Wow. The perfect tax. You pay the state and you get absolutely nothing in return. I hope other states don't pick up on this.

This is going to play out over decades. It's not like we will wake up one day and find autonomous cars everywhere. The first vehicles will be hybrids - not always or fully autonomous. The liability for these cars MIGHT be different, but at first there won't be many of them. Insurance companies might not notice for a while.

Over the years, there likely will be a big transition but the insurance companies, the DMVs and 16 year old boys will have some time to get over the twilight of the American Dream.

No, no. Foam insulation from a can, applied in the tail pipe judiciously to leave enough exhaust flow to sort of let the truck running. If you use the extension nozzle, he won't see this until he has disassembled the rest of the engine.

Subtlety is important. Even if he doesn't get it. And of course, there is always the concentrated sugar gas treatment. It's got electrolytes!

Has anyone ever clicked on a random link and been taken to a commercial porn site? To shock sites and stuff hosted in random places, sure, but these are not the ones being threatened with shutdown.

Nonsense. It is true, however, that Windows and Linux use different (overlapping) subsets of the SATA (and SCSI) command sets and, in particular, use very different sequences of commands in common use. If you test heavily with Windows and not with Linux, then you may find that there are code paths in your firmware that Linux uses a lot but which are mostly untested.

The 'tray' that Raymond describes in his second article looks very much like the Shelf from OPENSTEP 4.1, which was released just after Windows 95. I wonder if some of the NeXT people were playing with early betas of Windows 95 and, as their company CEO later quipped, started their photocopiers...

Win32s was released for Windows 3.1, but it just added some win32 APIs, not the UI. The UI was first introduced in the Chicago betas, which were eventually released as Windows 95. NT4 was released shortly afterwards and wasn't a bad OS, but hampered by the lack of plug-and-play support and perpetually having old versions of DirectX.

And, of course, I meant 'to shortcuts' there.

There are a few differences. First, symlinks are a property of the filesystem. This means that the normal filesystem APIs just work with them and you need special APIs for things that care about whether it's a link or not. In contrast, shortcuts are just another kind of file and everything that wants to follow them needs to know what the target is. Second, shortcuts contain a lot more information than just a path: they include the path to the destination file, an icon, the set of command-line arguments to pass, and some other flags. For example, I used to have a load of different shortcuts to the WinQuake (and, later, GLQuake) executable that all had different -game flags, for launching different mods. Many of them also had different icons, if the mod came with its own icon. You can't do that with symlinks.

The closest thing to symlinks on *NIX systems is .desktop files.

I really hope that "proud to declare that we are at the cusp of a reclaiming our heritage of being connected to each other and connected to the world." made a lot more sense before some translator mangled it; because otherwise it seems like absurd nonsense. If people were connected long enough and far enough back in time for it to count as 'heritage', the technology behind those connections must have been comparatively primitive. Is he saying that communications have regressed since that time? What golden age of connectedness is he talking about?

No, I'm pretty sure that corporate marriage is the old-school kind, where you get legally subsumed under the principle of coverture and become a wholly owned subsidiary

Well, getting screwed by corporations is pretty common; but I've never heard of anyone trying to marry one just because of its personhood...

I'm guessing that their decision to pitch rev. 2 at the 'people who propped up the blackberry holster market' demographic suggests that the Glass team was not entirely successful at coming up with a version that isn't socially alienating and ridiculous looking?

You don't use tin hats in biology. You need to keep in tune with Gai's resonances. Tin foil hats are strictly for computer types.

Look, why does everyone think China is involved? Just because the IP addresses point in that direction? Weak sauce. Here is a much more nuanced way to look at things. Yeah, they use China IP addresses. But much of the high tech part of China is on the eastern coast. This is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a whole bunch of active and extinct volcanoes ringing the Pacific Ocean.

Now, there aren't a whole lot of fiber optic cables that run directly to volcanoes. The business case really isn't there. So, if you are an evil villain bent on world domination, holed up in said geologic structure, where would you get Internet access from? AT&T? Comcast? Nope. You're neighbors in friendly, capitalistic China. You can even pull some plausible deniability out of it.

Come on guys, think harder. What kind of world do you want to see? Millions of plastic knick knacks at Wal-Mart.

Or sharks with lasers.