Yeah, it seems to me the main thing this mask would accomplish is helping Leo Selvaggio hide himself from surveillance, not the rest of us - unless we're willing to wear it 100% of the time we go out in public.

It's not clear to me how a bootable thumb drive is going to resurrect a non-functional computer. Neither is it clear what this will accomplish for all those people too poor to own one at all - although in the article it says these guys did provide five old laptops to a school where they were testing this.

Large scale models handling huge arrays, though - like climate or weather modeling - I think that's where Fortran has always been king of the roost.

The whole point is speed. No one's working in Python if they're interested in speed.

If it ain't broke - don't fix it.

This happens so often. Some big web hosting firm (GoDaddy or whoever) switches from Linux to Microsoft, or vice versa. That causes millions of parked domains to switch OS. And, to be fair, Netcraft often points this out in the comments.

With web sites that are actually active - as noted by a previous commenter - Apache's lead is huge. It always has been. And, in truth, the biggest "danger" to Apache is probably Nginx (another free, usually Linux-based web server) rather than IIS.

Wow, someone actually is still using Enlightenment...

Yup - if a for-profit company like Google is offering a service for free, you can be darn sure they think there's going to be a financial return one way or another.

My guess is they are building a currently-latent profile that will be used for targeting ads once the kid leaves school - that's twelve years of information, and now they'll have a running start. They're almost certainly also building shadow profiles of the kid's contacts.

and my dog!

That's all I ask. Even on the crap Android 2.2 phone that was my original smartphone, being able to easily manage my calendars and contacts was HUGE. It was such a step up over the feature phones I'd previously had...

I know the world is all about apps - but I could live with a basic smartphone that just did those two things (on top of the phone things - calling and SMS/MMS of course). Especially since I find my iPad Mini to be the perfect size for most other mobile tasks.

I saw Star Wars in the theater. It had run for AN ENTIRE YEAR - from opening day - in the same theater, and I have to admit it took me that long to go see it.

Mainstream theaters would never do that nowadays. The tiering system is pretty well defined.

Manual transmission cars are getting harder and harder to find. It makes me sad - I will always pick a manual if I have the option to do so.

Woah. Mind blown.

She's a faculty member - so right there you know here connection to the real world is pretty tenuous.

(No, I am not attempting to make a joke. I work with faculty every day)

At least switch to a non-Microsoft browser and email client - something that'll continue to get updated like Firefox, Chrome, Thunderbird, etc.

More like "don't continue to be evil after being called out on it in court".

Seriously - how does the fact Google got sued over the practice not get mentioned here?