What I really want in the new design, is easier access to SlashDataCenter and SlashCareers.... oooooh and SlashBI. I really can't get enough 'Business Intelligence' news formatted as a two paragraph article with a large stock image and zero comments!

"The Premium package gives you access to all your streaming favorites like YouTube, Hulu Plus, Netflix along with dozens of foreign movie sites you've never heard of.
The Friends & Family package gives you access to the people you want to keep in touch with, when you want to keep in touch with them, over your favorite NSA-sponsored proprietary social networking site: FacePalmSpace.
Our Adults-Only package allows you to stream all your favorite German Scheiße porn tube sites!"

Don't think so? Bookmark me, wait a couple years, then come back and mod me "Insightful".

> "This could have great applications in sound insulation of motorways"

Last I checked, the screams of children within neighborhoods protected by motorway sound barriers were not a major nuisance or safety hazard for motorists.

Or are we just brainstorming ideas without any thought behind them?

A one way sound barrier makes sense if you have an application where you actually need sound to go through in one direction. If you don't, then a wall is a better and almost certainly cheaper solution.

Are you familiar with the flying spaghetti monster? That is also a theory of creation. Using your logic, it must also be taught.

So to be an upstanding Atheist in your world, one must equally trash all religions all the time, regardless of the issue or region?

The issue here is that Christian fundamentalists have commandeered science curricula in publicly-funded schools to teach creationism. If we were talking about cartoonists in Norway caricaturing Mohammed and still bashing Christians, then you'd have an actual point.

Creationism is a concept, I might add, that both Judaism and Islam are proponents of, however, neither Jewish nor Muslim groups or schools are pushing creationist content to children in publicly-funded schools anywhere in this country (USA). It's Christian fundamentalists that are overstepping their bounds. Hence the desire to single them out.

Furthermore, Christians are the majority in this country and have enjoyed an historically unequal sway on government and policy, so you damn well better accept the fact that Christians will take more heat when overstepping their bounds as it affects more people.

Mod this up. This is a good analogy. How many people die annually in this country of obesity-related causes? Automobile accidents? Murders (with or without guns)?

Now compare that with all terrorist deaths in the past 20 years.

You can't justify what's being done (wars, unconstitutional laws and practices) in the name of protecting us from this albeit scary sounding, but relatively inconsequential threat. Dismantle the war machine.

Because I and a million others could have (and often did) tell you this would be the case back when I first tried a late Win8 preview build. MS could have had multiple times the current market share had they simply not *forced* Metro on people who didn't want it. You know, like do a quick check upon install to see if the PC is a touchscreen tablet and then default to the desktop with a classic Start Menu if you weren't on an appropriate device.

Instead, they chose to piss off tons of people by forcing their phone interface on people who use office applications. And now two years later, they get the market share they more or less deserve.

Don't forget:

http://www.mondelezinternational.com/brand-family

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...