As the summary mentions, 4 years is a long time range to be making such predictions. Who knows if there'll be a killer platform to come out or if Windows will scrap WP7 altogether?

(disregarding sammyF70's joke about tablet fanboys)

You know, there are people out there who just do not need a keyboard. The keyboard is optimized to construct words in an alphabetic language. Chinese users have struggled since the beginning of computing to figure out a good method to construct words on the keyboard. The most optimal solution now is a combination of some typing shorthand + auto-completion. Chinese is a language best written by hand. For that, a touch interface is actually superior.

I mean in practice probably the ones that are big enough are the only ones who will be affected by this anyway (who has time to go after the small companies?)

But it'd be really difficult to enforce. Probably the effect of it will be that US companies will audit their suppliers for violating licenses - this will be a good thing.

No biology test will ever ask that. If however questioned about the mechanisms of osmosis and they said, "god makes the water go this way or that", then yea you should probably fail him.

Great point. For me, imagining what the setting is like is fun, but it is much more rewarding to see a whole world constructed. The world doesn't come from cool gadgets and flashy science or magic, but about how people behave differently or similarly in the presence of such things. It takes more work on the part of the movie/book writers and more imagination in the parts of the actors.

Why not base 7 representation of Pi?

But it's quite clear they're talking in the plural, not singular. "Your Kids' SSNs" would correctly convey that Google wants multiple SSNs, one from each of multiple kids.

The only good point you've made is the elimination of one of the dimensions of movement. However, the combination of piece value and target file is much more significant than a 10% compression of the game. For example, at any given point in the game, there's very few different moves possible from those conditions. The non-moving pieces are non-moving; even in chess notation nobody cares about those.

Additionally, the goal of this exercise is to deterministically convert chess to music. So I think you're missing the point if you count that as a negative.

Calling this 20% of music is a bit harsh as well. True, many elements of music are not represented here, but arguably this is adding an additional element.

Was anyone else bothered that the summary and headline didn't read Kids', but instead read Kid's?

By the way, whether there's a better way of accomplishing the same thing is questionable, but it's not completely a useless idea.

High frequency trading actually facilitates more accurate pricing of securities because of the liquidity it introduces to the market. The benefit of accurate pricing is hard to explain fully without getting deeper into the economics of markets, but it's definitely there. The animosity you raised is probably due to a perceived lack of contribution (no tangible products produced). But actually, facilitating better pricing will route investment into areas that deserve it (e.g. to the guy who produces 2 potatoes per unit resource instead of 1.5 potatoes). The sum effect of these actions is a raised social utility.

I don't know whether I should be awed that we have discovered something like this hundreds/thousands of years ago or whether I should be frustrated that people take this knowledge for granted. We should be able to build upon all the things we discovered for progress, not digress centuries into the past.

As much as I agree with this sentiment, nobody is quite throwing it back in their faces. We're currently just having civil discourse on an Internet forum. As such, we should be as accurate and reasonable as possible. If we're trying to list points we can use in a logical debate, we should state it as such.

That's not a valid line of rationale with regards to privacy issues. Why should that be used now?