Exactly. Intervening in Syria allows the US to engage in a proxy war against Iran. The chemical attack provides the opportunity to intervene.

Not a Surface user, but I can't stand finger marks on the screen either, so I generally use a stylus when interacting with a tablet. The only problem is the pinch-zoom gesture. Somehow the thought of wielding two styluses like a pair of chopsticks isn't appealing to me.

It is exactly a fear of change. The people who use Yahoo Groups are older and have been using it for over a decade. Most older people have a greater resistance to change than younger people.

This reminds me of how car manufacturers are finally realizing that it's stupid to keep trying to market new cars to young people -- they're just not interested. It's the boomers who are still buying new cars, and it's much more effective to direct their marketing at that generation than the kids. Yahoo should try to understand who their users are and cater to their needs instead of the audience they wish they had.

This.

The synergy between geek culture and the broader mainstream tech culture looks like it is coming to an end. We were there creating technology and products for other geeks, engineers, and scientists before the public knew what the heck we were doing. Then the marketers caught on to us and used our leadership positions to expand the market for technology to the broader public, and we got the benefits of that scaling in the form of cheaper, more powerful devices. Now we are diverging again, and the devices and technology we prefer will be relegated to a new, more expensive niche.

VNC and RDP are really slow screen replicators. Why would you use them if you have X11 running on your local machine with a Gigabit connection to your remote clients?

If you have a web browser like Chrome as your remote client, then it will certainly benefit from having access to the GPU, especially for highly composited web interfaces and 3D WebGL web applications.

Anytime you have a remote client that needs or could benefit from graphics acceleration. Chrome, OpenGL applications, VirtualGL. Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VirtualGL, http://blog.macminicolo.net/post/33839671756/build-a-dummy-dongle-for-a-headless-mac-mini.

Dang, replying to my own post here... just a little research revealed that you can get console IO through the USB ports: http://www.solid-run.com/mw/index.php?title=CuBox_serial_port

Still haven't found anything about GPU acceleration in a headless setup.

Why do these newer small computers always seem to lack a serial port? Do you have to connect a physical keyboard and monitor to configure sshd before you can get in through the ethernet or wireless interfaces and run it headless? Or can you get console IO through the USB ports?

Related question: is GPU acceleration available without connecting a physical monitor? Some systems seem to require a dongle to fool the computer into thinking a monitor is attached before loading the drivers that provide access to the GPU.

I would think that most people, after looking at the facts, would conclude that neither Google nor Microsoft have any real concern about fighting for their users' privacy. Do you not have any recollection of Eric Schmidt's famous quote, "If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place"?

Google and Microsoft are effectively in the same business as the NSA. The only reason to have any sympathy for them is that instead of competing against another business, they are competing against the US government, which basically nationalized their data collection mechanisms for their own purposes.

And to top it off, Larry Ellison's Oracle team has been caught cheating... http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/26/us-sailing-americascup-cheating-idUSBRE97P0LD20130826

Ellison is real piece of work.

That's not my experience. I've been involved in two class action lawsuits, one against the old IDS investment company (now integrated into Ameriprise), and one against Smith Barney. They were basically shareholders who claimed that their brokers were ripping them off in various fees or misrepresenting their products. I didn't even know of these claims until I received letters from the lawyers. I filled out some forms and later was pleasantly surprised to receive over $600 from IDS and $500 from Smith Barney as a result of the lawyers winning their cases.

The ridiculous love store and accompanying saccharine soundtrack unfortunately was standard Disney fare. Turned it off after 30 minutes.

If corporations are really people, maybe they should take a look at the concept of civil disobedience.

What exactly would happen if Yahoo, Google, Apple, and Microsoft told the NSA to fuck off? There might be a few high-profile arrests. Internet services could be severely disrupted. But these companies have the greatest platform for expressing their views and fighting back since the beginning of history. Can you imagine the effect if Google dedicated their search portal to explaining what they were doing, why the Internet was suddenly broken, and urging ordinary people to flood Congress with demands to restore our civil rights?

These are huge public companies, but at least at Facebook and Google, most of the voting shares are controlled by the founders. They have almost complete control over their companies, and with that kind of power, they should perhaps consider exercising some responsibility.

Seriously, imagine how the engineers at Google must feel. They built this magnificent infrastructure for gathering personal information from their users and thought they were going to become the benevolent caretakers of the world's information, organizing it for the betterment of mankind and making a decent buck while doing so.

And in the end it was all taken from them by the US Government, along with the trust of their users.

My fantasy is that Mozilla will someday support something like the old Google Sharing Firefox add-on -- run a server that pools all your search requests, mixing your cookies with other users, and replacing your IP. This makes it look like you're running from an organization's NAT'ed local network, with no ability to track your real IP and identity. In addtion, Google Sharing would allow you connect to Google with HTTPS, so that the Google Sharing server can never know what you're searching for, while Google can't find out your identity.

The original Google Sharing was implemented by Moxie Marlinspike and was then taken over by Abine.com in some transaction that I don't understand. Since then Google Sharing has become very unstable and pretty much unusable, and Abine makes no mention of it on their web site. Anybody know what happened?