How cunning.
What's next? 'Your mom'-retorts?

Oneliners can be very insightful or completely ridiculous.

There can be no end goal.

1. The concept 'goal' requires the concept of time (or: transitioning between states) and the concept of objective desirability, as it defines a set of reachable states that are more desirable than other states (more fully: an ordering of states). Both are, to me, not fundamental but emergent elements of the universe.
2. The target state(s) are necessarily goalless (or they wouldn't be the most desirable, that is, unless you allow the 'end' goal to change between states).

Let me put it like this:
Suppose there is a big red button hidden in the desert somewhere and that pushing it is the end goal. Suppose we find it and push it.
Then what?

Push it again? Game over, thanks for playing? Cop-out 'transcendence' to next level with new 'end' goal? Transcendence to next goalless level in which things just happen for no reason and all states are equally desirable?

Don't get me wrong: we can still have subjective temporary goals. Just no 'end' goal.

Hehe, thanks for the chuckle :-)

I'm doubt that the takeover of 'tablet culture' will be that complete. It is very true that the capacitive touch screens have spurred a huge development in UI design when it comes to having big targets, little clutter and sensibly using gestures, but these principles aren't really new. They just became necessary elements because of the lack of input capabilities, precision and invested effort of the target market. At the same time we're also still seeing many, many suboptimal workarounds to deal with those properties (cursor positioning, slide-in panels, long press, double tap, triple-tap, auto-correction, Swype, etc.). Applications that are even slightly complex benefit greatly from having a pointer and a keyboard and I predict that these applications will exist side by side (or even as an integrated whole) on convertibles as consumers and application developers slowly rediscover the ease of having those input capabilities present. The apologism for the issues present in people's new tablet (and hopefully smartphone) toys will slowly wane when that happens.

I'm sure there is some analogy about men fucking women and men in there, but I'm not sure the imagery would clarify my points above ;-)

You do realize than none of those things are necessarily because of the tablet+case configuration you have chosen? Although I will admit that if you really want 4:3, there isn't all that much on offer in ultrabook/convertible-land.

1. There are Android convertibles.
2. Windows 8. It gets a lot of hate, but it 'too much chrome' is not among the arguments.
3. The amount of actual productivity tools on offer for actual laptop OS is ridiculous.

Think hard about what you said:

I agree with the latter, but not the former. A convertible with a proper keyboard and touchpad, combined with a hybrid touch/pointer-OS is infinitely more usable than a tablet with a keyboard slapped on to it.

Your ClamCased tablet is never going to be smaller and lighter than a/an netbook/ultrabook with the keyboard permanently attached (or even than a convertible/hybrid).

Tethering. Mobile Wifi hotspot. A secondary subscription just for your laptop/convertible/tablet is a PITA.

Try one of the newer Win 8.1 configurations on solid state memory.

This is where you have a point. Wintel is still catching up to ARM in this area.

Well, there's a tradeoff here. Bigger bricks generally charge the devices faster. Some convertible producers are switching back to (small) bricks from straight USB-chargers due to the limitations of charging via USB-ports.

Blessed Be Her Holy Hooves!

No, this is why you set up a VPN server in your home and use it to securely tunnel to the internet.

I will say that setting up the server and connecting to it on different devices should be easier, though. My current setup is OpenVPN (tun)-clients on Android and Win8.1 connecting to an OpenWRT OpenVPN server. I'm pretty sure that the average Joe wouldn't be able to get this setup up and running.

Seriously? You clicked on an article on statistics, yet haven't the faintest clue what 'correlation' means?
Try going to Yahoo Answers instead of Slashdot. You'll do everybody a favor.

They tried that, but it didn't make a huge difference (the resulting network was still easily 'fooled' with similar images).

The big thing to realize here is that the algorithm that generates the fooling images specifically creates highly regular images ("images [that] look like modern, abstract art". The repeated patterns are very distracting to the human eye, whereas the DNN pretty much ignores them. See figure 10 in the paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.1897v1.pdf ). It is necessary to take into account that the training set almost exclusively contains images of entire objects, not of patterns on that object. Presented with the 'evolved' school bus image, a human would probably say 'bee' or 'wasp' before school bus if forced to make a guess. The DNN, however, has never seen a close-up of the backside of a bee. I'm 99% confident that if you'd add closeups of patterns found on the classes in the ImageNet database, the DNN would be far less easily fooled.

Also, when removing a number of the top and bottom repetitions in the school bus example, a human could very well guess 'school bus', given the following question:
"Out of these 1000 object classes, which one does this image show?"
1000 different classes is ridiculously far away from the number of different visual concepts a human can distinguish.

You are what's wrong with the world. You're effectively saying that effective intra-governmental oversight is impossible and that any government is only after its own financial gain.

If you'd open your indoctrinated eyes, you'd see that there is a plethora of well-functioning intra-(semi-)governmental oversight relations. Probably even in the US. Stop throwing away the baby with the bath water. Government isn't necessarily and inherently evil.

Finally: the notion that corporations 'keep an eye on the government' is fucking ridiculous and implies that corporations have a responsibility they shouldn't, can't and fucking don't have. Unless by 'keeping an eye on' you mean 'lobbying and bribing the fuck out of ~'.

True, and windows 10 actually improves on this by also supporting top-bottom splits and corner-splits (the omission of which in Windows 7, if you think about it, is actually pretty idiotic - especially considering the post XP-removal of the CTRL+click on taskbar entries & Tile vertically/horizontally).

If you had read closely, you would have seen that I didn't make any statements on the absolute amount of morality and justice in the US. It was a relative statement, which only put a lower bound on the amount of morality and justice in the US. Considering the US is currently at 'killing and torturing people is fine', we are talking about a pretty low bar, however. (is a statement on the absolute amount of morality and justice in the US)

Now you may be right (in a very generous sense) that I'm looking at history through rose-colored glasses, but it isn't exactly hopeful to be under the impression that the US was always at the level it is now and probably always will be. I remain under the impression that whether it be in business or politics, the nature of modern society has increased the rate at which the good guys are either thrown out of the system or corrupted by it.

Nice ad hominem.. Dickwad.
Starting off with a straw man doesn't make you look great either: I never said that free markets are killing us.

Anyway.
The highly regulated private entities 'solution' is a Frankenstein monster born out of compromise. It's what you do when nationalization of certain sectors is called communist but you are also very aware that leaving it purely to the market would lead to a very shitty and untenable situation.

If a private entity operates in a natural monopoly, you will be writing veritable books of regulation to 'hold them accountable' and prevent all the ways in which they can and will cut corners to profit from their monopoly (hate the game, not the playa). Tell me, have you factored in the cost of the government entities necessary to regulate these profitable and 'efficient' government regulated private entities? What if, as a society, we add that cost to what we have to pay these private entities for their services, then weigh that against the quality of the service they are providing and consider whether a nationalized variant would really be worse?

Open your eyes, man. Don't throw away centralized government.
Instead: Fix it. Make it awesome!

Why the hell is that unfortunate? Utilities should be nationalized. Their existence and proper functioning is essential to society and shouldn't be subject to the whims of shareholders and career tigers or 'operating at a profit'. Even though I believe nationalized industries do not necessarily have to be less 'efficient' than private ones (the efforts to make them efficient have been meager and successes underreported), I'd rather have inefficient organizations operating at a net loss than ones that will fuck me over left and right to extract every penny they can and don't give a flying fuck about the service they should be there to provide.

This 'socialism bad, free market good'-crap really needs to stop.