For me, they jumped the shark / violated their unofficial motto the day they declared war on the microSD card in their hardware. I could never get too riled about the morality of doing business in China or submitting to the will of three letter agencies here at home because unlike many people I was never under the illusion that they were some kind of activist organization. "Evil" was therefore obviously a reference to not fucking up their own products in an attempt to manipulate their customers into, say, using their cloud storage solution.

Also, I seem to be the only one who finds it extremely alarming that Google has devoted a lot of energy to replacing GPL pieces in Android with BSD-style licensed equivalents. This isn't a simple precautionary exercise or worries about "viral licenses". This certainly isn't about freedom. The moment AOSP projects threaten them (or become an inconvenience) they will simply change licenses and break backwards compatibility. Geeks will struggle mightily to make non-geeks care about this, but there will be no viable alternative in the marketplace, millions will be locked into Google's content ecosystem, and the OEMs (with the possible exception of Amazon) will obediently follow Google.

My prius cost me $6000 used. There were $3000 used models available, but they were all Gen 1 and didn't have their battery packs replaced.

That's what over-the-air updates are for.

What's truly pathetic is I can't get it from Time Warner Cable on our dedicated fiber (not DOCSIS) connection, despite their claims that it's available to DIA customers. They have been dragging their feet now for eight or nine months, professing that we're the first business in our whole area (~250,000 people) to ask for it, so they don't actually have any experience getting it to us.

That's either complete bullshit (we have one of the largest universities in NYS here, along with major defense contractors and even a Fortune 100) to stonewall my request, or it's actually true and a sad reflection on our complete lack of progress on this issue.

If that's your argument just use the Windows firewall. It's completely free.

The rest of the West doesn't stop it either. It may be unique to the United States (+ South Korea and the Philippines, incidentally) in the non-religious context, but if you want to mutilate your son elsewhere in the West the authorities won't do anything to stop you. There were rumblings about Germany doing something to end the practice, but that's politically tricky to say the least, given their history with a certain frequently prosecuted group that happens to practice circumcision.....

I love how society gets worked up about FGM but thinks it's okay to mutilate young boys by the millions. And don't give me any shit about how it's not the same thing, because even if I bought the BS put out there by the pro-circumcision crowd, it'd still be the equivalent of elective cosmetic surgery on people too young to give informed consent. Of course, it's not really, you're chopping off functional body parts.

Facebook leaving the web could be a good thing, our generation's version of Eternal September would finally come to an end. :P

That's what firewalls are for.

Let me guess, you're one of those that thinks the breaking of end-to-end communications (NAT) is an acceptable substitute for a firewall?

Ah I see you already noted the FLOP thing. My reading comprehension sucks today

That is quite interesting, but I think my point may stand. Remember, standard chess matches last for hours. How long can the phone maintain maximum power before having to throttle to keep itself from burning up? And even if heat isn't an issue and we assume it's plugged in, can it pull enough juice through a USB charger to maintain that power? (My Nexus 7 loses power faster than it charges while I'm playing a graphics intensive game.)

Also, I'm not sure why Deep Blue was rated in terms of FLOPs. I don't see how floating point operations are relevant to discrete problems like chess position analysis.

Is this actually true? I'm aware of the recent grandmaster-in-the-bathroom-with-an-iPhone scandal but I had assumed the phone was tied to a desktop at home doing the analysis. My reasoning was thus: ARM processors aren't as powerful (hz for hz) as x86, the existing ARM-optimized chess codebase is presumably much smaller, and most importantly the processing power of smart phones is limited by both heat dissipation and battery life.

I would be surprised if a high-end smartphone in the world could out-compute a reasonably spec'ed desktop from the early 2000s (which was point at which computers began to rather consistently beat grandmasters.) The lack of CPU fan is the biggest limiting factor of all.

She'll be elected because she is a woman. All past history will be swept under the rug.

You're a decade too late. Even a modestly budgeted machine will (if not intentionally underpowered) romp over master chess players.

I get what you're saying and I'm sure an arimaa grandmaster, if one existed, could beat that particular program. However, you're ignoring the other side of the coin. There have been orders of magnitude more effort expended on writing chess-playing software vs. arimaa-playing software.

Go is much simpler and deeper (although computers are getting pretty good there, too.)

Arimaa isn't a bad game, but despite the claims of its creator I'm not convinced it's simpler than chess. Chess has a few idiosyncratic and tournament-specific rules (three move repetition, castling, double pawn move and the rare en passant capture, having to "checkmate" the king instead of simply capturing him, etc.), but if you ignore those for a moment... chess has straightforward capture, a static setup, and a single method of winning the game. The only thing you have to actually memorize are the 6 different piece movements, the unique rule about knight movement, the unique rule about pawn movement, and the promotion of pawns bit. That's pretty much it. All of the other rules in chess are there for historical reasons or to improve the pace of gameplay among experts--they don't drastically affect the flavor, tactics or depth of the game. If armiaa became a worldwide pastime played by millions, they would surely develop their own array of minor rule tweaks.

So, compare chess's fundamentals (ignoring the ) these are arimaa's fundamentals:

1. Moving one piece one square (plus pushing/pulling--see below) counts as one move. You make four moves per turn. Not bad. It's only slightly more complicated than "move one piece per turn", yet being able to split up a single turn among multiple pieces or pool it all into a single piece is a great way to add depth. (It's not unlike action points in Fallout.) And other than rabbits the pieces all move the same way--obviously, this is simpler than chess.

2. Piece interaction and capture is, um, involved. First, you have a nested hierarchy of pieces that must be memorized (yes, it's "easy" because it's easy to remember that an elephant is bigger than a horse but I don't think that makes it simpler than chess's "any piece can capture any other piece".) Second, there are four different ways to influence an enemy piece: you can pin, pull, push or blockade (blockades only exist in chess in the special case of pawns.) This influence can be used to maneuver an enemy piece over a special trap square, which is which kills the piece... unless there's a friendly piece nearby to save it.

There's a sort of intuitive, real world justification for what is going on ("you see, the horse is grabbing onto the cat's tail, and these four squares here with stickers on them are actually deep holes..."), but I'm not sure how you can call the actual game mechanics simple as compared to chess.

3. The victory condition is getting a rabbit to the other side of the board or killing all of the opponent's rabbits. Like pawns, they can't move backwards. Let's just consider for a moment a game of chess wherein the goal of "kill the king" (again, we're ignoring all of this checkmate nonsense that grew over the centuries) was changed to "kill all of the opponent's pawns". That this would make the game deeper, I don't doubt... but simpler?

If you are talking, it is rather easy to notice a serious helium leak. If I were working in an area where helium asphyxiation was a risk, I would make it a point to sing out loud while I was doing it.

This technique doesn't work so well with argon or nitrogen. That was the only point I was trying to make there.