Well honestly, if you ignore the whole Metro UI fiasco, Windows 8 is a nice update to Windows 7. There a lots of little improvements. It may sound silly, but I think the dialog boxes for copying/moving files alone would be worth a $20 upgrade for my own use.

My two main qualms with Windows at this point are (a) forcing users to use a touchscreen UI on the desktop; and (b) the requirement of stupid/annoying copyright protection schemes. I don't pirate and I don't have any problem paying for software, but product activation needs to go.

It really makes me wonder if Ballmer was somehow the source of the problem. I feel like Microsoft has been a little less evil since the new guy took over.

I'm not sure how you think they changed the tone, timing, delivery, or emphasis of the messages. Apparently they used real posts and posted the entire content of each post without alteration. From what I understand, though I'm interpreting from a few different stories that I read, all they did was to alter the algorithm that Facebook already uses to choose which posts to show in your feed. They didn't insert or remove words from the posts. They didn't do anything to really re-contextualize them.

Whether people realize it or not, Facebook already filters and resorts your feed to emphasize posts that they think you're interested in. If you pay attention, you'll notice that when you have a friend that you "Like" a lot of their posts, then more of their posts will show up in your feed, and they'll appear higher up. I suspect that they also do things like prioritize posts with links from friends who you follow their links. I think they probably even do things like, if you've looked at a persons' profile a lot, or perhaps even if they look at yours a lot, the posts will be more likely to show up. I doubt that Facebook has made this algorithm clear, but it's clear that they're doing things like this.

So it seems that all they did was to add into the algorithm for some users to favor posts with happy words, and for other users posts with unhappy words. I don't think they're altering anything about the tone or emphasis of any individual message. I don't say this to really defend them.

Maybe Google should be working with a company like Tesla instead. It seems like Google would need to find a partner that a background in manufacturing cars, but was a little more innovative and forward-thinking than the big guys in Detroit have historically been.

Along with everything else, my guess is that if this technology really becomes commonplace, it will be disruptive and it will likely result in fewer people actually owning cars. In cases like this, sometimes getting businesses with entrenched interests onboard is not only difficult, but counter productive.

As far as I could tell from reading about this, they didn't change what people said.

Here's the thing, Facebook already filters what you see with the default setup. Your 500 friends each post 10 posts today, and when you load up your page on a social networking site, the page only displays 15. So how are those 15 chosen? (I'm making up numbers here, obviously)

The obvious choice would be to show the 15 most recent posts, but that means there's a good chance you'll miss posts that are important and that you'd like to see, since you're only getting a brief snapshot of what's going on in that social networking site. Facebook instead has an algorithm that tries to determine which of those 5,000 posts you'll care most about. I don't know the specifics, but it includes things like favoring the people who you interact with most on Facebook.

So what Facebook did in this study is they tweaked that algorithm to also favor posts that included negative words. The posts were still from that 5,000 post pool and the contents of the posts were unedited, but they subjected you to a different selection in order to conduct the research.

It's still an open question as to whether this sort of thing is appropriate, but it's important to note that this is something Facebook does all the time anyway. I think where is gets creepy is that Facebook is also an ad-driven company, so you have to wonder what the eventual goal of this research is. I can imagine Facebook favoring posts that include pictures of food to go along with an ad campaign for Seamless. Maybe they'll make a deal with pharmaceutical companies to adjust your feed to make you depressed, while at the same time plastering your feed with ads for antidepressants.

I know math is hard, but there simply are not enough administrators to account for all the money. This is the typical union canard.

The truth is, at many colleges, the full time faculty have gobbled up all the salary and benefits, despite teaching a small minority (~25%) of the courses. They limit the pay and hours of the part timers who teach 3/4 of the classes. So the part time faculty are limited to 60% weekly load hours, less per hour, and locked into a cycle of lower middle class or outright poverty.

Typical union greed: They accrue all the goods for a small minority, at the expense of the unemployed or underemployed.

The best part is, even the janitors have tenure. So what gets cut first? Classes - the ones taught by part timers.

Ask me how I know...

I feel like archival settings might be even trickier. There are two additional problems that jump to my mind.

First, it would mean you'd want to recheck the hash on a regular basis, and doing that cheaply is a bit of a logistical problem to solve in itself, but it only raises the question: what do you do when the hash comes back bad? The best solution that I can think of is to develop a system where the data is automatically duplicated to another medium and both are checked regularly, and if either one turns up defective, you restore it from the other copy. I don't know if this is what you had in mind, but the best option in this case might be to load all the data from the flash media you receive into your own server and use a filesystem with it's own check-summing to prevent bitrot. You could then keep that server backed up effectively and efficiently and reuse the USB keys. All this would increase the complexity of the operation, but probably work better.

The second problem is making sure clients can manage, find, recall, and decrypt their data once you have it. Imagine I periodically ship a 32 GB drive to you, and eventually I've shipped 20 of them out to you. I'm a good customer, spending a bunch of money with you. Now I go, "Hey, I want this specific file back, but I don't remember what key it's on, and I don't have the decryption key anymore." Yes, if I do this, I'm an idiot, but when you're dealing with customer service for the general public, you're dealing with idiots. So my question would be, how are you going to keep that from happening?

So there are a couple different problems here. One might already be solved by the software you plan on using to encrypt/hash the data. Does it keep an index of all of these archives that the user can search? Ideally, if you dumped things to a server like I mentioned earlier, there would also be a way for clients to connect remotely and view the contents of their archive, assuming that they have the correct encryption key or password. But then there's a second problem: If you're safeguarding against people losing this data due to a computer crash, fire, flood, etc., how do you make sure they have a backup of that index and the encryption keys? I kind of feel like, now you need a second service that does the same thing, just so I can ship the index and keys to *that* service. Or only require a password and not encryption keys, I suppose.

The idea has some potential. Figure out the best media for it-- a specific model of external drive that's rugged, high capacity, but also light/thin for cheap shipping costs. Figure out a fitting rotation scheme to keep the price down. For example, if you dropped a new backup in the mail every morning and kept them all offsite for a month, you would need at least 30 drives (ignoring the time it takes to ship the drive offsite and back). That's potentially a lot of money, plus shipping and warehousing costs.

Alternatively, you could do something where you try to time it so they drop it in the mail at the end of each week, and they receive it back two weeks later-- basically they ship it to you and you almost immediately ship it back-- so then they'd only need 2-3 drives. If you held onto one drive per month for 3 months, and then 3 monthly snapshots per year, indefinitely, then that means you'd need 3 drives to be in the weekly rotation plus 3 for the monthly rotation, plus 3/year for permanent offsite, it means you (or the client) need to buy 6 drives + 3/year. That doesn't seem so bad.

Like you said, make sure they're encrypted and hashed, not just to guard against bitrot, but to guard against snooping and damage in transport. All in all, that might not be a bad solution for areas that are rural enough that you can't get Iron Mountain, and your Internet connection is too slow to push your backups over the Internet. I don't know how large that market is or how much they'd be willing to pay.

I don't think you necessarily need to backup to tapes yourself. If you backed up your Amazon stuff to Rackspace, for example, you would be protected both against someone gaining access to your Amazon account, as well as a systemic problem with Amazon. Just so long as there's nothing in your Amazon account that would allow an attacker to access your Rackspace account, that should be a pretty good solution.

No solution is perfect. You're just looking for one that's extremely unlikely to break.

That's why you have backups in different geographical areas.

Have you considered a service like Iron Mountain? They'll send out a truck to pick up your backups every day, if you like, and store it in a very safe location.

I'm not sure why you're surprised at all. Spam is still a huge problem. You might be lucky enough that you don't get spam, but it's a relentless arms race, and it's intimately connected with the issue of viruses/malware. Of course it would have the attention of researchers.

Neither do I, at least not inherently or necessarily. But Microsoft has not earned a reputation for being an ethical company that puts "solving the world's problems" ahead of making a profit. Hell, Google's motto of "don't be evil" seemed to have been partially in response to Microsoft. Not that they're selling chemical weapons to warlords or anything, but they've had a long history of screwing over their customers and partners, even forgetting the underhanded tactics used against their competition. And some of the worst stuff took place while Gates was still the acting CEO of the company.

Sorry, you don't get a pass on being an unethical asshole just because you've given money to the poor. Yes, you should give money to the poor! That's a great thing to do. Curing Malaria? Fantastic! But that doesn't give you license to go around acting self-righteous while still collecting profits from your previous unethical (at times arguably illegal) business tactics.

I always try to point out this kind of thing when people go off about what a saint Bill Gates is. He became the richest man in the word by being a ruthless, cut-throat businessman, and then donates some of it to charity, and suddenly he's the best person in the world, going on tour with the "hey everyone, I'm such a good guy!" act.

I may sound crazy, but it's sort the only metaphor I can think of: Imagine you had a really crappy roommate. He throws parties and doesn't clean up after himself. He never does the dishes or buys the toilet paper. He plays loud music in the middle of the night. He steals money out of your wallet, and once took a dump on your bed because he thought it was funny. He's just generally an asshole and a terrible roommate. And then one day, he decides that he's going to donate $10/month to the local homeless shelter, and suddenly he's going around telling everyone about his wonderful charity work, and everyone is telling you what a great guy his is, but you keep coming home to find that there's poop in your bed.

Doing one nice thing doesn't absolve you of your other ethical obligations. If Bill Gates wants my respect as a "good guy" and he wants credit for his wisdom, he'll publicly apologize for the unethical business practices conducted by Microsoft under his watch, and use his influence to set things right.