The common denominator apps for Web, Twitter, Maps, Angry Birds, MP3 player and whatnot are basically equal across platforms. You can easily adapt to the peculiarities of one, so that the familiarity becomes an actual asset. Differentiation is then minor preferences in form factor, UI idiosyncrasy, etc.

But when you get to serious applications for music recording, editing and processing - or astronomical observation - or organising a rock climbing expedition - or any other rather specialised pursuit?

iOS is really the leader space. Because the tablet really is all about the apps. I can do everything from replace a 4-track studio to manage XBMC/Kodi, before a jailbreak. Nobody bothers with this stuff for Win or Droid. They seem destined for Spotify not Garage Band.

Neal Caffery? Is it you?

Oceania has ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR with East Asia.

Jackson ends up telling NO story - just a vomit of computer-guided coloured lights. Sound and fury, signifying nothing...

I was more worried about replenishing Red Vines, than seeing what happened next.

As a result, the money is stolen not from the customers, but from the bank itself.

"Party on, Garth."

Bizarre argumentation. One hardly knows where to begin with your assumptions and red-herring analogies.

To address your first point - with it's ill-considered implications of parity between democracy, capitalism and actual worth or value: Commercial success at this scale simply indicate how thoroughly that vulgarity and thoughtlessness have been cultivated and encouraged by this media-driven culture over the past 90-100 years or so.

When people make "free choices" in such a society, they do so in appalling ignorance, with a maximum of empty stimulation. This is the post-Edward Bernays world.

The vulgarity of this decadent age. So? He rapes the corpse of JRR Tolkien and that's just fine if it earns a bauble and a penny?

That was a case of "resource constraint".

Exactly.

I AM one of those "small musicians and authors".

You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it does....

It's actually a tragedy and missed opportunity, that Jackson has so little talent as a director, and so little discipline in telling a story.

I was appalled by how little he regarded the audience - and proportionally insulted his actors - in "Desolation". Huge musical cues 'instructing' the audience of the drama or character development that was supposed to be on screen, at all times. This seems to be because he cannot elicit real performances from his actors.

I might muse that this is because to Jackson, they are not actors - but merely the armatures on which he templates his green-screen composited glory... But to assume that this is the root of his deficiency, rather than another symptom of of his artlessness, would be to succumb to curmudgeonly urges.

The lesson to be taken away is that Jackson should be designing games, not ruining popular cinema.

It appears that - despite the contempt it provoked in my teenaged self - Rankin and Bass actually produced the best ever adaptation of Tolkien, with the greatest respect and truth towards the source text in feel and substance. Perhaps, when we have destroyed the concept of copyright as a tool of corporate greed, another - more thoughtful - filmmaker might use this as a point of departure for a loving and well-crafted "Hobbit".

The wireless tools complicate everything. Otherwise? Yes. I'd just edit the interface descriptions in /etc/network/interfaces ...

Microsoft used to give all customer facing employees 5 of these, too. Ingratiating.

No Net Neutrality for YOU! Pay EXTRA for Hulu!

Robots are mechanistic, deterministic machines. As such they have no consciousness, however complex their programs. Complexity of programs is a sort of "intelligence," especially if they are well-programmed. But that intelligence is an extension of their conscious makers, for instance, us.

Now, your idea of limiting "IQ" of robots is interesting. Clearly low IQ is no bar to gaining political power in our world. But any political power gained by robots would be on behalf of those who had programmed them. A person with the resources and intelligence to deploy a robot army would be powerful, the same as a CEO or general deploying a corporation or human army is. In a sense, the robots might all be avatars of the person behind them. And their sheer calculating ability might be many times his or hers, just as is true of the computers we all use today.

Robots as dangerous machines, yet powerful ones: yes. Robots as able to conduct their own civilization: no. Not until someone has the capability of endowing them with consciousness. We're no where close to that. We hardly know what direction to go to do it. It may not even be an available direction to go in. In this universe, there is some class of imaginable prospects which is nonetheless truly impossible.