Well? Did he find it?

It's a great idea... until technology progresses just a bit further, and these cameras are equipped with facial recognition, GPS and data capabilities, and all tied into a giant back-end database tracking exactly who was where at what time...

You think the surveillance state is creepy now, wait until every cop is a roving track-your-location bot. The reasons for it now are reasonable, and I have no problem with cops having video of their encounters with people. But give it a decade or two (maybe less) and it could be come a very creepy bad thing.

I wouldn't really call them a new spin on taxis. They're more like the remises in Argentina, and unlicensed (and technically illegal) taxis in many other countries. Basically, you have the licensed and regulated taxis, where you have a relatively strong assurance that you'll get where you want to go for a controlled/metered rate, in a reasonably safe and well maintained vehicle, and if you have a problem you can write down the cab number and make a complaint to a regulator. You also pay a fairly hefty fee for all this.

If you're willing to take a bit more risk, you can flag down a remis, pay a couple pesos per person, and they'll take you from where you are to downtown, or from downtown back out to the residential area you live in. The drivers make these trips all day, fill the car as full of people as it can possibly be filled (they pick up additional people along the way until the car is completely full and then some). They run on the cheapest fuel possible (in Argentina, typically LPG), and are not necessarily well-maintained. So there's risk. And, while you typically get where you want to be OK, there's plenty of opportunity for an unscrupulous person to take advantage of individual riders (or even groups if they're organized well and coordinating with someone else). So again... it's a risk.

There's a reason taxi cabs are regulated as heavily as they are, and in general it's probably a good thing for public safety even though they're freakishly expensive.

I'll second/third/fourth this... I had an HTC Arrive (Sprint's WinMo7 phone), and bought a couple Anker batteries and a charger. I switched from the HTC battery to one of the Ankers as my primary battery, because it lasted substantially longer. I still carry the universal charger when I travel, as it can charge my camera batteries, anything that charges over USB, etc. It's a little finicky to get it to contact the battery correctly sometimes, but overall it works quite well and is far more flexible than any other charger I've seen.

many open-source apps can be found at the store from unofficial sources that have a cost

So, serious question... is this a bad thing? With a few caveats, I don't really see a problem with someone making a bit of money from packaging an open-source program for a different OS, if they're going to the work of compiling, testing and packaging it. Obviously they should somehow make the source available if the license requires it, but beyond that they may be doing that software a favor, assuming an official package doesn't exist (which for the Windows app store, may very well be the case).

So their brainless store got filled with brainless garbage to take advantage of the brainless users who'd use it.

So, they succeeded in being like Apple?

Easy... Windows phones run their services. Google phones do not. Apple phones might.

If you want people to start using all your services, and the only hardware using all your services by default is a Windows phone, and the company making 80% of all Windows phones is about to start making Google phones instead, it makes sense to buy the company and keep them making Windows phones instead of letting them turn into a competitor or die a slow and painful death.

There is no modern equivalent. Sadly, I'm getting rid of the Orinoco because:
    a) It's slow
    b) It doesn't support WPA/AES
    c) It requires a PC Card slot, which nothing modern has anymore.

But I still remember driving down the highway through Dallas with an external antenna hooked to that card, cataloging hundreds of APs as I passed by, many of them wide open. Ah, the good 'ol days.

All these gloom-and-doom reports from an investment company? I wonder if they're shorting the utility companies.

1) Short the stock of the utility companies
2) Release predictions of doom
3) Wait for stock to drop
4) ...
5) Profit

But naw, that would be unethical, our banks and investment companies would never do something like that. Obviously.

Like I used to do racking servers in the datacenter, anywhere from 12-17 hours at a time. *yawn.* Yeah, it was tiring work, but it was by no means something that needed a robo-suit to accomplish. Call me when it can pick up fully populated 6509s all day long.

Actually, my computers are always in a constant state of re-assembly...my "newest" computer has some components that are 3 year old! And my oldest computer has components that are new in the past year.

The point of 2-factor auth is someone (like a criminal) can have one factor in their possession without it being any good. So with the SMS just being a form of "what you have" (it goes to your cell phone, and in theory only yours, and is time-limited to prevent re-use), an outside attacker would still have to gain the "what you know" or "what you are" factor (either your password/passcode or biometrics of some sort).

True, I wouldn't use SMS for highly classified document protection, but for most things SMS is just fine as a second factor.

I think that's changed in newer versions of Windows Server.

Think of Server 2008 as Vista for Servers: Lots of good ideas, but kicked out the door long before it was ready.
Server 2008 R2 is basically Windows 7 for Servers: Most of the things that were cut to get Vista out the door were finished, so it's actually a pretty good, solid OS. As part of that, many management things that were done through CMD in Server 2008 were moved into PowerShell. I *think* it was at this point that Server Core started supporting PowerShell, but in my world Server Core was always more of an "oh, that's kind of interesting" side note.

In the interest of completing my Server OS list above:
Server 2012 is like Windows 8: It had a few decent improvements under the hood, but with a UI designed by, but not fit for use by, a chimp on acid.

Anything newer than that I haven't used, but I have to believe after the debacle of Server 2012/Win 8, it can only get better again.

Look up "Server Core." I'm not certain if it has an SSH server by default, but MSFT has done an incredible amount of work in recent years to allow everything to be managed through PowerShell.

Thankfully, we have people like the Arabs and the Russians helping us keep the human population under control. All in the name of saving the animals, I'm sure.