I'd say this comment misses the point of phone apps pretty terribly. At least the ones I use tend to rely almost entirely on the phone's hardware features. Not just accelerated graphics and GPS and camera, but tie-ins to the address book and calendar, etc.

>>Odd we don't see many stories about the global shortage in female garbage collectors. Or janitors... Women aren't in computers because they tend not to be interested in it.

Is the implication that men love being janitors and garbage collectors? ;-)

>If there's money to be made, the big players will each have a Cloud. They'll each support some set of software; why would you assume that it would all be the same, or even interoperable?

For the same reason I can plug any brand battery into my remote control or use any brand light bulb in my chandelier: because interoperability is a core selling point for these products. The very first essential question I'm going to ask when choosing a "cloud" is this: will it work with my existing documents and those my peers use?

So I've used various drawing programs for years to make crappy little graphical schematics to post online. MS Paint is all I really need, although I've used Photoshop and similar programs as well.

I heard a lot about how powerful GIMP was, and my Mac didn't come with even a basic drawing tool, so I downloaded it. Lasted... oh, maybe 2 minutes.

The issue came when I wanted to draw a line. Now, every other graphics program I've used has a "line" tool, somewhere in plain sight. Observe:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Using-Paint
http://www.extropia.com/tutorials/photoshop/line_tool.html ...and so on. Such was not the case for GIMP. In GIMP, you use the Shift key with other tools to draw lines. Not an inherently bad way of doing things, I guess. But here's how you have to find out about it:

http://www.gimp.org/tutorials/Straight_Line/ (That's from the official GIMP site, mind you.)

Hey, GIMP guys. Screw you and your sarcastic screenshot telling me what the "Shift" button is. Your interface is the WEIRD one. People who use MS Paint or Photoshop or friggin' ClarisWorks - your potential customers - expect "line" to be a tool, not a key. And it's not like the key is entitled "Shift Or Draw Straight Lines In Some Linux Programs." It is NON-OBVIOUS that this would be the manner you draw lines. I don't care that I had to look up how to use a new interface, but don't act like I'm supposed to psychically fucking know ahead of time how your arbitrary interface works.

Note how both MS Paint and Photoshop are way MORE straightforward in this operation, and yet avoid sarcasm in their tutorials.

>>hell, if copyright existed, we wouldn't have had Shakespeare's [works].

Actually, I always thought the reason that Shakespeare never published his own plays was precisely that there were no copyright protections, so the only way to keep other theater companies from stealing his work was to keep his scripts secret (until the First Folio came out posthumously).

If Shakespeare's England had had copyright protections, there's a good chance that we'd have a lot MORE Shakespeare plays - all the stuff that didn't make it into the First Folio.

I would be intrigued to see some more evidence of this "frugal economic right" in U.S. politics. I mean, presumably we're not talking about the Republicans who actually get elected to office and then consistently create record-breaking deficits.

The fact of the matter is that industries like agriculture, energy, and automobiles are so neck-deep in government money already that what we're really talking about here is redirecting the flow of that cash. Take some agricultural subsidies away from factory farms and redirect towards more sustainable farming methods. Make the GM our government now owns 60% of develop Earth-friendly vehicles. Encourage development of wind, solar, and nuclear power rather than subsidizing oil and coal.

>they can produce and sell goods on their own with no such assistance like almost every other company

Except for agribusiness, defense contractors, oil companies, manufacturing, and every other industry sector that receives government subsidies or tax breaks (i.e. an awful lot of them).

>I wonder when this cold war bubble will burst.

All I know is, when it does hit that bullseye, all the dominoes will fall like a house of cards: checkmate!

The robot's stance actually a lot closer to the position that athletes take when they're expecting interference with their balance - football players, martial artists, etc. all work to keep their center of balance low so that it's harder to tip them over.

Standing fully upright locks your knees and actually makes you much more unbalanced; we only do it because it's less exertion for our leg muscles.

Any idea how hard it is to get DVDs in the "Outer Space" region encoding?

Actually, I can imagine tons of scenarios where a guy might not want to have kids yet, but wants to reserve the option for later. Teenagers, for example.

Sounds like a kind of regressive mindset to get rated so highly on a site full of futurists.

If there's a drug that makes me smarter, stronger, braver, and more attractive, and it doesn't have appreciable side effect, why the fuck SHOULDN'T I take it? Because being old and out of it is part of the Circle of Life? Screw that. Freezing to death in the winter and getting stepped on by mastadons used to be part of the Circle of Life, but we came up with (proto-) science specifically to put an end to that crap.

Is your position that 40-year-olds enjoying life isn't part of God's Plan, but you talking with people around the world through your fancy internet pipes is right there in Leviticus? If you're going to be a neo-Luddite, you better get some consistency going.

And the response to THIS is that while current research would be more than amply supplied by just using already-aborted fetuses, a breakthrough treatment or cure that could be widely applied might require more stem cells than would be available this way.

In worst-case-scenario-land, this could lead to ethical dilemmas for medical practitioners. Just as people who sign up as organ donors supposedly have a lower chance of being resuscitated in hospitals (because doctors know their organs could save a handful of lives and subconsciously or otherwise don't work as hard to save them), doctors might feel an ethical pressure to recommend abortion, knowing that the resultant stem cells would cure a handful of people.

Now, of course, all of this is very far-fetched. But it's not completely irrational, just unlikely.

It sounds like they've already managed A, B and D, judging from the "vast network of red-light cameras" mentioned in TFS. (If you've never experienced this particular joy, red-light cameras take a photo of anyone running a red light, optically scan the license plate, and use their database of addresses to automatically mail out a ticket. They've got them here in California too.)

Or, they've received contrary advice from people whose input they value more than yours. (No offense, but you're probably one of many potential employers they've talked to; maybe five other hiring directors told them that MSFT is the way to go.)

The flipside of this "young narcissists" issue is its inverse: older people tend to inaccurately generalize from their personal, anecdotal experience to the world at large. One of the many tricky issues a burgeoning worker must manage is figuring out whose advice is most worthwhile, and who is playing them or talking out their ass.