So... getting women out of tech is a good thing?

(Joking. Only joking.)

It sounds to me like he was watching this documentary I recently saw on TV, Person of Interest, which is about the dangers of AI run wild...

(I think the character who created the AI on Person of Interest has said something almost identical to Elon Musk's quote from the summary. The latest episode has a throw-away line about how many iterations it took before his AI stopped trying to kill him.)

Since you mention it, if you search for "Doom", you get (amongst others):

So I guess John Carmack never did exist.

And, yes, "Doom (Video game)" appears twice. The second one is actually "Doom 4."

Honestly, that's because that's what it is. It makes a much better competitor to the MacBook Air than the iPad. (The price point doesn't help it either.) It makes a fairly lousy tablet, and it suffers from the general Windows 8-ism of "throw absolutely everything we can think of into it at once."

It's a multi-touch tablet. With an optional-but-not-really keyboard-touchpad cover. And a front and rear camera. And a pen that doesn't attach anywhere. (Fun game: in Surface ads, watch for them to produce and disappear the pen. It comes out of nowhere and disappears to nowhere.)

It runs a laptop OS (and runs it well, mind you) and therefore picks up some annoying laptop-isms: by default, unlocking requires your Windows password. (You can, thankfully, enable a PIN to unlock.) Like a laptop, it enters hibernation mode and then requires a couple of seconds to wake up if you leave it alone long enough. It also takes a couple of seconds to wake up from sleep (not hibernation).

As a small form-factor laptop, it works quite well. As a tablet - well, Windows 8.1 turns out to make a lousy tablet OS.

Although I find that using touch on desktop apps works surprisingly well. The handwriting support is also fairly good and you can get away with using just the pen in a surprising number of desktop apps.

It honestly isn't a bad whatever it is. It's just that it isn't really a good tablet.

I'm not sure the Surface Pro line is really competing with the iPad, though. I mean, according to Microsoft themselves, a Surface Pro 3 is equivalent to a MacBook Air.

(Disclaimer: I own a Surface Pro 3. They're probably right to compare it to the MacBook Air and not the iPad. I know everyone hates the "tablet UI" on the desktop but even with the Surface Pro 3 their tablet UI is still pretty terrible. I pretty much never leave the desktop. On my tablet. The few tablet-style apps I've tried for the Surface has all been terrible. It really does make a descent small Windows laptop, though!)

How does that work when you're off the LTE network, though? LTE coverage may be generally "OK" where I live near a major city, but I know that my brother who uses Verizon frequently finds himself on whatever Verizon calls their CDMA data service when using data. (I think it's just "3G" but I don't remember.) Do you need a special CDMA card too or does it all use the same SIM card? I'm assuming it all uses the same SIM card? Or do the new iPads just not support CDMA at all?

I'm genuinely curious, I have no idea how the CDMA to LTE transition works. Not that it really matters to me since I'm currently on AT&T, but my family all uses Verizon and I have no clue what's going on with Verizon's transition to LTE.

Well, yes, but generally you buy the SIM through them and not through Apple.

Apparently with the new iPads one of the new features is that they come with "Apple SIMs" that instead of being a SIM provided by the cell provider are a SIM Apple provides. (Unless you're using it with Verizon, in which case you have to use a Verizon SIM. Except I thought Verizon and Sprint used CDMA which required something other than a SIM. Or maybe 4G LTE changes that. I haven't a clue how it works, other than for the longest time in the US if you wanted to use the same phone and change providers you could only do that between AT&T and T-Mobile and then even then you often couldn't because they didn't use the same bands.)

So, er, anyway. It's a story because it means that AT&T and Verizon are basically preventing one of the major new features on the iPad from working, which ultimately doesn't really matter because for the most part you can't just buy data a-la-cart in the US anyway so it's not like you're likely to be switching providers enough to make being able to keep the SIM useful.

Wait, really? When I took a trip to Australia, I wound up getting a Japanese car from the car rental and was constantly turning on the windshield wipers when trying to signal.

Driving on the left? No big deal. Remembering where the turn signals were? Took the entire trip.

Of course, when I got back to the US and into my own (Japanese) car, the first thing I did after starting it was turn on the windshield wipers to indicate I was turning left out of my parking spot.

Well, to be fair, that story was immediately below the one they presumably intended to link.

Although now we have a definitive answer to "do the editors bother checking the stories being linked to when they post stories."

You mean something like Project Ara? (Actually, Project Ara's website sucks, try the Wikipedia page on it instead.)

People are working on a modular cell phone. Not open hardware, necessarily, but something which you can upgrade piecemeal. I don't think anyone's managed to create a real marketable solution, but - well, there are companies working on it.

As far as I can tell, chflags nohidden does nothing to "." files as far as Finder is concerned.

I can hide other files in Finder using chflags hidden and it hides them immediately (and they then reappear immediately using chflags nohidden) but "." files and directories remain hidden. (This is using Mavericks as IT hasn't approved Yosemite yet.)

I live in an apartment complex outside of Boston. FIOS is already wired down the street I live on. When I asked Verizon about FIOS, they told me that in order to offer it in my building, the building owners would have to pay to wire it and they'd have to get half the units in the building to sign up ahead of time.

Needless to say, I'm still on Comcast.

Right here, the list is located on the side of that page. I have JavaScript disabled as well, but I still found it in the menu at the top of each page.

Anyway, the full list:

Ammon, ID
Auburn, IN
Austin, TX
Boston, MA
Centennial, CO
Champaign, IL
Chattanooga, TN
Clarksville, TN
Jackson, TN
Kansas City, KS
Kansas City, MO
Lafayette, LA
Leverett, MA
Louisville, KY
Montrose, CO
Morristown, TN
Mount Vernon, WA
Palo Alto, CA
Ponca City, OK
Portland, OR
Raleigh, NC
Rockport, ME
San Antonio, TX
Sandy, OR
Santa Cruz County, CA
Santa Monica, CA
South Portland, ME
Urbana, IL
Westminster, MD
Wilson, NC
Winthrop, MN

And, bringing it right back around to video games, Ogg Vorbis is apparently used in a ton of video game engines. Something about it not requiring a license and being better at looping than MP3s. I'm unclear on the technical merits, but apparently there are still technical merits that make it a good choice for video games above and beyond the "no license fee" thing.

I know that the Unreal Engine started using Vorbis a long time ago, and from their API docs, it looks like they still do, along with Opus.

If you View Source, you'll see that they do, in fact, use an <audio> tag. They also have a JavaScript library that replaces it with an HTML GUI. I guess if it detects your browser is old enough to not support HTML5, it goes with a Java applet instead.

So... update your browser?