Yea, MS money made the users hate the experience.

Oh, come now. All users complain at least sometimes. If a complaining user were really enough to change the course of the enterprise, how many Windows desktops would be left? Or Oracle? I use an Mac Pro at work myself, and it certainly is not perfect.

Maybe system in Munich really is bad, but you simply cannot determine that in any substantial manner just by sticking your finger into the air. It all comes down to subjective decisions by whomever is in authority.

How does it compare to eigenfaces?

Darn those people from the east, always copying western practices.

No, I don't think it's a Flash vulnerability. It is awfully obscured in the article by general hand-waving, but I think the idea here is to trick people into installing an executable that isn't really Flash by causing an executable that presents itself as a Flash update to request installation. Since this happens while they are visiting youtube (with a man-in-the-middle doing the injection), the user may assume it is a legit update and install the malware.

In other words, Flash and Java are "exploited" only in the sense that people are so used to being pushed security updates, that they may accept a fake update delivered on an insecure connection. Accepting a so-called Flash update from any untrusted site would accomplish the same thing. It really just boils down to the fact that every site is an untrusted site if you're not using https, since you don't know who all is in the middle.

you could cruise the highway 5 feet behind the car in front of you.

The main benefit of flying transportation is to bypass the congestion on the surface of the earth. (You could achieve most of the same practical benefits by digging tunnels everywhere, but nobody knows how to do it cheaply and the scenery is no good.)

How do you figure? There's no reason, for example, an aircraft couldn't say, "our destination is over the ocean, but we don't have enough fuel for that, so I'm stopping for gas now..." It would be like riding a horse, if you ask it to walk into a wall, it just looks at you funny.

Surely a big part of the Flying Car Dream is making them safe enough for everybody to operate - which is to say, highly automated.

Hey, for all we know, one of the 6000 jobs eliminated in this objective, impartial assessment of Cisco's evolving business needs might be his own, and he will be kicked to the curb. That could happen, right? I mean, he did say "we" need to have courage to lead change. If he were actually exempt, he would have had to say something else, like, "a bunch of you people are about to get buggered."

Libraries are also a haven from commercialism. Any privatized variation on the library, run by e.g. Amazon, will unavoidably slide into becoming a flea market and / or Cable TV, just as surely as the Internet did. There are deep inherent conflicts between the goals of spreading knowledge vs turning a buck.

Waivers for individual companies (or tailored so that they only apply to one company in practice) really suck. How is this the rule of law? It's a popularity contest. Worse, it favors only big companies with enough sway to browbeat the government. If anything, we should be working towards better global standards to clamp down on regulation-shopping. At least, goods should be produced under similar regulations to those where they will be consumed, otherwise local industry is unfairly undermined and externalities are rampant.

But libraries already have floating e-book licenses you can check out for downloadable content (including off hours) in addition to everything else they offer.

My daughter volunteered at the local library this summer teaching younger kids to read. In theory some semblance of this "could" be done over the Internet, but I just don't see it actually happening, and it wouldn't be the same.

That is just a general limitation of crowdsourcing (or democracy for that matter). There is a not-super-high ceiling of quality you will hit. But anything much better will, inevitably, come to resemble a scientific journal, and that's not what most of us want most of the time.

I think SSDs are not unlike power supplies in that some poor quality options are available so you can't just shop price. So far I've stuck with Intel and Samsung SSDs, passing up cheaper options, with good results. As the technology matures I suppose that budget brands will become a safer bet. But getting back to this article, I would not be first in line to buy a new model OCZ.

No desktop should be HDD-only. The are too slow. Conventional wisdom used to be that maxxing out RAM was the first thing to do, but after even 8GB (which isn't all that much in a desktop any more) I would get an SSD for it before anything else.

Is it any stranger than designer t-shirts? Or needlessly large homes? The point is to show everybody you have money.