The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can store as much as you like on your cloud. Your cloud can float on the information superhighway, up as much as you want. Everytime someone visits your cloud, it rains apps on them, and they smile.

Your server isn't a cloud. It's just a water tap. People have to drive to your house to use the tap. There are no apps coming from the tap. It makes people sad. You should pay money to put your apps on the cloud, where everyone can read them. When you hug your server, you just get wet, and the NSA get cross with you.

The cloud is a magic place of infinite storage and bandwidth, and unicorns. Its the dreamland where all of the apps come from. You should hug the cloud.

The internet, that you when you click on the blue "e", that's your cloud. You can only store so much on your cloud. Every time you browse, you store more and more in the your cloud. If you store to much water in the cloud, the tubes of the internet will leak.

That's why we need to cap the amount of water you store in there. Especially Netflix. They steal water from your cloud, and pump too much storage in. So we had to build a dam, to store water and generate Net Neutrality. That's how the Market moves.

You can develop all the security technologies you like. They'll be worth precisely nothing when the NSA sends a pup of an agent with a national security letter to seize your files, equipment, and force your co-operation under penalty of imprisonment. The courts remain the ultimate root-kit.

One ploy they can use that doesn't require super genius insight is to try to promote complexity in new standards. Complexity makes implementation harder and increases the probability of exploitable mistakes, in both design and implementation.

And yet despite this, SELinux remains installed by default on many distros. How long more is the NSA going to be allowed to live in our Kernels?

Paris may forget you cheri, but marketers never will.

This may sound crass, but this is a problem that'll solve itself in a couple of decades, after which you'll have a much lower population on the island, which given the lack of space (especially in large cities) is probably a good thing.

Ireland has one of the lowest population densities in the world. This did not stop one of the world's worst per capita property bubbles forming and bursting, and now re-inflate itself in the capital.

The principal determiner of housing afford-ability is bank policy, and after that the level of influence landlords have over government policy. I imagine both are high in Japan, and the result has in part contributed to the literal decay of the entire country.

If young people in developed countries cannot afford a place to live and raise children, they will not marry, they will not have children, and the country will slowly die. Property prices and rents will remain propped up on an artificial floor, but in consequence the country will simply die.

Perhaps a lot of server administrators are simply tired of dealing with the unending farce that constitutes modern internet security, and have simply decided to give in. What's the use in spending time and effort on security measures which frequently fail, sometimes spectacularly so in the case of heart-bleed. In particular, what's the point of protecting customer data if organizations like the NSA can simply walk in and take it, or if you're already selling it en-masse to marketers.

Except, why would a machine intelligence want to enslave us? For me that was the biggest gaping plot hole in The Matrix. If it/they lacked creativity we might have something to offer, otherwise we're just playthings or potentially dangerous vermin.

The Wachowski's original idea was that the machines were enslaving humans to use their brains for raw computational power. As the humans dreamed in the matrix, the machines would be able to run themselves and their society on the zillions of effective clock cycles that the massed human brains provided, all at a fairly minimal biological cost, and with the small "overhead" of the Matrix itself.

This concept was later abandoned after being deemed "too complex" for audience, and later changed to the Duracel version.

Which was a huge pity because the idea of human brains as computing devices explains immediately how operative can "will" themselves to be stronger, faster, etc in the matrix, and how Neo can manipulate the code. Not only that, it createed a concrete in-universe consequence for the ordinarily abstract cyper-punk goal of "waking-up" the population. In the Matrix, a revolution of thought alone was enough to, and indeed the only thing which could overthrow the oppressive machines.

"Everyone just had to like, wake up man. Turn off the government TV in your head dude. Like, fight the system... with your miiind." The genius of the original concept was that it actually turned abstract cyber-punk rebellion into a concrete sci-fi consequence. The Duracell version lacks any such subtlety.

However, the Wachowski's seemed to later forget this script change and proceeded to write the next two films under "humans as CPUs" viewpoint. As the on-screen sequels devolve deeper into what seems like mysticism, the greater tradgedy is that not underestimating the original audience, these elements of the sequels could have added to the philosophical bent of the original film.

But the short answer to your question is that AI intelligences could concievably be digital zombies who want to "eat" our brains.

Does that mean today is World "I Forgot My Password" day?

Doom was "Indie". Command and Conquer was "Indie". Hell, compared to the modern AAA teams large enough to fill a city church, Super Mario World was "Indie".

The difference between 1 guy in a bedroom making an ephemeral App, and 10-20 people in an office a timeless classic does not give the right to the former to be lauded as either innovative, avant-garde, or somehow good for the industry. Contemporary "Indie" developers are just as much of a cancer on modern gaming as AAA kilo-teams.

If you're using LaTeX, it's not, provided that you're a reasonably quick typist and have memorized the standard mathematical commands.

No.

I use LaTeX Professionally. Moreover I use AucTex with in editor previews, split panes with docview and a heavily customised yasnippets installation made to work on Lyx-type input shortcuts. Everything is designed to speed up LaTeX document creation(Believe me I've tried it using vanilla LaTeX).

On average, it still takes me five times longer to type up a page of mathematics than to simply write it down with a pen. If there is so much as a single image, this extends to fifteen to twenty times longer -- literally.

LaTeX can very easily fool you into believing you are actually getting work done, but in reality you are simply wasting time typesetting mathematics instead of actually writing it. The only positive side to LaTeX'ed mathematics is that the equations look nice. Everything else is a huge waste of time.

Where is this profound change? It did not happen.

It did not happen because the software and distributed infrastruture needed to support it was never written or developed. The blame for this can be placed solidly at the feet of the global hacking community, which hasn't created a truely disruptive technology since Bittorrent back in 2001 (IMHO, the jury is still out on Bitcoin (2009) ).

The reasons for this are largely socio-economic. The rise of Google and Co. has meant that "disruptive" software is now principally developed in corporate campuses, with most "hacking" talent now draw to the stable and lucrative paycheck offered by compaanies interested in neat toys, but not unfortunately in the kind of software the world needs to keep the NSA out of people's lives. Another big trend has been the mass migration of programmers towards writing "Apps" for walled garden devices. It would also be unwise to omit the drain of programmers to HFT firms and computer aided finance in general over the last decade or so.

There is no modern Bram Cohen (or Satoshi Nakamoto) working on a mass privacy program. They're all writing iPhone games or working for Google, Facebook, the NSA, and the Banks. And without that individual, or small team, actively dedicated to creating a distributed, anonymous, and secure communication system, users will increasingly turn away from the panopticon that the internet has now become.

Those complaints resulted in roughly 21 million vehicles being recalled. The push-button ignition isn't perfect, but we know electrical trumps mechanical more often than not.

Those recalls were predominantly due to issues which arose as a direct result of companies cutting cost by deliberately making parts weaker, cheaper, less durable, etc. It is simply naive to suggest that these same companies will apply more care or consideration when designing all electrical systems.

All a switch to electronic system will do is replace infrequent mechanical recalls with increasingly more frequent updates of shoddy on-board software. Eventually, drivers will be expected to download and install car software patches themselves. Once again, company costs will be externalized at the expense of quality.

Back when I was still programming, i once got a spec sheet written on a post-it.

The programmers task is to create the concrete system which the executives are only daydreaming about. When executives give you such a document, they are giving you the freedom you to design, code, and implement the thing. Once you have created it, Code is Law, and the program gains its own authority.

The problem with pain scales is that sometimes they don't include all the numbers.