I understand the dislike many have to Atlas Shrugged, but I am not sure I agree with some of the assessments that have been made against the book. I can relate to the OP regarding the sense of enjoyment when reading the book (minus the John Galt radio broadcast, which was simply painful).

The problem that I have with the book is what netsavior appears to be saying; the book is very much to an extreme side of the equation and does a poor job incorporating any discussion of the need for non-capitalistic components in our society. The most glaring flaw I see in the premise of the book is that the runaway nature of capitalism (convergence toward monopolies, etc) is never addressed.

What I do like about Atlas Shrugged is the concept of fair exchange, where a person is compensated for their contributions. This is also something that is far more complicated than what Rand is willing to discuss; but I like to keep it as the kernel in how I understand what currency is supposed to be.

I found a good follow-up read to Atlas Shrugged is “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World”. This book does a good job explaining what money is, and I believe exposed some of the flaws Atlas Shrugged has in terms of currency.

Slashdot should do something like the Netflix challenge, where they release the dataset of modding information that can be analyzed for these kinds of trends. I would be very curious to see what kinds of information about modding behavior the community can dig up.

"You take care of the ounces, and the pounds will take care of themselves" was a phrase I learned in scouting regarding reducing the weight of a backpack.

When improving a system it does make sense to go for the most impactful problems first. It is, however, a better practice to have these concerns up front during the planning process. If there is concern about wasting $500M, then there is no way that $3T can get wasted.

I have been very happy with 16GB, as it has allowed me to turn paging off. Combined with an SSD drive, the machine is very snappy - I rarely have to wait for anything...

What is needed is a proxy organization. Something like Wikileaks, who can take from the white hats, and manage disclosure to the outside (company affected, etc). This way a white hat can report issues to the proxy with less risk of being prosecuted or sued by idiot entities.

If you look at that AMD Fusion design, they have already addressed this. The memory will be shared between CPU and GPU, and the 'transfer' from CPU to GPU will simply be a pointer exchange. In fact, Fusion is doing away with the concept of a GPU being a discrete device - the GPU that is presented to the OS is really only a virtual device wrapping a bunch of the vector processing units.

I really haven't had much use for the Android marketplace, but I did decide I wanted to check out what Angry Birds was all about. Going into the marketplace and searching for "Angry Birds" returned an absolute mess of results. As a user, I shouldn't have to weed through all of the crap to find a well-known application, especially since Google is first and foremost a search engine company.

..and, as a bonus, you won't have to buy a halloween costume this year.

If I had to guess, this would be a multi-point approach solution. The service would feed content to XBox, Media Center PC, and a set top box.

Keep in mind that for many users (my parents being an example), an 'appliance' is what they are looking for, and the XBox and Media Center PC don't fit that criteria. I don't want to deal with the XBox UI just to watch a TV program. The XBox also does not have digital cable decoding, etc. Media Center PC requires that a geek live in the house, to keep the damn thing patched etc. I personally use a Media Center box at home, but wish I had something more basic and closer to fixed function.

A couple of observations:

The biggest competitor to Microsoft in the areas they have traditionally been successful is....Microsoft. Windows XP has been "good enough" for a large audience, and 10 years from now, Windows 7 will be "more than good enough" compared to whatever version of Windows will be shipping then. Same with Office. Most of the other applications are either given away for free, or are not nearly as profitable.

The reason Microsoft is so interested in "the cloud", is that these are services they put reoccurring charges on. Xbox live memberships, Zune pass memberships, streaming media (music, movies, etc), are all services they can charge for until the end of time.

Microsoft is still hurting from the loss of market share for search (Google) and Music (iTunes). Of course they are interested in streaming video, and so is Apple and Google. Whichever one creates the market place that obtains the most users is in place to have a cash cow that can be milked for a very long time.

As a Microsoft employee and stock holder, I do want them to go after this market, because there is a lot at stake here. Unless Microsoft has a strong strategy, Apple will likely be the victor within the next year or two.

Ever been to Defcon?

Bad analogy. This would be like preventing the police from searching your house, where they believe the body to be. The computer is a container of the information, much like a safe would be for physical documents. The police are asking to look inside the container for the evidence, not asking you where the evidence is.

Demanding a diamond encrusted pony is a bit different than demanding that 'society' not take your money away.