Not the first time a computer geek has used a feline for nefarious purposes. In Japan.

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

Take a good look at the photo that accompanies the linked article:

http://www.newscientist.com/da...

There's clearly no support for the hands. The thumbs of the worker modeling the exoskeleton are clearly visible above the presumably heavy metal object that's actually being lifted by a a crane-like contraption that loops over his shoulders. The worker is only using his hands to stabilize the object.

Power suit this isn't. So no Ironman here yet.

Sad indeed. Sony should have learned something from their console business. It isn't so much the console as the games, it isn't so much the ereader as the ebooks. Now it seems their smartphone business is also going dodo.

However I'm curious about this part of your post: "The remaining alternatives to the Kindle (Kobo and various janky Chinese and Russian devices) routinely fall short". Does Russia really manufacture anything besides spyware, rockets, and killing machines?

For reference, here's what Obama said about Russia's manufacturing capability: "http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/03/us-ukraine-crisis-obama-idUSKBN0G30Q920140803"

"I'm serious... I really want someone to explain to me why they think Windows 8/8.1 is so bad (once you get rid of the tiles/apps paradigm"

You nailed the problem, and you're asking why? Modern OS's are all about tweaking performance or conversely, making it worse. So you really can't design, a gee whiz, that's fantastic new GUI that's going to blow the pants off everyone and then expect it to be usable for day-to-day work. Take your pick, OS X style or Win 95 style. Desktop UI design was already perfected by the time /bin/laden terrorized New York.

IOS and Android are relatively easy to use because they're touch and small-screen optimized versions of OS X. The touch interface formerly known as Metro is a nice concept but deviates too much from the desktop UI "norm" that most people view it as unusable. A museum is a pretty place, but I sure as hell don't want to live in one.

Let's just censor the press and get it over with. /sarcasm

Saying things will be forgotten if it can't be Googled/Binged is like saying you won't get robbed so long as you don't post a sign that your door isn't locked. If a news outlet decides to "unforget" a person, then why not go after that media outlet, which is the source of the link that Google has indexed. I'm sure Google, even from a purely commercial point of view, won't keep serving dead links.

Technically you're style Nazi. Figures of speech aren't covered by grammar.

"Nonsense. Imagine Bilbo kills one of the dwarfs for no reason and they all laugh and continue with their business. That wouldn't make sense and you'd be immediately pulled back from the scene and think WTF am I watching? Why the director do that? The suspension of disbelief would be broken."

I imagine you haven't watched one of those violent kiddie cartoons?

Bad comparison (although I'm pro-driverless car), unless you're thinking of dedicated driver-free lanes that basically turns the supposedly autonomous vehicles into glorified train cars. You might as well say that driverless cars are as safe as elevators and when was the last time an elevator killed someone?

Right. I won't trust a defense contractor whose security gets compromised using phishing emails. If the intrusion is more low level than that (the mythical compromised routers), then they might have a good excuse. If the story is true, and the Israelis aren't just making it up as a cover story or honeypot to attract would-be cyber-attackers from other less technically competent nations (Iran, N Korea, etc), then the defense contractors should be banned from future military contracts.

WTF? It's fantasy with wizards, elves and dragons, and you're talking about suspension of disbelief? If it's an Asimov or AC Clarke adaptation maybe we can start talking about believability, but a high fantasy like this one? Anything goes, except perhaps when it comes to absolute immortality. Apparently "immortal" characters or monsters tend to have some sort of weakness that allow them to get killed by a determined hero or villain.

Mod parent up. A (properly) modifed /etc/hosts file (in case you're using Linux/Unix, don't know the Windows/Mac equivalent) should be more efficient than a browser based solution. I say more efficient because you effectively cut out one step in the web browsing chain, as links to the "blocked" web sites are simply redirected to localhost (127.0.0.) instead of being first handed over to the OS for DNS resolution and then blocked by browser.

However, compared to a browser extension, the hosts files hack can't do wildcard pattern matching, so if you want to block Facebook, you can't just input "*facebook.com" but every subdomain like www.facebook.com, cdn.facebook.com, etc.

MicroNokia has been pursuing the lower end of the smartphone market using non-Windows devices (actually I think they're pursuing the higher end of the feature phone market), even coming up with their own generic Amazonesque Android phone.

At the lower end, you don't need a Play/Appstore sized ecosystem. Just Angry Birds, Facebook and Twitter.

" How could a stupid cunt like you even bother posting such a moronic comment? Seriously, go die in a fire and I hope your kids get leukemia. Only someone with severe autism and Down's syndrome would be so clueless about psychology."

But Linus, despite the vulgarity of some of his rants, doesn't use language like that. Unless you can provide a link to prove otherwise, Linus hasn't used terms that poke fun at people with disabilities ("autism") or used sexist language ("cunt"). He does use generic terms of abuse like shit and fuck, which doesn't really qualify as sexist since it can both men and women (and homosexuals) fuck.

The EU directive gives at best a false sense of privacy, since the information itself isn't removed, but only the links, kind of like the way an OS might "remove" a file but still preserve its data ready to be "undeleted" (unless it's a filesystem that tends to overwrite unused blocks).

The EU regulators don't want to appear as "censors" (with the unsavory connotation that the word carries in a presumably democratic environment) so they don't go after the source. This reeks of institutional hypocrisy. Why not just go after the publishers. If they shut down the publishers, bloggers, etc, then all that Google and Bing would be left are the dead links.