At a company where no one seemed to have any graphic design skills and our toolbars were a random collection of misappropriated icons from various open source projects, I suggested we just use Chinese characters for everything. Our users are gonna have to attend training to figure out what the button's for anyway

Shootings and rapes? Sounds like the news on my local Fox channel, followed by COPS. They're probably worried that people will spend time shooting imaginary people instead of listening to reporters tell them about shootings of real people.

When was the last time you ran a program where the WPM of the developer affected the quality of the code?

I type way fewer WPM on a smartphone or tablet than I do on a keyboard. I think if I tried to program on a phone, a general sense of oppression and hatred of my situation would express itself in an inferior software product that threw NullPointerExceptions at random.

What's important is not how fast you can type words, but how effectively you can connect the problem-solving part of your brain to your code input method.

a single repository of free software used in the federal bodies of executive power

Part of the point of free software is that there are lots of repositories, and anyone who wants to create their own can do so. That phrase certainly sounds like a Soviet-style approach to a good idea about sharing.

If they're looking for resources, they could do a lot better than trying to take over Earth. Humans have depletion quite in hand, thankyouverymuch.

once something hits the internet its out there, no privacy promise by a huge corporation is going to protect it.

BS. People send millions upon millions of email messages a day and have a reasonable expectation that their email providers and any SMTP hops along the way are going to keep them private. If a webmail provider suddenly decided that everyone's email address and all the addresses of all their contacts were to be public (unless you opt out), that would rightly be perceived as bad behavior and a violation of users' sensible assumptions. The path of least resistance opt-in flow for Google Buzz had the end result of publicly listing the names of some of folks frequent contacts (who'd also opted in). It created a big uproar and Google quickly changed the wording to make it clearer what would be public and how to keep it private.

I access my banking records through the Internet on a regular basis. I use this convenient system instead of paper and phone calls precisely because I trust the privacy promise provided by my bank. A bank that suddenly decided to make everyone's financial information available to the world on the web by default would quickly lose a lot of customers and get a big fine from the regulators. I don't think we need a Federal Department of Regulating Facebook, but I do think we have a right to expect companies to stick to their privacy promises and suffer customer-based consequences if they fail to live up to them.

One thing The Cloud can do better is give users control of their data. Google's Data Liberation Front is a good model: If a user decides they don't want to use a cloud provider's services for whatever reason, it should be easy to get all their data out of that company's control and import it in to a different cloud provider (if desired). Take it a step further: As a user of service A, I should be able to select certain information to share privately with my friend who uses service B. Like telephone companies and the post office, the service providers should transmit and present that information, but they should have no option to change the parties who can see it.

Caveat: Court orders and other legal actions can force a provider to reveal private information without the approval of that information's owner. This is true of banks, cloud providers, and internal IT departments. So yes, if you're planning an elaborate murder scheme on the Internet, don't assume it will only be seen by your co-conspirators. But if you're closeted at work and out to your friends, you have a right to expect your social network won't suddenly decide to make "Orientation: Gay" the first thing people see when they Google your name.

Kindle killer? Fine. But a tablet computer is an astoundingly poor replacement for a GPS device.

My Garmin device fits in my camera bag, takes 2 AA batteries, and is sturdy enough to drop off the side of a mountain into a brook. Tablets won't do that very well.

Also conferences with a could hundred livebloggers in an auditorium.

... assuming CPU cycles are the key bottleneck and not, say, network communication and data access. I'd assume they look at performance pinch points and optimize those. So if the 10% most computationally-intensive code is written in C++ or Java, the savings in rewriting the rest in C++ might be 15%.

Are brain scans really so cheap that it's cheaper to set up an EEG than to pay someone in a third-world country to do it?

Does the patent also cover being ridiculously annoying and not actually secure since it doesn't prompt for a password? If so, I say we grant it to Microsoft so nobody copies that design.

It would be great if they added sudo.exe so you didn't have to run the whole command shell as an administrator.

(I'm basing this on my experience with Vista; things may have gotten markedly better in Win7.)

automatically equating weekend work with fun is just poor science

People do all sorts of unfun things on the weekends: cleaning the gutters, upgrading Windows, scrambling to meet a work deadline because you picked the wrong language or environment for your project...

In many states, property tax is the primary source of income for local (county, city, fire district...) governments. Conveniently, those governments provide services to people using that property (social services, road maintenance, putting out fires...).

The economist-minded folks might also point out that if someone has a lot of land and not much income, the land isn't being used very effectively, so having to sell because taxes are too high will increase the efficiency of used. (I have some philosophical issues with this line of reasoning, but it's got a point.)

On the plus side, it means that if you live in a rural area but work and shop in the city, your house in the country gets a paved road, a sheriff's department, and fire protection. It also means school districts in areas with high house prices are better funded that districts in poor areas where parents are less able to compensate for a school's shortcomings. It's not a perfect system, but it works fairly well.