Oh, and furthermore, what an interesting timing, just when Google in under concerted attack by Apple and others, in view of destroying Android!

I really do hope some Democrats will wake up and tell someone responsible in this administration that they should check what kind of crap some civil servants are moving.

Indeed, really?

Please begin with enforcing the anti-trust case brought against Microsoft, which in this case was justified, proven and concluded, and then we might perhaps consider those new claims by the FTC against Microsoft's rival, which Ballmer promised to destroy. Doing otherwise might likely bring shame and discredit to the FTC itself, and the current Democrats administration.

I have mod points, but since you are well on your way to +5 insightful, I just want to add some data to this. I am interested in this topic, and I have noticed a series of articles in influential venues, like the Economist, the New York Times, etc. beginning a couple of years ago. They all have a common point: they are reporting some kind of controversial news, like here "doctors are prescribing drugs to poor kids to help them, is this good or bad", while the underlying message is unquestioned, that is, whether those drugs work at all. The underlying message is that they do and that would go without saying.

In the case of the Economist article, unfortunately for the drug companies and the PR firms probably doing this work for them, the reader comments were devastating for this underlying assumption. This article was asking whether it was fair that some students could have recourse to "brain enhancing drugs" bought illegally (like the one used in the treatment of ADHD). Dozens of people having taken drugs as students in the hope of helping at exam times reported their horror stories, and shredded every point of the article.

Big pharrna is financing PhD students in prestigious universities around the world, for work on the use of drugs, not for therapeutic purposes, but for enhancing the brain. This is something that I have myself confirmed meeting one of them.

Now it is the Slashdot crowd being targeted. According to the comments I am reading already, I would say this is another mistake of theirs...

The typical terabyte hard drive is equivalent to how many punch cards, and how much would they weight?
--
Ah, the smell of punch cards in the morning!

How interesting! It sounds like school might have been a boring experience to you, and somehow getting stoned made it a bit more interesting.

I am not sure if my experience is similar to yours or could be compared. I had been an above-average student --I would not say above in terms of intelligence, just above-taking-it-seriously-enough-to-attend-classes-and-to-cram-material-before-exams. One course that was not going well was calculus. I am naturally anxious, and my expectations about calculus just made the whole thing so scary that I was not learning anything, and I was getting more and more behind. I did not choose to do so but I happened to attend a class while being quite high. I was fascinated by the world of abstractions that the professor was unfolding just by talking and writing on the board. Not that I understood anything, but I was relieved of my anxiety, had a sense that this could be fun and how to use my imagination, and I caught-up pretty quickly with the material after that experience.

Apple does not realize the ill-will it is creating with this. It may think this will be limited to a few slash-dotters whining on a forum. The usual stuff. But this is not usual.

I often read on Slashdot that Bill Gates at Microsoft was a good businessman. I don't believe so. Microsoft awful practices have earned it a reputation that has led to its current decline. Apple, as the David against Goliath, use to have a lot of sympathy as a result. But its reputation was also earned on the basis of a preoccupation for the product and for the user experience that was lacking at Microsoft. We believed that Apple was on our side.

If you take Apple as superseding Microsoft on the basis of a better understanding of users' interests, you can then see Google as going further on that account, and greatly benefiting from the confidence they earn as a result. The understanding of the user's interests is much clearer in Google's case, and more sustained (despite all attacks on this account by its enemies) than it ever was in the case of Apple, despite the great show they made of it, 1984 and all.

It may take time, but Apple will pay dearly for what they are doing. They are trashing their name, and their reputation. What a shame.

I have read every argument in this story so far, ready to believe this old man. But your informed comment clinches it for me that the story is probably bogus. Then pops the question: why is this story, a controversy soiling NASA's reputation, coming up today, on the day the world celebrates the successful landing of Curiosity? Why the appeal to crowd-sourcing to locate this guy and make as much fuss as possible down in the tubes? Who has interest in doing that? Those who have might get a little surprise, as crowd sourcing, as far as I am reading on Slashdot, is turning from finding the guy to finding who is making up this story and why.

My comment is still quite speculative, I will admit, but this has a strange odor for sure.

See the alternate picture here, that could have been a reality, or that could come back? I am very grateful to Firefox, an open source/collective, and a very successful, effort to get rid of a Microsoft monopoly, and of the horrid experience that IE6 was. We have yet to appreciate the magnitude and the significance of this, even though we all think we understand it.

For this reason, I am very loyal to Firefox and ready to be patient with minor misdirections.

Firefox usage might have declined somewhat, but Chrome has speeded up the decline of those who think nothing of public standards, and it is a good thing, provided that Firefox remains strong.

On the website I manage at the University of Cambridge (granted, those are pretty well educated users), Explorer, all versions confounded, is down to around 25%. I have watched the steady decline of this number month after month over the past few years, with the same contentment every time.

Evil is not all powerful.

Sorry to reply to my own post, but...

I am at the University of Cambridge, where outreach activities are quite valued among academics. The Raspberry Pi originates from here, among other educational interesting ideas. I could suggest of few names to help form a committee. Contact me.

But there should be some form of return for such form of sponsorship direct from the public. For example, use and prominent display of public domain tools, like GNU-Linux, etc. Advocacy for the public domain nature of the Web and advocacy for net-neutrality. Get to work with Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the Web while at CERN (a public institution) and other prominent scientists and advocates of the public domain like Lawrence Lessig.

Get it right and that in itself will help funding and do good for all of us, on top of the science!

Polished piece of work... must have been quite a bit of work, but there is a major inconsistency:

For the major part of the film and during most of the interaction with the girl he is dating, the info he gathers on her is a distraction and makes him look like a dork.

Indeed, this is all information (her Facebook profile) he could have read beforehand, which is already possible and happening in the real world. As his prior gathering of info would have been rather uninteresting in the story (although it would surely have been more efficient for him achieving his goal), here it is shown happening in real time. It can only be a distraction, especially in a live conversation, and the film carries this quite well. The guy looks like an idiot.

Then, at the very end, what has been portrayed as a debilitating distraction suddenly turns into an absolute power of manipulation, out of all conventions built during the preceding scenes, and without letting the viewer know what would be the source of that power. He stops her going out of his apartment by a simple voice command, and presumably rewinds her memory to prior her discovery of damning information on him. All of this happens in the very last seconds of the film, where we are suddenly thrown in deep sci-fi territory, in a completely inconsistent way. The film concludes on that little surprise, and it is obvious that it could not have carried on after such a stunt.

So, I see this as a slick flick without much depth, attempting to piggyback on the publicity surrounding Google Glass. Clever.

Arrgh! Please let me forget my past!

It was a long time ago though, 1990... but still a painful memory.

You will be modded funny, but I would mod you insightful.

Beside prior art, you may also look at other capital and publicity intensive spectacle sports, like Formula 1. You would have a few well funded stables, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer; and commentators would speculate non-stop whether which athlete is going to be recruited in which stable. Newspapers would delight in the gore of overdoses, deaths and bio-mechanical accidents of all kinds. Truly dystopian and I hope never to see pharmaceuticals get their way with such a monstrosity. It takes a mobster mentality to think of such a thing, even half seriously.