Look, his uncle was probably as much a despicable character as any in the NK ruling party, likely performing or being complicit in any number of crimes against humanity, so no real loss to the human race here in all likelihood. What I find disturbing though is that Jong-Un has displayed callous disregard for human life in recent months in order to maintain complete control over the population.

I had high hopes for him when I learned that he'd been schooled in Switzerland, spoke English and had made positive comments in the past about the plight of the NK people. I figured he was young, idealistic, and maybe not all that different from myself -- had I been placed into a very difficult situation due to my family lineage. If placed in such a situation, I imagine that for a year or two I might have acted the part (whatever that means) in order to maintain control long enough to come up with a plan to bring some level of reforms to the country and ensure a longer-term transition to democracy.

Then again, you never really hear about a dictator who had a change of heart and became 'sane' after being able to operate with complete impunity for a while. I guess it's true when they say absolute power corrupts absolutely.

It seems that his age and boyish looks belie the fact that Jong-Il chose and groomed his successor very carefully.

It's true. The overall rate at which Firefox adds features is not really much different than in the past. The difference is that they trickle the features out every 6 weeks instead of a big dump once a year. That's just fine with me, as plugins rarely break anymore and overall stability and speed is much better than Firefox 4.0 and older. Yes, I said that and believe it to be true.

between so called 'legitimate software' and botnets these days anyway?

Each is used to collect data that can be analyzed for profit in various ways. Legitimate software, you might argue, provides actual value to the end-user, is not surreptitiously installed and doesn't exploit software vulnerabilities. However, if that's all it takes to be legit, then witness the gobs of commercial software (not to mention greyware) out there that fit the definition of 'legit', but in actuality provide only the thinnest veneer of value behind a EULA so broad that it allows the software vendor to pretty much do as they please across your hard drive and Internet connection.

Won't work because most stockholders don't care enough to vote and even if they did, most shares are owned through proxy via mutual funds so most of the voting rights are in the hands of a few major players anyway.

He will be spending his time at Oculus 100%, which is good, because there's plenty of new ground to break and few are better qualified to drive the software side of things for a new graphics technology than Mr. Carmack.

I had access to a Rift DK for the better part of a month. For what amounts to a smartphone screen mounted inside ski goggles, I was thoroughly impressed and have no doubt that this device offers an early look at the future of hardcore gaming -- I suspect a similar device that allows you to insert your own smartphone in front of a set of lenses could be the eventual template for casual gaming as well.

Among the many tech demos available, I was most impressed with Lunar Lander on the Rift, which was worth hours of fun. The illusion that you are actually there, on the moon maneuvering this vehicle was only slightly diminished by the development kit's limitations:

* lack of positional head tracking -- up, down, left and right work fine, but you can't lean or move your head in any direction as it immediately breaks immersiveness (probably a major contributor to the early nausea that I and others have reported)
* awkwardness of the headset, input box & wires
* lack of congruent body avatar in virtually all demo software to date
* low resolution screen (half of a 1280x800 LCD panel for each eye) contributing to what's known as the screen door effect
* various unoptimized latencies (LCD refresh, video card output, head tracking, etc...)
* clunky lens adjustments

Over time, continued software and hardware development will mitigate or eliminate many of these problems. I'm looking forward to the 2014 consumer launch which is rumored to have higher resolution and positional tracking. If so, I will definitely be one of the first to line up for it.

Most employees are more or less replaceable, but John Carmack for all intents and purposes *was* iD, at least in the early years when 3D graphics engines were in their infancy. When he announced he was going to be CTO at Oculus, it was obvious that he was really excited about the prospects over there, and was going to be winding things up at iD sooner or later. But he chose not to leave his old company in the lurch, and he transitioned at a pace that didn't screw them over in favor of the new. This is John Carmack exiting graciously.

Why not just buy some land in rural areas, construct a barn looking thing as a decoy (out of a material that's transparent to the instruments within), ship redundant parts across several ports and assemble under the cover of darkness. Difficult and expensive to do without being detected? Maybe, but surely within the realm of possibility for the Russian government...

LeVar Burton played Geordie LaForge on Star Treak -- a character who could not see except by virtue of a digital visor he wore. Now the actor in real life tries something that's also sorta similar -- if you wave your hands, squint your eyes and gesture knowingly. What are the odds! The parallels must have been mindblowing! Life imitating art! The jokes must now write themselves! Queue the Benny Hill music...

Um, I think you've reached your metaphor quota for today. Thanks for coming out. Anything of substance to share?

still released it that way in spite of the problems. Arrogance is the only logical explanation.

This has been a well documented problem from earlier preview builds and was specifically not fixed in the RTM code because... well because MS seems to think it can make unilaterally bad UI decisions again and again and get away with it.

Try setting your Win8.1 display to 150% on a 1920x1200 monitor. This is exactly where I've used WinXP, WinVista, Win7 and Win8, yet in Win8.1, a random assortment of applications (including many MS utilities and 3rd-party programs) deliver barely readable fuzzy characters. At least in Win8.0, you could set a master switch to tell the OS to disable DPI scaling, but in their infinite wisdom, some group within MS decided that to hell with useability, they're going to simply remove the master switch and force ALL users to disable DPI scaling on an app by app basis, making it bloody well a gargantuan effort to avoid either fuzzy or tiny text.

It's absolutely appalling... About as appalling as MS deciding that Win8.0 users shouldn't be able to boot into desktop mode on a non-touchscreen device and then completely removing the start menu as if giving the middle finger to the existing install base was some kind of magical shortcut back to a dominant market position.

If you're arrogant, but generally make good or at least non-destructive UI decisions, most people will forgive you. When you're arrogant and make butthead UI decisions, well, then you're MS.

  They've managed to marry Apple's arrogance with butthead UI decisions.

Disclaimer: I own a top of the line 54" Panasonic plasma set from a couple years ago and enjoy its excellent picture quality.

If you walk into a Best Buy or any other retail store and head over to the TV section, what immediately hits you is the brightness of most of the LCD sets and the comparatively subdued brightness coming from any (remaining) plasma sets still on the floor. In the unscientific forced side-by-side comparison environment of a brightly lit store, the LCD panels just show better.

It's the same reason that many folks think they'll prefer shiny laptop screens or speakers that deliver booming lows and super highs. It all seems better in a snap judgment... It's not until you take it home and have to live with it for a few hours that you start to realize that matte screens are easier on the eyes, speakers with more natural frequency response are easier on the ears and that LCD TVs (usually demoed in torch mode) need to be turned down to a more tolerable brightness level (well within the realm of what a plasma can do) during extended viewing sessions.

> Look at how quickly the people followed the orders to cower indoors because of 2 kids.

Really? The "2 kids" in question bombed a public event with improvised explosives, then killed a police officer, hijacked a car and the last one took refuge by hiding in a boat in a local neighborhood. How would the authorities have responded in your magical utopian 'free' country?

Luke, we're gonna have company.

Even in the Martha Stewart case, they only got her on obstruction of justice. Hard to say whether Cuban was legit or not, all we know is that the evidence was not strong enough to convict.

The theory seems to be that insider trading is so widespread and difficult to prove that one of the government's strategies is to go after a few high profile 'celebrity' cases as a way to drive awareness among the populace. It probably gets your average Joe to think twice before trading on a tip from an executive friend higher up in the corporate ladder, but I suspect the people who really know what they're doing siphon millions out of the market daily.