In Gerrold's depiction, the US had lost a war, but worked its way into being the world's arms manufacturer - and clandestinely integrated chips that "chirped" on random intervals (so it sounded like noise), revealing their position. Also could be triggered to stop working or explode, remotely.

Been saying this for a while, MS is clearly looking over the fence at the Apple walled garden with growing envy, and trying to manipulate their product strategy to let them segue to that model ... but they're ignoring that not even Apple has tried to force that model down DESKTOP users' throats.

I'm actually glad they're doing it ... the market conditions are so desperate in the mobile arena that it's forcing them to tip their hand, and it's so blatantly anti-consumer in the desktop context that even the average man/woman on the street is starting to get an inkling of it (and maybe will twig to the fact that a mandatory walled garden is anti-consumer on mobile devices as well). It deserves its own reverse meme - "I for one welcome the disappearance of our former desktop overlord" or somesuch, because if they don't give it up, that's where it's headed (not with them disappearing, I don't really think that's going to happen - but certainly with them becoming just one of the players, amongst Android PCs, even more Macs, Ubuntu PCs, etc. - not dominant the way they are now on the desktop).

What mood are you in when you're not eating your own dogfood, MS?

I haven't seen any analysis of the obvious white elephant in the room (and don't intend to provide any, because I'd be blundering around in an area where I have no expertise) - could this economically replace satellite-based telco operations? What would the tradeoffs be?

The day I decide I no longer care about freedom, I'll probably reconsider and give Windows a try. You know, unless I die first - which is my plan as of today.

Very thoughtful, and respectful of the original series. The treatment of women was mixed in the original series, but I always looked forward to an Uhuru, Nurse Chapel, or Yeoman Rand story, because they were more than sex objects. Heck, even when being treated as sex objects (e.g., Plato's Stepchildren), there were depths to it beyond the obvious.

I don't understand why patenting FOSS offers an advantage over its use as prior art. Is it a "mutually assured destruction" model, where e.g. Google wants patents to assert defensively? Or is it cheaper in the long run to have an explicit patent on something, rather than having to defensively assert it as prior art, if the patent office swing-and-a-misses it and grants an illegitimate patent to some other company?

Out of one side of their mouth they argue that Moto's couple of dollars/device is a totally outrageous licensing fee, given the % of a said device's capability relies on the patents involved (as if being able to play video and do wireless hardly matters to an Xbox) ... and out of the other side, negotiate - only under NDA, of course, because darkness fears the light - for on the order of $15 patent licensing fee for each Android devices, for what the temporarily-courageous Barnes & Noble leadership showed to be be patents that covered a ludicrously small part of said device's capability.

Of course they're getting flak. Point to one time in history when someone has really, earnestly tried to change things that matter without being criticized.

All of the spitting contest "they made amazon searching the default, how dare they", "they refuse to ignore the architectural issues with X, how dare they" stuff is to be expected. It's people who aren't actually trying to implement a vision for the future whining about others who are.

Ubuntu is fighting to put Linux and open source at the heart of the device convergence wave, with a unified OS for phone/tablet/desktop; to push into enterprises, with AD integration and a cogent management alternative in Landscape; to push the open cloud mantra with OpenStack integration and robust and open juju charms.

You make bold thrusts like that, people are going to look for opportunities to thrust their toes underfoot, so they can whine about having them stepped on.

I agree with the spirit of what Ubuntu is trying, independent of whether I agree with all their choices. Let's think big, and push for great things. The alternative is a continued landscape of many small technical distros (the Gentoo and Slackwares etc. of the world) serving specific needs in their small ricepot - or larger distros (e.g. SuSE) serving as footholds for corporate interests. Not that that's particularly wrong, each case has to be weighed on its own merits - but neither is the "think big or go home" model.

About 2 weeks ago or so, I stopped being able to watch any Amazon Prime video on my Ubuntu 12.10 box. I was fine previously, after installing HAL and disabling the Pepper flash plugin in Chrome, so the Adobe plugin was used. But suddenly, with Flash 11.2.202.280, it didn't work.

After experimentation, I found that video viewing was re-enabled by back-leveling to an earlier Flash plugin version. Instructions here.

Can't try it till tonight, but hopefully that workaround is effective still. Minor edit to the instructions, I later tried the plugin version right before 11.2.202.280 (can't recall the number) and it worked fine ... probably better than back-leveling all the way to 10.1, like I mentioned in those instructions.

Wouldn't that just be cool!! To root your phone just so you can sell your soul to Zuckerberg!! Because, you know, there's just nothing about this whole idea that in any way doesn't pass the sniff test.

You and the parent would likely be wrong as to their motives. They have very lucid reasons for forking, ones that pass the smell test. One of the developers enunciated them here, though he's careful to qualify it as his perspective, not an official position.

Really?? You believe this? Have you tried to install software on a Surface RT from someplace other than the MS app store?

It will take them time to boil the frog on the x86 front, but dollars to doughnuts, they're going to do everything they can to get as close as possible to Apple's 30% cut of all software installed. They may not get completely there on x86, because of customer-generated and enterprise software that requires complex installation - but I'll bet you any amt of money they gaze longingly in meetings at that greener pasture, and strategize on how to get there.

FTFY (minor typo) ... more importantly, I call Dunning/Kruger. Just because what you describe is what you've seen happen doesn't mean it's a universal truth. Proprietary software has an in-built bias that nudges kids in the "learn how to use our software now, so you'll be consumers later" direction. Compare kids who pick up an OLPC with Sugar, where the whole user interface and every app has included source code that can actually be changed at runtime (with the baseline easily restorable, so experimentation doesn't have any fear factor built in) ... and what do you know, a fair % of the kids actually groove on figuring out the programming language and doing interesting things by modifying the software!

Wanna bet which of the learning experiences is better in the long run?

Android has taken it on the chin from a security perspective, even though most of that relates to poor user choices. Chrome OS has some interesting and significant security-related architecture and implementation in place. I'm very sure that one fertile area of cross-pollination will be to port the kernel and configuration changes in Chrome OS into the Android environment.

Cross-pollination in the opposite direction? Harder to see, other than the ability to run Android apps on Chrome OS (which isn't really a merging of features).