My first thought too.

To quote Frozen, "Let it go! Let it go!'

Android and Apple have sewn up the smartphone market pretty well. Android fully raced to the bottom, so there is almost no chance to ever undercut short of paying people to use their phone OS. At best you will have a news funky OS on the same cheap junky hardware. How will that make the OS any better? I'd argue that MS's desperate attempt to get some toehold in mobile is just good money being thrown after bad.

Worse yet they screwed over their flagship Windows OS trying to chase mobile.

I would argue that they need to concentrate on keeping their cash cows going and stop sacrificing them on the altar of mobile/touch. The OS needs to be leaner and meaner. The interface should be streamline rather than abandoned for something new and shiny. Apple did not throw away the interface when they totally overhauled their OS with OSX, nor did they wholesale force the iOS interface onto the desktop (yes, some sharing has occurred, but it has been gradual). MS has does a good job pissing off its core customers needlessly over and over, and that is what needs to stop ASAP.

Until MS rebuilds their reputation to be a net positive, just being as cheap as Android will not be enough to get mobile market share. Instead people currently are cranky about the end of support for XP, still remember Vista, mostly like their Windows 7 box, are either avoiding or hating a new Windows 8 box, and are cautiously hoping they will just be able to get work done one whatever POS version 10 MS ships next. Oh yeah, and still despising the ribbon interface (WTF?!).

With all due respect, you don't make much sense. I took and passed a polygraph to work for the CIA about 15 years ago. Mine went easy, but the previous poster's experience was typical for about half the group who didn't do so well. One guy got screamed at be for clearly being a terrorist. Of course he still got to ride with the rest of us future employees back to the hotel in the un-marked blue van, telling you how much of a threat they deamed him. Polygraphs are a crock, and interogations are likely not much better, but thankfully I have never been on the wrong side of one of those.

All your claims about "real" polygraph tests sound like something you read on the interwebs.

Most folks don't take Linux seriously at all.

Not all ranges are equal. The current Leaf was claimed to be a 200 km car (124 miles) in some regions where their test regimens are pretty wimpy, but the exact same car is only rated for 84 miles here in the USA. So the comments from the Nissan CEO recently of 400 km for a Leaf 2.0 likely translates to ~150-170 miles per the EPA testing, not 250 miles.

Given that this is a concept car, I would expect the 200 mile range claim to have very similar asterisks on it. Basically, wait a bit and see what really pans out for range and pricing. The original Volt 1.0 over hype saga should make everyone a skeptic of GM until proven otherwise. Also, wait and see what the battery warranty looks like. Leaf 2011 and 2012 drivers in warm climates really got a rude lesson on that one. I am hopeful that with more competition we will see good battery capacity warranties become the baseline.

You mean like a Volt? Or do you need something that has >50 miles of EV range but also has a gas extender?

Can't agree more. I got an Android phone a couple years back (late adopter...) and was initially pretty impressed compared to the price of an Apple widget given the specs and all. But the few updates that have been pushed have crippled the darn thing, and there is too much bloatware that I have no ability to remove without rooting the device.

The whole Android ecosystem is more of a Mad Max distopian free-for-all than I could have imagined. I am no Apple fanboi, but I am pretty sure my next phone won't be another orphaned Android POS. At least Apple gives a pretty decent support life of most of products.

We vote by mail here in Oregon. I like it. It give you a chance to sit down and research each issue (voter guide, google, etc). Compared to having to go to a polling place ONLY on a Tuesday I really prefer it. I just wish it was postage paid, or was mailable with just 1 Forever stamp.

I know I will annoy some naysayers here, but I really would like to see the polls open from Saturday through Tuesday for non vote by mail states. I hated having to track down a polling place when I used to live in California. It had to be in the evening after work, and usually had a long line thanks to everyone else having similar schedules. Kind of a hassle.

Yep, I view low voter turnout as a symptom, not a cause of our badly broken system.

Low-information voting exacerbates the problems, but is hardly the main issue either.

Problems I see:
1) 2 party system that does not do a good job representing the needs and desires of the country. Usually you have a choice between bad and worse, which is hardly a compelling motivation. Neither party seems to do much more than play high stakes chess with the other to try to stay or get in power.

2) Congressional and Presidential shenanigans that prevent enough transparency for even the well intentioned voter to cast a well informed vote. Bills get nearly untraceable amendments, or die quietly behind closed doors. Accountability comes in the form of badly belated and heavily redacted reports after years of legal wrangling. Can't vote a bum out who retired years before his deeds become public.

3) External ownership of bills. Congressmen don't write, let alone read the bills they pass. It comes out of external groups who hand over tidy packages of legislation ready to go. You can't vote ALEC, or the Koch brothers away, so why vote?

4) Gerrymandering that dramatically reduces the power of minor party voters in a given state. If your district is 90% democrat, or only 35%, your vote matters very little, by design. Why bother?

I could go on, but basically it has become very hard to argue the your vote matters that much anymore. By design our democracy has been subverted.

Seconded.

I tell my wife that if there are things that she really just must see to just buy them ala carte from itunes or whatever. A couple shows a year is still cheaper than the relentless ~$70 cable bill we ditched. She has only bought a couple in the first year we cut the cord, and those shows are now available streaming.

At $16 a month Netflix/Hulu works pretty well for our situation. I still REALLY wish Hulu had an ad free option, even if it was a few bucks more a month. We are never going back, period.

I see the future as more ala carte streaming options and see a good market for whatever service figures out how to offer an ad free tier for their offerings. Seriously, I HATE ads on any pay service.

I am hoping cable goes the way of AOL, and existent but increasingly irrelevant service.

I would welcome ESPN having to fend for itself, and schlock channels like TLC, QVC, etc all ending with a quick death.

Huh?

In this case there is willful negligence going on by pointing a bot in a dangerous direction and pressing go, then throwing your hands up like you had no control. If I cut a horse or cow loose near a busy freeway to see what happens and someone dies I should be responsible for manslaughter and animal neglect. These guys were very intentionally reckless.

A butterfly cannot be reasonably expected to know if its wing flapping will result in a tornado, and there is a high probability that it won't (trillions of wing flaps per day, maybe hundreds of tornadoes per year, and far fewer deadly ones).

Buying stuff from the hidden bowels internet at random is pretty likely to net stolen and or illegal stuff a fair percentage of the time.

So while there is a line, these guys are clearly on one side of it, and the butterfly is quite far on the other side of it. Ignorance is not a defense for the most part.

Simple. Imagine the scenario.

1) You see someone in distress.
2) You grab your smartphone and wade through the plethora of apps you almost never use to find the iLifeRingDrone app.
3) Wait through a mandatory ad to load, since the service needs to fund itself, and ad supported is the only business model going these days.
4) In your panicked state you try to figure out how to tell the service where the poor victim is at, and how to discern from the dozens of other beach goers frolicking about.
5) Drone takes off, assuming it has not died from being stored for a couple years under salt spray conditions (yes, any system has to work for YEARS without annually replacing them).
6) Drone uses your crappy smartphone instructions to try and go to the correct coordinates and drop a ring.

My guess is the swimmer would be dead by step 4.

Far more lives would be saved putting the money for such a system into almost any health related application. Low tech life guards at popular beaches and good warning signs at known dangerous spots would do much better at saving lives for the same cost.

I was hoping the new year would bring some sanity to the drone conversation. Sorry but just because you think your quad-copter is really cool does not translate to it being terribly useful for everything under the sun.

I for one do not welcome out new drone overlords. It will take a few failed startups, but I expect the fad notion of these things to fade away as their utility is explored and found to be rather wanting compared to the hype.

Here in Portland our MAX light rail has a pretty good cross section of the population. I only have pause riding it during the commuting rush hour when it is overpacked.