This, entirely this.

I don't know of any large companies that had a mass deployment of Vista, I only know my own personal experience was a jump straight from XP to 7, which happened after 7 had been out for nearly 2 or 3 years. Corporations (and small businesses) need stability, configurability, and to some extent user familiarity. Win 8 may be the most stable thing they've produced yet, but when you have to train 100k+ employees how to get to their email, you're talking a massive expense for little to not real productivity gain. If 10 maintains the AD mass-configuration, with the well-known look and feel, then they may have a corporate winner.

This is the same reason you don't see wide-spread Linux adoption in corporations. The look/feel is just too different for those folks used to clicking on the little blue 'E' for "internet". Combine that with all the "Microsoft certifications" that know "file->add" but not the nuts and bolts of how to actually add a user/group, and you're looking at retraining your entire workforce for a new OS. It seems they would rather pay $100 per seat for a new OS, than get a free OS and suffer $200 per seat in training, not to mention lost productivity.

If MS somehow does manage to screw the pooch with 10, we may see corporations either stick with 7 and weather the storm, or you might actually see some start to look for alternatives.

You could do that now. Then get all cozy with QWest/CenturyLink, TWC, Cox, etc...

It means the connection between your PC and printer has had an underflow of "LETTER". Best fixed by sending another 100 copies of War and Peace to the printer. You know, to get those fat electrons moving down the wire again.

I used to work in a proposal center, where people should know a good deal of the basics... such as using Office and assorted graphics/layout programs. One morning as I'm walking to my desk I see someone on the phone, obviously talking to the help desk, and there is an ominous message on the display:

So I ejected the floppy and tapped the space bar. About 3 minutes later I got some of the most intense thanking I've ever recieved. You'd think I'd just saved a years worth of rework for them. I still don't know why they'd bother with a floppy disk, none of the files we worked with would have fit on the dumb thing.

I think this is an incredibly short-sighted look at this. What we are talking about is changing genes, changing neural links, or fundamental brain chemistry (which we kinda do already... see medications). The human brain is incredibly complex and the only way we know to "fix" it is surgery to remove something like cancer, or via medications. To fundamentally change neural pathways or genes would be to fundamentally change the person, with unknown side effects. To suggest we can simply "fix" them ignores some well observed side effects of "traumatic brain injury". Likewise, the brain will adapt in a concept called neuroplasticity, it will rewire a damaged portion to a new section of the brain.

There are people out there who have no choice in the matter. For example intersex individuals, such as those born with 2 X's and a Y, are uncommon, but are out there. We are not necessarily talking gender dysphoria. Rather, we are talking someone who does not strongly express either gender. My understanding is that parents typically want males, so given the choice early on that's what they opt to have the doctor go for (and resulting surgery). Later on in life that may impose gender dysphoria, not because "he feels like a woman", but because his body is actively producing hormone levels of both, perhaps with a leaning toward one or another. This is not some psychological conditioning, this is a fundamental issue with the chemistry of their body. How do you suppose we fix that? A series of invasive surgeries? Years of therapy to "deal with it"?

This is what the Texas Digital Library aims to do. Though it's not quite one big wiki, it actually is a push to archive and collaborate using various data types and formats.

That's not entirely true. Printers will output small dots intended to be invisible to the naked eye (they're tiny and yellow). This is called printer steganography. While not all of them have been decoded (as of whenever that was updated), the assumption is that the marking can uniquely identify an individual printer and printout by serial and date/time.

Oh I wish we could do that. We'd be able to solve many problems at once.

I'm curious how and if this applies to that patent fron earlier this year or last year about location-based advertising. Its bulk grabbing of cell phone data to feed you a coupon for something on or near the shelf you're standing by. True, the underlying motivation is different, but the mechanism is largely the same. I happen to be looking at power tools, look at my phone and am fed Sears adds. I'm sure with the appropriate warrant some agencies could listen in, if they arent already.

Where exactly does that text say anything about overthrowing the government?

Lets break this down: "Well regulated militia" because there was no standing military. Also, who do you think is actually doing the regulating? Why?"Necessary to the security of a free state" the 'militia' or 'military surrogate' defending its borders/people. "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" you can own a gun if you so choose, and no one can take it from you.

Looking at the time it was written, it was up to the people to defend themselves. There was no military, it wasn't organized yet... our country was a bunch of immigrants looking to start anew. Today the right has been (in my opinion) perverted to the point its about dick waving instead of self defense. Sure, get that hunting rifle and kill a few elk. Have a handgun in case of an intruder. Just don't bitch and moan that you need that semi-automatic rifle for "self defense, just in case Obama comes to your house to take your 9mm". The amendment is not saying the people need to mount a violent uprising because they don't like what the president is doing. It only says you can own a gun, not what you need to do with it.

My right to free speech ends where your rights begin. True, the government shall make no law abridging the right to freedom of speech (e.g. GOV restriction of speech), but in practice that right has been upheld to private sector too. That is exactly why customer clauses prohibiting negative reviews have been found illegal and unenforceable.

Penn and Teller put it pretty well in their first episode of Bullshit. To call someone a moron or an idiot is slander and you're open to lawsuits. To call someone an asshole or a motherf***er is expressing an opinion, and you're pretty much in the clear.

Take it a step further and you're getting into the slander/libel territory. A 14yo brat calling someone a "faggot" I would argue could get into lawsuit territory. If the target was in a position that, should the accusation be true or generally perceived as true, could cause irrepairable harm to that persons livelihood. Teachers, for example, may have a cause to start a lawsuit since along with the label "faggot" (homosexual) is an implied "pedophile".

With regard to this whole "movement", I liken it to Westboro Baptist. They are an incredibly vocal minority looking to stir up crap. They are within their rights to speak their opinion wherever and however they wish, so long as it is not destructive to others. They can picket all they want, but as soon as a rock is thrown through a windshield, they are in the wrong.

It goes far beyond peer pressure. Look around you next time you're in any store and look at how things are marketed toward men and women, girls and boys. For the strongest example, look no further than the toy section. Boys toys are all about building, destroying, superheroes, sports, and other stereotypical toys. Girls toys are more about Barbie, princesses, cooking, cleaning, etc...

I say this as a father of a young daughter. I want her to explore her interests without pressuring her in any particular direction. I also would rather her have toys that encourage her to learn and explore. By and large, that means going to specialty toy shops to find gender neutral toys. Things like K-nex, assorted Legos (that aren't focused on kitchens, princesses and horses), or more science-oriented toys.

To let your kid go to their toy isle and pick out their own is likely to just reinforce the stereotype of women being "princesses", waiting for their prince to come pay for their pampering.

This reminds me of the Prisoner's Dilemma. There's a few different variations of the reward, but the dilemma goes as follows:

You have two prisoners that are each offered a chance at freedom. They are given the choice to either rat out the other or remain silent. If both rat out the other, they both get a longer sentence. If only one rats out the other, they get a much reduced sentence. If they both remain silent, then they get something in between.

Obviously a "psychopathic attitude" would be to consistently rat out the other, despite it also being the only option that has a 50% chance of an increased penalty/sentence. It's not as simple as me-first, there is also logic and planning involved in how to get the greatest gain. This is why you get some players that will help others out, become part of the group, then take the group to the cleaners (e.g. steal all the stuff in the guild bank or whatever).

What nobody seems to be bringing up here is the concept of disassociation that all people have. One reason that some people road rage and scream at other cars is that they do not see that there are other people in the cars, they only see the vehicle. Likewise with some in-game avatar, there is no personal accountability for actions, no concept of personal punishment or social rejection. People behave much differently when they aren't being judged by others in person. There may be some lack of apathy in some players, in others maybe they just genuinely enjoy being a jerk when they won't get their face punched in.I believe that this is a big reason why we get griefers and in-game chat e-peen measuring contests, it's all a sort of virual posturing because there are no repurcussions. You take the same folks and put them in a room and I can all but guarantee the 70-lb 12 year old won't be mouthing off to the 300lb biker.

Without even reading the article (GASP!) I can tell this isn't GPS, and it isn't a (pure) INS. What they are talking about is a more accurate magnetometer that have been used in stabilizing pure inertial nav systems for years. The idea being that if they cool it down and isolate it (e.g. negate many of the problems a compass has, such as changing direction when near a large ferrous object), that they could pinpoint location based on the Earths magnetic field. There has been some experimentation with this in the civilian space with smart phones using built-in magnetometers to help aide in GPS-limited environments, such as around large buildings or within shopping malls, instead of the built in inertial sensors. I wouldn't call it GPS, though I would call it some "new" form of navigation.

A lot of what you say already exists and is somewhat transparent. Here are some examples:

For years they said that cross-realm mail was impossible, that the physical segregation of hardware (despite them all being on the same network) made it impossible. Now we have cross-server group finding in the random queues. We have account-wide mail of account-bound items that are not tied to servers or factions.

The cross-realm character transfer (and faction transfer) are advertised as though they they take at most 24 hours, and some forum posts by Blizzard employees have hinted that it isn't just a switch in a database, that it was closer to taking a USB stick and physically moving character data. If you've ever paid for any of those services, you'll notice that it is typically done in minutes, as though it was done in a lower-priority task as soon as the servers in question had a few free cycles. Or maybe just a simple transact-SQL script.

Hell, they even said for years that there was no way to automatically level a character, that the process was too complex and computationally expensive. Now you have "boosted" 90's running around all over the place. They've also implemented a server-side update stream for pre-patching installations, as well as server-based changes in environments (see phasing).

Of course, this is all just speculation. They could very well still have all the separate servers, complete with little printed labels slapped onto the front of the machines separating Drak'Thul from Doomhammer. 9 years is a lot of time for software development, they might have refined their network code to make all the above that much easier. They might have also upgraded from copper to fiber. They aren't public with their server setups, so who knows what they've got going on.