With Oculus Rift-like displays, you can have very very big 2D "screens", and very many 2D "screens", and also 3D Abax/"Sand Tables" and Environments.

And that's why I'm very disappointed with Microsoft, Microsoft Research etc, for crap like Windows 8.

High powered personal computers with such screens and a suitable UI could let you do a lot more, quicker than what's possible now (and also check facebook/slashdot in a fancier way ;) ). Add thought-macros and we might actually have what I'd call progress. If you head in this direction, the mobile devices won't be competing with your Desktop/Personal Computers, OS and UIs for quite a while yet. What is likely to happen is they become complementary or even synergistic. The mobile stuff will let you do your virtual telepathy, virtual telekinesis and virtual savant stuff (eidetic memory, fast counting/math, face/gun/etc recognition), while the desktop stuff will help you use up all the cores Intel/AMD can provide (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... many people are capable of much more, a suitable UI might make it almost natural).

While it's true there isn't much of a market for such devices yet, but the OS and UI has to be in a position to support such devices first. You need the infra, APIs, frameworks so that developers ("Developers! Developers! Developers!") can start building stuff.

Even if it's merely an announcement of direction with no actual tangibles yet, it'll make me more hopeful and excited. The roadmap/direction they've been announcing has been disappointing for all the supposed creative geniuses they are supposedly paying. Who gets excited about Microsoft turning their desktop computer into a more powerful tablet?

Someone will eventually do it. I doubt the present Desktop Linux bunch will or can, nowadays it seems their idea of innovation is to make a UI that's worse than whatever Microsoft shits out. They're so bad that I sometimes wonder if they're being paid to sabotage Desktop Linux.

Maybe Apple might? If Google or Apple succeed in making a decent virtual savant/telepathy/telekinesis wearable device or make a better general purpose UI for Oculus Rift stuff I'd say it's genuinely "Insanely Great".

Can we stick to "News for nerds", please?

That's clearly a fallacy -- the "effectiveness" argument requires you to buy into the false dilemma that the only way to get potentially live saving information is by torturing prisoners. Certainly the CIA has dug up plenty of information before and since that did not require torture.

Even if torturing prisoners was "effective," who cares? If something is immoral, good results will never make it moral.

Unless you're advocating a new form of Creationism that I'm not familiar with, the universe wasn't built from human labor. Software, on the other hand, is -- and that's why it costs money to make.

Free software isn't free to make. There's a reason it's free as in libre but not necessarily free as in gratis.

Yeah I think the article is overrated. Alcohol has been around for a long time, and so has the ability to process it AND its effects on brains.

See this: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03...

If I had to bet, I'd bet on the trucking companies replacing their drivers with robots first before the bus or taxi companies do.

Buses are too messy - dealing with too many unpredictable people and vehicles in complex scenarios. Taxis would be even worse (buses have bus routes, taxis don't).

In contrast imagine being able to run trucks nonstop using robot drivers that don't need sleep, robot drivers that are safe and reliable enough to make the insurance companies to charge lower premiums. Maybe every Xth truck on the route has a human (who doesn't drive) just in case a truck encounters a problem that needs a human around. The trucking companies can pick routes that are more robot-truck friendly. Can't do that for taxis, and maybe hard for buses too.

When a robo-truck crushes a kid on a "no pedestrian" highway, that's a lot less bad PR than a robo-bus crushing a kid in a city or residential area.

If your wife is making more noise than the computer, spending money on computer parts won't solve the noise issue.

I prefer a buttery biscuit base: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Does it come with dual hidden blades?

Many of these exploits and xss-worms would not have been effective if people had implemented the suggestion I made more than a decade ago:
http://osdir.com/ml/mozilla.se...
http://osdir.com/ml/security.w...
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/P...

Plenty of people suggest libraries to sanitize stuff, but when people keep creating new "GO" buttons and never a single "STOP" button - how can you be sure you've disabled every possible "GO" button? With my proposal, a "STOP button" could even disable future yet to be invented "GO" buttons.

Anyway since the Mozilla bunch supposedly have a better idea, how about getting on with it: https://developer.mozilla.org/...

Actually, GIMP still uses GTK+2.

Maybe he's suggesting to just use plain SSL without the initial plaintext exchange and initiation.

Yup. Nobody needed to reinvent traditional TLS/SSL secure sockets in order to send email.

What's wrong with STARTTLS? To quote the original RFC: "...a client that gets a 454 response needs to decide whether to send the message anyway with no TLS encryption, whether to wait and try again later, or whether to give up and notify the sender of the error."

So in other words, if you're writing an SMTP stack you have to handle a severe security edge case by parsing a string instead of getting an exception from your secure socket library. What could possibly go wrong! Oh right... there's a reason this is on Slashdot.

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted.

Look, most severs these days are configured in such a way that STARTTLS runs on a different port than the plain-text connection. The server will reject login requests until the STARTTLS handshake is completed.

So sure, a few old, badly configured servers will continue over an unencrypted connection. But take it from a guy who worked on an email client, this is not a typical setup these days.

(Also: STOP USING STARTTLS!!!)

and the sales.