In spite of the fact that I don't like Apple products, mostly due to the proprietary nature of their designs and the inflated prices, I'm very excited to see if this pans out, and I'll tell you why.

I've long been keeping an eye on the tablet PC. In theory, it seems like the perfect interface. Everyone knows how to use a pen and paper, and a tablet emulates that to a T. In theory, anyway. But sadly, a lack on interest from manufacturers has left this type of machine a niche mainly coveted by graphic designers due to the lack of simple, polished utilities for the input method.

Simple, polished, user-friendly. Those are the things a tablet needs to hit the big time. And who's the reigning king of all three of these design elements? Apple Computer.

If Apple decides to build a product, they do it right. They brought the PC into the mainstream, the MP3 Player, the touch screen. If they bless the tablet with their sheer force of consumer exposure that anything Apple decides to build, the tablet won't just be a well-oiled machine, it'll be downright fashionable. And it'll usher in a whole new kind of user-friendly in the world of computer interfaces, even in the ones that aren't built by Apple.

You are being a bit paranoid here. Making software that tells you how to use it does not a Big Brother make. In this regard they aren't even as bad as Apple, IMO. Googling becoming a legitimate verb isn't that big of a deal either. It's no more ominous than when I say I'm 'ssh'ing or 'pirate'ing.

I will, however, grant you this: Google is becoming a monolith, a consolidated power base in the digital world, and that's just as dangerous as consolidated power in the physical world. Any person or organization given enough power will restrict freedom in order to preserve the former, and corporations are nothing if not the modern incarnation of the empires of old. I never forget that Google is a corporation and therefore inherently dangerous even if I am very grateful to it for it's philanthropic contributions to the open source community and the greater internet community as a whole.

No, really, who cares at this point? Is there anyone here who isn't aware that the news that comes from News Corp is utterly skewed by the reigning powers in politics and industry? This wouldn't be a loss, it would be a gain, people would get news results from independent journalists instead of a media conglomerate. I can promise you that the losses to Google's engine use by a move like this would be negligible at worst.

Whose leg do you have to hump to get a mod point around here?

I, as an avid Linux user, am bemused by how hard everyone in the discussion the parent started is trying to find SOME reason to look at this as a BAD thing. =) Sometimes you have to know when to let go, kids. Microsoft did a good thing today.

Long story short, mods are pricks.

I don't think this is really relevant in an OSS-based platform. Most apps you get for Linux that aren't distributed through your package manager are in source, allowing you to run it through the compiler for whatever architecture you happen to be using, which makes having multi-architecture binaries a moot point. Which is not to say that multi-architecture support is a BAD thing, of course, just that putting it all in one binary is the wrong approach to take.

I don't know if the average repository stores packages in a particularly wide variety of architectures, but it seems logical to me that that's the place where you put in universal support if it isn't that way already.

I think it's interesting to note that once this claim is made, no matter what this doc does he'll still look bad.

His decision was to cut the program immediately. This implies either the claims are true and he wants to bury the whole thing before it erupts, or he just wants to save face. But the same conclusions would be drawn even if he hadn't cut it straight off, and no matter whether he was guilty or innocent.

Which is not to say I'm scolding the reporters for covering it, it's just something to think about.

It's a fool who hold a soldier responsible for his entire military's crimes. It's like holding a secretary responsible for a CEO cooking the books, or a help desk staffer being accountable for a senior admin breaking a whole rack of essential servers. It accomplishes nothing.

Oh, I dunno, maybe the part where surgery and advanced genetic manipulation is required to implant this technology in even a single brain?

What's so frightening about a mind-machine interface? I've dreamed of breakthroughs like this most of my life!

To be able to replace parts of my body just as easily as I can swap out a part on a car or a computer, the power to build a better human... Just imagine if they could develop this effectively enough that you could literally link your mind to another, or to a machine, to the net! Both the practical applications and the philosophical implications are staggering.

As it happens, I've actually done exactly what you're asking for. I will freely admit it took some digging to figure it out, but the solution is actually quite brilliantly simple.

Presuming you're using a Gnome-based desktop, simply log into root, run gconftool, and click a simple gui button that locks all the environmental variables for the other user's desktops. This includes things like wallpapers, themes, menu entries, launchers, widgets, you name it

You're right, you can use a GUI tool with far less training. But we're talking about the ease of managing systems in Windows vs. Linux.

Someone put in charge of administration a production system should damn well know how to use the system they've been tasked with maintaining, that's just common sense. If using CLI, reading man pages, checking changelogs and running the occasional google search to learn something new are huge hassle, you really shouldn't be administrating anything.