Robert J Sawyer wrote an article (likely the one referenced in te summary) about this very topic, an interesting read. http://www.sfwriter.com/rmasil...

False, snaps are not "meant for running in a container". Isolation (both from other snaps and to keep control over which devices and resources it can access) is achieved via other mechanisms, such as apparmor restrictions. Also, the entire snap is packaged as a squashfs, and all snaps are simply mounted read-only, so they can't modify each other's (or even their own) packaged files.

Snaps also have access to a per-snap writable directory for user and runtime data, but again, they can't even see other snaps' writable dir.

So, without RTFA, the summary is misleading. It makes it appear like this program is a novel thing that has never been done.

In reality, Mexico City has been keeping a percentage of vehicles off the road for pollution fighting purposes since 1989. Vehicles stay off the road one working day per week according to their license plate's last digit.

Newer (10 years old or newer) cars were allowed to drive every day. Also, while all cars have to pass mandatory emmissions control, that had no effect on whether they could be on the road (so for instance, a newer but more polluting car would be able to go out every day while an older, potentially less-polluting car would have to stay home one day a week).

Earlier this year a court mandated that the permit to be on the road daily should be tied to the car passing emmissions control. More cars on the road are part of the reason why pollution levels reached a high-enough level to prompt the government to remove all exceptions to the program and have all cars, irrespective of age and pollutant output, stay home one day a week.

Incidentally, this program is part of the reason why there are so many cars in Mexico City: faced with the prospect of not being able to use the car once a week,many families bought a second car to also have coverage on the first car's off-the-road day.

HAHAHAHA Because Bill Gates, of all people, understood the internet from the get-go.

It's not a series of tubes, it's a Tidal Wave.

VIA Rail is NOT a commuter train service. It offers "intercity passenger rail services", not commuter service, which Wikipedia defines better than I can: "Commuter rail, also called suburban rail, is a passenger rail transport service that primarily operates between a city centre, and the middle to outer suburbs...". Again, not what VIA Rail primarily does.

Examples of agencies which offer commuter rail service in Canada include Greater Toronto's GO Transit trains and Montreal's AMT. These do, indeed, offer service between communities forming part of a greater metropolitan area and said area's city centre. At least in Montreal, the AMT has some exclusive tracks and agreements on shared tracks which prioritize commuter trains over other scheduled trains at rush hour.

Music for Krull was also composed by Horner. Given the fantasy theme I think this is also "notable to the ./ crowd".

What will you do if you're on the phone with a customer and another customer calls? Will your caller ID tell you if it is indeed a customer or maybe an unrelated (e.g. "wrong number") caller? How about the possibility of it being a new customer? (not sure if your org has a separate department to handle new signups).

This is quite understandable. I was envisioning the above-mentioned scenario of two potentially-equal-priority callers in which case call waiting is a nuisance (that's what busy signals are for). Your "preemptable caller" scenario is a good use case for call waiting + caller id, but it will not always be the case.

Why would you prioritize an unknown caller over someone with whom you're already having a conversation? Just as interrupting a conversation is rude, call waiting should be banned (just as voicemail!) and emergency calls routed $SOMEWHERE that guarantees a live immediate response (or perhaps keep the sole instance of voicemail in organizations).

Just ignore the keyboard labels, configure it as english keyboard and you're done. I did that for 4 years with a Samsung QX410 with that same keyboard layout. OTOH, the XPS13 is an awesome machine, so I'd recommend that over anything else anyway.

Another +1 for Trello, due to lack of mod points. It works well on mobile and ipad and even has an app (I think). And the metaphor is dead simple to use.

Maybe this guy hasn't heard of resizable application windows, invented over 30 years ago, and which render his "allow me to blow your mind" bravado into the realization that he's not as bright as he thought.

Just size the browser so it uses up half the screen, then you can have other stuff in the remaining half. You can use a tiling window manager, or just configure easy tiling shortcuts to set up your windows that way.

Using a single, maximized window at that resolution is doing it wrong (tm).

My organization uses 2FA with a standard that's compatible with Google Authenticator and a Yubikey (OATH: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... and http://www.nongnu.org/oath-too...). People with smartphones could use Google Authenticator to obtain auth tokens; an inexpensive ($25 per person) yubikey provides a very easy way to enter tokens without much hassle; and the open-source oathtool can generate tokens for other uses (i.e. add a "paper" authentication device with a long list of sequential tokens).

Righto, unless you're renting your house from the postal service, or are using their "USPS bank" for your safety box, they are completely different entities, so I still maintain it's a bad analogy. Google owns both the post office and the safety deposit box where you put your letter.

Not an entirely accurate analogy. You own the house (and even if you didn't, the *mailbox* from which you retrieved the letter is distinct from the dwelling where you're likely to store it afterwards).

In gmail's case, google *owns* everything, and they just let you use the storage and mailbox assigned to you. So given a court order, they could remove the email without technically accessing anything that's actually yours.

Now, if the recipient makes a local copy, then your "break into my house" analogy would be more accurate, applying to the copy in the recipient's system.