Honestly, it makes evolutionary sense.
Cognition is a high-energy task; the brain takes a massive proportion of the body's energy - it's about 5% of our mass, but consumes about 25% of our resting caloric consumption, and this does go up as we "think harder".

The *sole* function of an organism is to live and to reproduce.

If - from a simple organism standpoint - the "living" bit is effortless, ie you're not being chased by sabertooths and you're getting piles of calories coming in, why waste energy on brainpower?

Yes, it's a thing that hovers, but implicit in the term "hoverboard" specifically is a functionality like a skateBOARD or a surfBOARD, ie someone can ride it. None of the videos I've seen shows it supporting any weight but itself (nor even actually moving), which is hardly more impressive than a levitating magnet in a lab.

Seriously, has the media lost even the slightest trace of criticality to their reporting? We just cheerfully repeat whatever some marketing wonk has told us as fact?

Seriously.

Your town is 120 people.
FORTY more people move there - people who will pay taxes, join the Lions Club, and mow their lawns. Most communities would be delighted to see that sort of growth.

As long as they didn't come to create some sort of armageddon death cult, WHO GIVES A SHIT WHY THEY MOVED THERE?

Are they interfering with your life?
No?
Then shut the hell up and mind your own business.

First, your weird double-negative statement is nonsensical.
(That they made a clarification) "...does not mean it was not free, or going to be free - or meant to be free..."
Logically there's a finite list of possibilities here; either it was going to be a) free, or b) not free.
Whether or not they clarified it now is irrelevant. It was going to be one of the two.

Second, what it does mean (to a rational mind) is that their message to the marketplace was pretty damn confusing to more people than just me, to the point that MS felt they needed to try to clarify.

In case you're wondering where I got this "crazy" idea, here's an example:
http://www.theguardian.com/tec...
From that article, in regard to the 'free Win10 offer': "...Once you have installed Windows 10 and made a note of your product key, itâ(TM)s yours forever. ..."

I'm still trying to figure out how you could parse that it's NOT free, or that that is somehow obvious?

Well, maybe I'm not rational then: from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us...
Boldface mine.

"*Windows Offer Details

Yes, free! This upgrade offer is for a full version of Windows 10, not a trial. 3GB download required; standard data rates apply. To take advantage of this free offer, you must upgrade to Windows 10 within one year of availability. Once you upgrade, you have Windows 10 for free on that device.

Windows 10 Upgrade Offer is valid for qualified Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 devices, including devices you already own. Some hardware/software requirements apply and feature availability may vary by device and market. The availability of Windows 10 upgrade for Windows Phone 8.1 devices may vary by OEM, mobile operator or carrier. Devices must be connected to the internet and have Windows Update enabled. Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 Update required. Some editions are excluded: Windows 7 Enterprise, Windows 8/8.1 Enterprise, and Windows RT/RT 8.1. Active Software Assurance customers in volume licensing have the benefit to upgrade to Windows 10 enterprise offerings outside of this offer. To check for compatibility and other important installation information, visit your device manufacturerâ(TM)s website and the Windows 10 Specifications page. Additional requirements may apply over time for updates. Security and features are kept automatically up-to-date which is always enabled. See the Windows 10 How to Upgrade page for details."

Precisely how else might a 'rational' mind interpret that?

What I'm unsure of, and isn't clearly addressed above is whether Win10 eventually becomes one of those 'instead of buying it you pay monthly' things like Office365, and thus you might have a version of Win10 for free, but support ends in 12 months or something.

Yet these machines managed to put Obama in office in not one but TWO successive elections.

So your assertion is what, then, that the "Republicans secretly control everything" but that they're simultaneously staggeringly incompetent? What charming cognitive dissonance you have.

If we elect politicians with such malleable interests/positions on important issues, how are we surprised that these positions are ultimately changeable/amendable when a lobbyist pushes in a bulldozer-load of money?

I'll say it again: let the candidates state their opinions on important issues in debates etc.
We're grownups, we understand that no candidate will match our desires precisely 100% (and for those who insist on that, it's better all around that they don't ultimately vote as well).

".. the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven't figured out how to replace it..."

Here's a crazy idea: let's have everyone vote, and then see what the results are before we report on it?

Or even weirder: instead of micromanaging a candidate's positions based on what they think the public wants to hear, have the candidate state what they actually think, and let the public judge them (shock!) on their actual beliefs? Do they even remember what they think themselves still?

I know, I'm so old-fashioned.

Of course it is. But the only people with the power to fight monolithic corporate monsters are monolithic corporate monsters; our government is (to quote O'Rorke) a parliament of whores, they certainly won't.

Likely, Apple could crush her in the marketplace....but their market-image rests to a large part on their bullshit lily-white public image (which, if you have ever dealt with them professionally from Jobs on down, you'll know that's nonsense) ; like a clever judo move, she's deploying that against them. They (probably) daren't allow themselves to be seen to fight her.

In regards to your first point, it is ENTIRELY political.

As Lomborg observed years ago, you might go to a car mechanic to determine what's wrong with your car, and a roofer to determine why your roof leaks badly but consulting a car mechanic or roofer to determine WHICH of them you should spend your precious money on fixing first would be ridiculous.

Climatologists are the guys we should be listening to about what is happening and what, if anything, we can do about it but the decision about how we prioritize our resources to improve our collective world is *entirely* & *essentially* a POLITICAL problem.

Whatever simple test they could fool by simply "mixing in dna" would likely then be spoofable the other way too: a vendor caught selling rhino horn could tell the authorities either "oh no, it's synthetic actually" or at least he THOUGHT it was. ...because the people who buy rhino horn today aren't doing it to own something that's LIKE rhino horn; they either believe some goofy bullshit it about it making their dicks hard or for some mystical "I want to have something that's forbidden" reason - in either case, 'fake' rhino horn wouldn't cut it anyway, and there will still remain the market for real rhino horn.

set it up in a VmWare... and it's horrid....horrible....unusable...wretched. What were they thinking!
Windows 7 was finally a stable and decent OS after the Vista fiasco and then they decided to take away the start menu and replace it with...uselessness.

It was this downhill trend that turned me from a Windows developer since Windows 3 (yes 3 LOL) to OS X. Today I downloaded the Eval copies of both the Enterprise and regular editions and I'll suppose I'll wait until next week to eval them but after wasting a day and a half on that 8.1 POS I don't have high expectations. I miss .NET but Windows just became too much of a grind.

OK so wait, their first announcement that if you upgraded to Win10 now, you could have it for free.

Now they say that if you are willing to test it, you can have it for free forever ...which would imply that the PREVIOUS announcement *wasn't* 'forever'.

You can't write an infinite loop in python its too slow.

My kindle knows when I press the screen to go to the next page. When I connect it to the internet, it will pass this information to amazon. If I never connect it, the author presumably doesn't get paid.