2013 failed to produce industry-altering innovations

GOOD.

UX: the field of taking something that's familiar and works well and replacing it with some as different and as "sleek" as possible regardless of the critical importance of visible affordances, constraints, natural mappings, etc.

"We've replaced your boring 20th century 'steering wheel and pedals' interface with our new three shells interface. Drive safe!"

The only people bemoaning a lack of "industry altering innovations" in user interface are the people who want to be paid to throw out every principle of designing things to be usable.

I assume you watch Netflix yourself, let me know if I'm wrong.

You know how when you see a movie in a theater and it has a conclusion that's full of emotion or has a surprise twist... and the credits start rolling and you have a moment to absorb what happened.

What if instead of having that moment, the film being projected shrunk to a tiny corner of the screen and trailers for other movies started playing?

"SO YOU JUST WATCHED SCHINDLER'S LIST. YOU MIGHT LIKE THE PIANIST!"

"SO YOU JUST WATCHED THE SIXTH SENSE. YOU MIGHT LIKE FIGHT CLUB!"

Do you agree that this would be annoying and would be doing the audience a disservice? (I'm hoping that you do.)

If you were watching a box set of a great TV series, would you WANT to see a still and a plot summary (rife with spoilers) of the next episode appear the instant that the end credits started rolling?

To me, this seems like a disservice, yet it's exactly what Netflix does. Worse, Netflix doesn't see any need to provide customers with an option to disable it. Are they so intent on encouraging binge viewing that they don't care about shitting all over the user experience?

I already registered my complaint (sans profanity) with one of their CSR chat people.

The only solution I've heard is to buy a Roku, but I'm not inclined to spend money on a device which doesn't do anything my PC can't do EXCEPT play Netflix content without crassly jamming suggestions and spoilers in my face at the end of a video. (And how can I know that this disease won't somehow start manifesting on Roku?)

I'm much MORE inclined to simply direct my monthly entertainment budget to Hulu Plus or Amazon Prime or some content provider that doesn't provide an experience that's qualitativly worse than going to a theater.

What say ye?

But the good news for people writing software is that this is the last job that will be automated. Once AI is strong enough to write quality software it will be able to improve itself at a dramatically increased pace and the intelligence explosion described by I.J. Good will take place, after which human affairs presumably will no longer be administered by human intelligence.

Canada Post is phasing out urban home delivery

Well, delivering homes sounds awfully resource intensive and is probably a departure from their charter to deliver mail.

I guess we're just supposed to assume that any reports like this were made possible by Snowden unless someone says otherwise?

Why doesn't the summary mention Snowden?

I've pointed out how traitors from Ames to Snowden all passed the Polygraph with flying colors.

I wouldn't regard someone as a traitor for drawing attention to previously unreported violations of constitutionally guaranteed protections against unreasonable search and siezure.

There are certain users for whom Windows (7) will provide all the functionality they need without ever needing an additional driver

I can guarantee you that any random desktop or server is likely to need far more drivers downloaded and installed to fully function under Windows than any reasonable Linux distribution. Troll begone.

scrypt aims to defeat highly parallel cracking systems.

The scrypt function is specifically designed to hinder such attempts by raising the resource demands of the algorithm. Specifically, the algorithm is designed to use a large amount of memory compared to other password-based KDFs, making the size and the cost of a hardware implementation much more expensive, and therefore limiting the amount of parallelism an attacker can use (for a given amount of financial resources).

As an aside, the people with "password" and "123456" as their passwords clearly weren't taking security seriously and should expect to be the first ones compromised.

The notion that intelligence will continue to be meat-based (and thus subject to aging and death) for the indefinite future is quaint.

It seems unfortunate that the most common version numbering scheme bears such a strong resemblance to floating point numbers (but doesn't work like floating point numbers).

You're lucky I don't have mod points today.

This is an old canard that gets trotted out in an attempt to encourage more women to enter computer science and related fields. The ends may be noble but the means are fraudulent.

Babbage wrote the first programs for his engine, which is a point even Lovelace's defenders acknowledge.