The biggest problem with Windows 8.1 tablets is the total lack of decent apps. Not "applications", which they have plenty of, but "apps" that make content consumption easier.

I've got a Surface Pro 2. It's a pretty good ultrabook, even if the keyboard is a bit flimsy for that application, but it's a complete failure as a tablet. For casual browsing on the couch, it's miserable. There are no decent apps, and the desktop versions of most applications don't appreciate being occasionally resized for a keyboard. Even the professionally-backed apps, like the Kindle App, is miserably bad.

Developers make apps for Apple because there's an established user base, even if there's a barrier to entry (Apple Developer Program.) Hobbyists make reasonably good one-off apps for Android to scratch their individual itch because there's almost no barrier to entry. Windows apps aren't made, because there's no user base, and the barrier to entry for Windows Metro App development is still unreasonably high.

Microsoft needs to revive it's "Developers, Developers, Developers" chant.

A sixty-second commerical? Nope.

I can't, nor can many of Slashdot's audience. Why? Because of a law IBM bought in 1986 prohibiting programmers and software engineers from working as self-employed individuals. (Citation: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19tax.html ). So, once again we see regulations bought by corporations to steer things in their favor. Which is kind of the whole point of the protest.

Thereby sucking them out of the university's Finance schools. Brilliant!

Back in the dark ages (1997 or so), there was a school of thought that advocated cookie poisoning, not just removal. Anybody know of any firefox plugins that actively randomize your history or cookies? Throwing wrenches into databases is the next best thing to naming your kid Little Bobby Tables.

Fill a market niche. I loved those games. They weren't anything like the PC Baldur's Gate series, but they were full-screen (no split-screen) couch co-op fun for me and my roommates in college. There's nothing like that anymore; all the current generation games are splitscreen co-op or network co-op only.

If I could play Diablo with fullscreen co-op, I'd buy it on launch day.

Are they called "political parties"? It's just like home!

Privacy is not, and has never been, a killer app. We still don't regularly encrypt email; we send it plaintext and leave it on google servers. NSA's pressure on Zimmerman didn't kill PGP email, apathy did.

People don't want privacy. People want Farmville.

What a great idea. The whole building as a huge super-conductive antenna designed and built expressly for the purpose of pulling in and concentrating spiritual turbulence. Your girlfriend, Pete, lives in the corner penthouse of Spook Central.

Mark my words! Do this, and many Shuvs and Zuuls will know what it is to be roasted in the depths of the Slor that day, I can tell you!

What is needed is network transparency, not necessarily network neutrality. EG, under some definitions of network neutrality, various useful traffic shaping (such as placing heavy users in a different QOS tier when compared with light users, implementing per-user fairness, or doing Remote Active Queue Management to mitigate the effect of overbuffered access devices), would not be allowed.

I agree with you, and so does everyone else. You have just defined net neutrality. Net neutrality never, ever, ever considered stopping traffic shaping for heavy bandwidth usage or QoS. That was just a straw man set up by neutrality opponents to knock down. It's not your fault, since they scream it at every opportunity.

Net neutrality's ONLY definition is the prohibition of traffic shaping based on source or destination IPs. QoS has been a part of network design for decades. Torrent filtering is another argument entirely. It's not just the naive who have been misled: you've obviously done your homework and thought about the effects. The people arguing against net neutrality (aka: people who want to sell you an Internet Package with Yahoo and Google, or the Advanced package with Blogger and Hulu) are crafty and have no compunction about lying.

Have no fear, kind sir: you are a supporter of Net Neutrality, and have correctly identified, in its entirety, the misleading crap lumped in with it by its detractors.

If you include the cost of our presence in Iraq, the oil subsidy dwarfs imagination.

(And if you don't think our presence in Iraq is about oil, then I have a bridge to sell you that was highly subsidized by the city of London.)

Does a company have the right to destroy a purchased product - after the sale - if the consumer doesn't use it in a prescribed manner?

Yes, if the company is big enough. Hell, Sony included rootkits on music CDs.

I own an N900 and have a love/hate relationship with it. Nokia missed a few important things:

1: It's hard to develop for the N900 without a Linux box. It's possible now, and the new Qt 1.0 SDK release makes it a lot easier, but until about a month ago it wasn't trivial. Do I have to do the "developers, developers" dance here?

2: Maps. Google maps was the original killer app for android phones. Ovi maps...isn't. Especially not an non-updated Ovi Maps 1.0, which is what my N900 was saddled with for far too long. The new updates take the N900's maps from "unusable" to "bad". We were promised Ovi Maps 3, which is at least tolerable, but apparently somebody in the Symbian team was sleeping with somebody really highly placed, because only Symbian phones got the good map software.

3 Symbian. Developers hate it, users dislike it. It should have been killed, and its developers should've moved to Maemo. You knew Apple would support the iPhone's OS, and you knew Google had a hit with Android, but Nokia hedged its bets with Symbian and spooked a lot of devs.

I'd love to see a similar law passed for consumer transactions.

I can't see why this isn't the law for medical care. If a procedure costs $50 to do, and you charge $75 for insurance company X or $400 for an uninsured person, then you should go to jail.