I'm not sure it's possible to praise justices Scalia and Thomas on Slashdot without be marked as a Troll, but I'm about to.

There is a lesson in this to be learned by all of those who rail against justices like Scalia and Thomas when they vote contrary to your personal beliefs about social issues.

This is at the core of the difference between tyranny and a constitutional republic.

As Edward Kennedy recently put it, are we a nation of laws, or a nation of men? Today we see again that we are merely a nation of men, ruled by the arbitrary will of an unelected few, rather than by a constitution designed to protect at all costs the liberty of the few from the will of the many.

If you don't like the constitution, we have process in place to change it for exactly that reason. We have many times before. That's the agreement you and I have as members of a civilized, free society. If you think you can walk all over the peoples' document when it becomes an obstacle to your social agenda: FUCK YOU.

And what apps are these unnamed, always on the horizon iPad competitors going to run?

Well, if they're Windows-based, not a hell of a lot. If they're Android based, the same knock offs and ports of iPhone apps and iPad apps that the Apple platform already has.

You see, by the time these devices come out, and none of them have unless you count Archos tilting at windmills, Apple apps will outnumber their apps 10:1, Apple apps will be 2nd and 3rd gen, and Apple hardware will be at least a generation ahead.

Until someone delivers a $99 consumer tablet, I put the iPad on top. And who's to say that Apple won't be the one who does?

Apple has built a robust and vibrant software ecosystem around mobile devices that has generated more excitement among consumers and developers alike than we've seen in 5 years.

The thing that has got to be eating Microsoft execs up is that even if Microsoft entered the revived consumer tablet space tomorrow, they would be starting years behind.

I've known a lot of microsofties over the years, most of them former; I don't think the Microsoft corporate culture today is capable of delivering successful consumer products in this space.

Until she shifted to the domestic propaganda wing.

Once a spook, always a spook.

Why yes ma'am, I should be grateful for the government to use my tax money to gather and mine my personal data! Why didn't I see this before!

Please stop using the words "brown people" like that. I don't care if you think you're being snide or ironic.

As one of those "brown people" I can tell you that to our ears it's your own racism you're projecting, not the alleged racism of anyone else. In fact, I've never heard a US politician in favor of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan use those words. It's always those who oppose them.

Speaking of education, while war is horrible and I would not wish it on anyone, at least now as a side effect the girls and young women in Afghanistan are returning to schools, still with great risks, but have been empowered to take some small measure of their future into their own hands. That, in the scale of human progress, is in my opinion at least no less an achievement than 5% more scientists coming out of the US.

Fucking brilliant. What could be more fair than one person, one vote, majority rule, world wide?!

Just think, instead of arrogant Westerners and their so-caled human rights running the show, we could have a truly democratic world government dominated 2nd and 3rd world fascists sharing their enlightened values with us! Oh blessing of blessings!

Why, we could bring about a truly egalitarian society in a generation! A whole fucking planet living in mud huts, herding goats.

And what relational algebra languages "of all the alternatives" other than SQL are database professionals such as yourself using to query RDBMSes? Tutorial D?

So-called NoSQL DBMSes started out by requiring you to use object oriented facilities of your preferred client language to painfully build up queries.

It's no surprise to me that so-called NoSQL DBMSes are now developing SQL or SQL-derived query languages upon finding, as we seem to go through this same cycle every few years for the past 30, that SQL is pretty good at what it does.

When you tie yourself to Microsoft Office you have physical possession of the software and they can't change it from under you. When you buy a copy of Microsoft Office and use it to script your business and finance operations, you can count on it continuing to work for 10 years, no question, as long as you can keep the hardware running, and then as long as you can run the OS in a VM.

With Google, they can change the software and scripting interfaces right under your nose and there's nothing you can do about. It's not even vendor lock-in, it's customer SOL, because unless you are willing and able to update your solution to use the new interface, that changes every 6 months or a year, knowing Google, you are SOL.

And the problem is largest for the customers who are most likely to want to take advantage of this: home and small businesses. They're the ones who are least able to take on 3 months of development on short notice to update their scripts to Google App Script x.x++. That will put a home or small business under.

Advance warning: do not allow another company to control your software upgrade cycle for critical business infrastructure, or they will control you.

And I see that our options as developers for interacting with this stunning new invention are still limited to one: Javascript.

With application development increasingly moving to the browser, we as developers are going to find ourselves locked into a one language platform.

The browser platform should standardize on a VM, not on a language. Say goodbye to traditional paths of evolution of programming languages driven by competition. Want to innovate by using a functional language to bring your solution to market faster? No can do. It's JavaScriptway or the highway.

Congratulations, you've developed a framework for client-server application development. Welcome to 1990. But wait, it's different this time because it's lightweight? Only it's not. Your framework runtime (the browser) consumes many times the resources that existing client-server applications ever did, and you still can't provide the same level of functionality.

Progress in the software industry today looks like this:
- 2003: Microsoft releases Office 2003
- 2008: Google releases quirky, limited-functionality clone of Office 2003 that runs in the browser
- 2016: Google releases quirky but fully functional clone of Office 2003 that runs in the browser, only it's progress because it's Web 5.0!!!

Thanks but no thanks.

Microsoft is Washington's 3rd largest employer, behind only the university and the Seattle international.

Washington can:
a) take money from successful companies and redistributing it to less productive members of society
b) take and redistributing it according to the whims and interests of politicians who think they can make better investment decisions than a successful company like Microsoft
c) let Microsoft keep the money it earned to create jobs and increase wages,

I will take (c) every time. It's not a difficult decision if you aren't living on the government dole.

I doubt, however, that Washington will see it that way. There's a reason Washington's economy is in the crapper.

Woosh.

But if you are a casual reader like most people here, you don't have any need to carry thousands of books with you. You carry one book with you, or if you're going on a trip, you carry a few.

Not to mention, the environmental impact of that entire bookcase of books is still far less than the environmental impact of the manufacture and operation of a single Kindle.

The day I have to recharge the battery in my books is the day I stop reading books.

Firefox/Chrome/Operate are not alternatives only in environments managed by fucking incompetent MSCEs who think being a system administrator means being really good at clicking around in group policy editor.

Firefox will run from read-only binaries on a network mounted volume, and will store its profile in a network mounted user home directory.

You can't figure out how to deploy and manage Firefox in your environment? Doesn't bring any update tools for large enterprises? THAT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB, to deploy the apps to your users that are best for them, not the ones that give you the most shiny integration with group policy editor. Hands down, by every independent assessment, any of these browsers beat the pants off of IE in meeting the needs of end users.

Educate and apply yourself, man. How do you think we got by before group policy editor and deep freeze? If you can't deploy and manage Firefox, you're doing something wrong.

I just showed her this video and she is very interested.

Let me tell you why. What I hear from her is that the biggest problem is the kids who sit through the lessons and the material just goes in one ear and out the other. It's not necessarily that they're stupid or that they don't care, it's that they aren't engaged. What you need for those students is either massive support from the parent(s), or you need to interact with them on a one-to-one basis. My wife doesn't have the bandwidth as a teacher to provide that one-on-one interactivity while still teaching the material to the rest of the children who are on track and are learning in the traditional model.

This sort of technology can provide that one-on-one interactivity. What it needs, and what she's looking into, is whether it also provides some way that she as a teacher can monitor progress live while the children are using the devices.

But your assumption is dubious. While you will likely make more money selling your proven apps to publishers than by marketing them yourselves, you will likely not make money from your platform in that way, especially an unproven platform.

Publishers don't want to buy a platform. Publishers want to buy existing games with proven popularity for an initial capital investment that they can a profit on over time. Publishers fund development of games primarily through paying the original developer of a game to extend it, to port a game, to build another game, or to build a game with a product tie-in on behalf of another company.

If you want to sell the rights to your apps, start cold calling and the online equivalent. When you don't have connections, that's how it's done. There are plenty of social media game publishers out there, and if you have multiple games with proven popularity you shouldn't have any problem getting their attention. It's a publishers market, and it's put up or shut up.

Only don't expect them to be interested in your platform. If you're that confident that your platform is where it's at, then attract other developers to it first, get proven apps on it, and put your platform where your mouth is, so to speak. Then you might have something.