "one device, take it or leave it." Samsung has a whole range of devices differing in small features and size ... Tab 3, Tab 10 3, Note 2, S4, Mega, etc. Pick a size and whether you want a stylus or not and they've got a device for you. Whether it's a phone or not doesn't seem to have a huge impact.