I always like the articles magazines like Forbes publish about Amazon. They're tired of seeing Amazon make no profit because it plows all its income back into infrastructure- "It's time for Amazon to start providing a return for investors". Fuck that- stockholders can get stuffed. If you want dividends, buy something else. Amazon (and Google) are thinking years to decades ahead, and they'll be stronger for it long after all the companies that took Forbes' advice are dead.

My nine year old figured out how to get the "Ok Google" voice recognition working on our Chromebook months ago. He barely bothers typing searches anymore- instead I get to hear his entire search history. I don't think he got far enough into the settings to hit the combo mentioned in the page

Viruses are going to be tough to get distributed though. Something bad happens to a Chromebook? Hit the factory refresh button and it wipes everything on the machine. Since everything is stored with Google just log back in and all your documents are there. Pretty much the worst you have to do is redo your screen background, or flip a few advanced setting toggles if you're bothered.

It's one of the prime reasons I bought one for the family. Kids mess around with weird web sites? I don't have to worry about the machine. (My kid's mental health is another issue....) My kids break it? Oh well. It was $200, and if I get a new one they'll barely notice.

This seems a no-brainer for me in a couple of ways. Chromebooks aren't any more fragile than normal laptops in my experience- yes, they are cheap but dropping a $1200 Macbook Air, a $500 iPad and a $200 Chromebook on a tile floor are all likely to do permanent damage. My two (very rough) kids haven't managed to kill my Acer 720 yet. Given the low price and the "All files are in the cloud, devices are totally interchangable" it's easy to deal with them, plus they have a working keybaord and a trackpad.

On the flip side, I'm really seeing a move towards Google Apps for my middle schooler. Virtually all his projects are done as part of a group, and they work from online documents. He doesn't need the high end features of Word or Excel: he needs a way to have multiple people work on something over two weeks. It's easy for the teacher as well- just send them the link and you're done, no papers to lose.

Is it? My understanding is that AWS is in large part the excess capacity Amazon needs for peak times, so otherwise the hardware sits around unused. AWS is just getting something out of that. Am I wrong here?

No, you compare to an average of the driving populace, not the best or worst. Why? Because that's what the insurance companies are going to do. When it becomes obvious that SDCs are better drivers than humans, you're going to start seeing a serious push to let the bots take over.

I don't think it's going to take anywhere near as long as people think. There's a *huge* market for this. My grandmother in law is 93. She basically can't drive, but wants to stay in her house. My wife's in the hospital right now and I have two kids that need to be different places at the same time. One of my old teachers is blind, etc, etc SDC taxi pools can act like super-flexible mass transit for areas that don't have any

You're assuming they could use search and replace. Given my experience with HR (and lots of other people) that's a serious stretch.

They also have curved backs. I had thought it was just for show, but perhaps not. I haven't managed to bend my M7 yet, and I'm not sure I could.

I had assumed the curved back on my HTC One was just for show, but perhaps the designers were actually thinking this way. It's way harder to bend a curved surface than a flat one.

Don't diss the Surface Pro. Yes, it is *absolutely* a better solution. No, you can't replace it with an iPad- the iPad is like fingerpainting compared to the fine detail you get on a Surface. And why would you want to buy an additional Wacom tablet when the Surface uses a Wacom digitzer in the first place? You can write directly on the Surface rather than trying to master the blind writing skill you need with an external tablet. And if there's a tablet+pen interface better than OneNote on a Mac or Linux let me know, because I've yet to see it.

We've been buying more and more of them lately simply because they work so bloody well for this sort of task.

/Waiting for the "Troll" downmods I get everytime I mention that they are far nicer than most people realize.

has a Ph.D. in 17th century English literature. Admittedly we do work at a college, but you might be surprised at what humanists are doing these days: he got into the computer side of things while building databases of who was sending who letters around then. Digital Humanities is a growing field, and one that has some interesting CS applications- you've got things like Mallet chewing through vast swathes of literature looking for correlations, you have folks building high end digital maps to look into questions of how sight lines affected historical battles, etc.

Heh- a large chunk of our timesheet system where I work as well as departmental budgets is all done within a custom portal written in.... ColdFusion. We're slowly moving away from bits of it (The helpdesk ticketing/inventory control parts are gone now) but I can't see it dying completely within the next decade.

If you're talking computers, my neighbor got a hard copy terminal when I was about 8- it was hooked up by phone line to the mainframe at work and printed on green bar paper. Hacking wasn't much of an option. "Technology" to my generation probably would have been a 4-barrel carb or a tube guitar amp.

Except that these people didn't post their information on the internet for everyone to see. They uploaded the photos (possibly without their knowledge, since they might not really understand iCloud) to what they thought was a secure account. From Apple's own page on iCloud: "With iCloud, you can share exactly what you want, with exactly whom you want." It was only Apple's piss-poor understanding of security that allowed the accounts to be brute forced.

Should they have used better passwords, or better reset questions? Sure, but I bet that 75% of Etrade account passwords could be brute forced using the same script if Etrade allowed it. Hell, I only updated mine a year or so ago since it was 10 digits long and I figured that wasn't enough anymore

I'm actually really annoyed at the focus on the "Don't upload nude selfies" bit. The foci in this story should be 1) Don't trust cloud vendors. 1a) Especially Apple 2) Push for better multi-factor authentication systems on *everything*- cloud photo accounts, checking accounts, ATMs, etc.

If you don't want people stealing your money don't store money online. Don't use credit/debit cards, an online brokerage account, web access to your checking account, etc. If it's out there someone is going to steal it.

Simple, no? Blame the victim all you want, but that line of thinking pretty quickly devolves into unplugging from the Internet and trying to pay your bills with physical cash.