TED Talk: Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation.:

Good because you are clearly a simpleton.

I hope its hype and nothing more, but it seems different this time, ie. dwindling unit sales, s/w piracy, difficulty of PC manufacturers to remain barely profitable. What applications really drove the explosive growth of personal computers anyway? Email, web, word processing, spreadsheets, CAD, forums, IRC, compilers/assemblers, and computer games. All those apps, with the exception of CAD, and the most graphics-intensive online/offline computer games are mostly F2P in the "cloud". For those cloud apps, h/w that can run a web browser is the minimum requirement, so the PC is overkill in that case. Much smaller, less energy intensive, and dumber devices like smartphones and tablets will suffice for those apps. Still need fast 3D graphics accelerators, i/o ports for large HD monitors & good qwerty keyboards though. People saying these are ancient fossil dinosaurs for i/o that need to go instinct are wrong, often moronic.

Thousands if not tens of thousands big & small, fish, birds, dolphins, seals, sea-turtles, coral reefs, sea-lions, walruses, everything that comes into contact with the 170M+ gallons of oil that leaked from the ruptured BP Gulf oil well due to irresponsible reckless idiots at BP & Deepwater drilling, you DF wannabe lobbyist.

There's something in the proverbial water that's effectively dumbing down huge swaths of the general populous when it comes to political worldviews overwriting reality. A few observations: What are the sources of their information? I heard from a friend of a friend that...; I heard on the radio...; I read in a magazine...; I saw in the news...; I read on the Internet...

What passes for "free press" these days - Radio, TV/Cable, online blogs, magazines, are virtually all for-profit commercial organizations heavily funded by advertisers and commercial foundations. Every person, every organization is corruptible - given the right price and/or level of coercion.

It is inevitable, in our modus operandi, that the richest most powerful commercial interests become embedded in the general population's psyche as something "good". Just watch/read some BP, Chevron, Exxon/Mobile commercials/advertisements. Its the echo chamber in action.

Hypocritical religious fantacism has wrapped itself around the GOP. These poeple don't give a damn about this world. Its all about the next world with them. That's why the U.S. cannot afford to have these crazy people in foreign affairs, with trigger-happy fingers on the big red button, nor should they ever again run agencies such as the Dept. of the Interior.

We evolved from primordial goo; were the first to evolve a self-aware intellect that allowed us to dominate all species and become a geophysical force that now threatens its own existence by short-sighted foolishness. Countless non-human sentient beings, with complex nervous systems, with brains, have suffered unspeakable torturous existence, and demise, due to human activity, most notably the harvested factory farm animals to feed our rapidly growing, expanding biomass. From science, with its observations, experiments, hypothesis & assertions, people with empathy want to preserve humanity's existence well into the future by preserving a biosphere with robust intact ecosystems, while at the same time, minimizing suffering of all lifeforms. From fanatical evangelical theologies, people apparently selfishly only care for their (hypothetical) next world "heaven". To them, this world, with all its pressing issues means nothing. These useless bastards need to GTFO of the way of progress. We all have less and less time to keep fucking around.

The only "innovation" going on in "the cloud" is the commoditization of routing/switching functions via SDNs (what Google & Nicira are doing). The cloud+tablet hype is an obvious swing back to a centralized model for corporate IT - only this time data centers are primarily accessed via public Internet pipes vs. private broadband. Downsides include loss of robust internally controlled data security and privacy, and increasing dependance upon ISPs and 3rd-party massive arrays of VMs. Whatever threats each of those high-profile entities are exposed to, ie. govts.and other criminal organizations infiltrating & snooping, so to will you and your company be equally visible and vulnerable. It would be very unfortunate if a robust desktop PC marketplace succumbs to cloud-dependent iPad-like dumb terminals. Don't let desktop PCs disappear.

1. Get him a new e-mail address & don't associate it with any social media apps, especially facebook

2. Change his phone number, unlisted

3. backup data to a HDD

4. repartition & format primary HDD, install OS (assuming win32)

5. install an "Internet Security Suite" from either: Kaspersky, BitDefender, Eset

6. install SOHO Deep Packet Inspection Firewall with VPN (~$300), ie. Sonicwall TZ100 (recently acquired by Dell):

http://www.sonicwall.com/us/products/TZ_100.html

- review of TZ100: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/products/review-sonicwall-tz-100-router/989

- this might be astroturf comparison of Sonicwall vs. Cisco, but worth a read:

http://www.firewalls.com/sonicwall_vs_cisco

What are your opinions on "Consumer Report" reviews? Are they legit to any degree? I'm trying to find a dependable central A/C & heating package. Every damn review out there is well written astroturf lies. After reading around a dozen positive reviews for a particular brand/model, I almost bought it, but luckily, I ran across a very negative, very detailed, review. Whether or not that one negative review was legit or from a competitor, I truly could not discern. It just seemed like a real dissatisfied customer warning others not to fall for a piece of expensive high-maintenance garbage . So I kept looking. Still am.

IMO, this is about a gamble Microsoft, under Ballmer, is taking by betting traditional PC desktops are obsolete and on their way out as a front-end to "cloud" apps & data. Regardless where the actual apps & data wind up residing, I prefer powerful PC/Workstations that can function equally proficient either online or offline, for all things non-trivial. I like giant HD monitors, a great tactile keyboard, decent mouse/trackball/pen tablet input devices. Tablets do not replace any of that in any way. I do not want to have to be constantly online to get anything done. I don't want to be forced to type on lame, error-prone touch-screen virtual keyboards. At home, I want a powerhouse desktop PC to handle video & photo editing, diagrams/drawing, presentations, playing games, & messing around with personal coding projects. According to Oracle, the desktop OS should've died over a decade ago and been replaced with dumb terminals running a web browser exclusively. If Ballmer can't adjust the behemoth's current course of foolishly chasing Google/Amazon/Apple into Cloud hype in 3rd place, and prioritize core MS strengths (desktop & server OS, MS Office) MS deserves to slam into that iceberg dead ahead.

I want to know, in a nutshell, will your administration be more likely to make decisions, and form policies, based on scientific realities, or on industry funded pseudoscience? Press for this debate loudly. All too often, scientists in general, are too polite, too subdued, whereas brash know-it-all MBAs & Lawyers can't restrain themselves & their abilities to whip up a crowd for obfuscated, short-sighted, often selfish (greedy) counterproductive reasons. It is pathetic, the progress science-deniers/ detractors have made in the public consciousness in areas that truly matter: habitat destruction, green house gases, marine pollution, stratospheric ozone depletion, aka collectively screwing around with the global nitrogen cycle.

We are hardwired for optimism, for better and for worse. And future milestone breakthroughs are very hard to predict. Some predict an accurate simulation of the human brain is only several years away. Strong AI shouldn't be too far off after that. Strong AI will expand the sphere of whats possible, technologically. But we human beings are most defintely very primitive. IMO, we have never possessed the type of ethical wisdom, nor moral courage that would allow our species to survive well into the future. As it is, the world's nations cannot restrain themselves from destroying the last remaining intact natural habitats (of this world) in the race for "scarce resources" for immediate term survival. Plutocracies control it all, and seemingly there is no way to break out of the destructive stupidity of how human civlization has chosen to conduct itself. That downer aside, we are wired for optimism. So we cannot give up hope. From fiction, sometimes great imaginations do accelerate (tehcnological) breakthroughs in the real world.

Numbnuts using phrases like: "I have nothing to hide, so I'm fine with this...", or "If you don't like it, don't use the Internet..." should be very careful what they type from now on. Deygoingetcha. On the one hand, law enforcement focus their scopes on terrorists and gangs. At the same time, rotten elements within law enforcement can focus their scopes on things they happen to hate. This is all happening now. Not in some abstract future. Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Nokia have histories working with the NSA & equivs installing backdoors in their OSes. And FB is a pathetic joke when it comes to privacy issues. Might as well assume zero privacy when it comes to social apps, webcams, and smartphone cameras.

Filtering out echo chamber noise, those arguments you attack, imo, are about humanity's capacity for selective morality, antipathy, selfishness and greed (to not share). Collectively, humanity is not a moral species, nor has civilization ever operated with empathy. Human GE will be weaponized (priority), and expensive. If human civilization operated with morals (which includes empathy), for food, we'd prioritize R&D GE to grow farm animal meat - without brains with advanced nervous systems.

It is a decent read. And they did post a deal-breaker (for me anyway):

What were they thinking?