Personally, I have a Windows tablet and I love it. The only real problem is the small number of apps. If they could make iOS and Android apps run on it, then all the better.

they're probably talking about wanting to run Android/iOS apps on Windows 10 phones.

Ouya has loads of competition now from ARM "sticks" and media adapters like the Fire, Roku or Cu Box. And each year brings more capable hardware while Ouja stays the same. The new raspberry pi 2 or Amazon Fire are arguably superior in all ways. Certainly both those alternatives make excellent XBMC/Kodi boxes.

And competition has also come from tablets in terms of casual gaming. Tablets benefit from huge economies of scale and large online market ecosystems. Ouja was always going to be a niche market appealing to techies and gamers.

But what really frosted me was the "Oh the advertised rates are for NEW customers only!" line. Come on Verizon, I've been your customer for 6 years, never a late bill payment, no changes in my service, not even a technician visit to my home to fix something. You are going to give the guy up the street you don't know is really going to pay you a better deal then me? You people are NUTS..

Interesting how in some places in the world, we call it bribery and corruption. In other places, it's just "how stuff gets done."

Ok, fine, I will bite.

Now let's say the university alters their courses to be more attractive to women. But the jobs that engineers will not change. You may want to change them, but if they want them to actually achieve something useful, they really can't change. It's like asking painters to be more like actors, so actors can also enter the field of painters; this will not create more painters, since the skill of painting, remains the skill of painting.

"more societally meaningful" ?! And I don't get it either. My job does not get more societally meaningful; if I don't do my job (Software Engineer, Industrial Automation), you don't get any power to your home, don't drive a car, don't get air condition in the mall and many more things. Sure I am only a small cog in that bigger scheme of things, but without engineers modern society would not exist.

I would like more women in engineering; many of the colleagues I like to work with are women. And talking with them, the content of their work is not what is holding them back. In some cases it may be social or cultural and in other cases just "math is hard".

On that note, I demand more male nurses!

Just another stupid thing that takes batteries or needs to be charged.

... My ISP still offers Usenet access...

Ain't nobody going to install pentabular screws in my body.

Something I will be curious to see over the next few decades is how propaganda is affected by advertising saturation. Something that has been worrying marketers is that young consumers (ones more accustomed to multitasking and who grew up with heavy advertizing) filter out a larger amount of marketing than other groups. Even as their knowledge and skills improve (ah, the dark uses of all those psych majors), advertising is becoming more difficult and consumers more jaded and less uniform. Since propaganda can be seen as a specialized form of marketing, I wonder how that type of manipulation is going to adjust. It used to be that one coherent message would affect most of the population the same way, but increasingly the same techniques and narratives will have differing effects on different populations. So what we tend to see more and more of is propaganda generating smaller more fanatical groups along with others forming backlash against tem.. it kinda works if you examine only the successful parts of the application, but is no longer all that useful for changing general public perception, just creating partisans.

Makes me wonder about the economics of producing these things. Apparently something related to the OS choices makes it worth Intel's while to develop separate models and the infrastructure to build each one, rather than just building the higher spec model and slapping either OS onto it.

It's things like this that hearken back to the glory days of the Evil Empire, and why people find it difficult to trust MS now.

is the only safe solution.

The BBC is a public broadcaster, funded and owned by mandatory license fees in the UK.Clarkson was on contract to the BBC. Once the organization confirmed that unprovoked verbal and physical abuse had occurred, they had to take action or leave the corporation open to an indefensible lawsuit from the victim. They can't exactly say, "Yeah, get stuffed. We have extensive policies promoting equality and prohibiting harassment and violence in the workplace, but we're ignoring them because the presenter is popular and profitable."

No doubt Clarkson and pals will make a profitable jump to Netflix or Sky to make a similar motoring comedy show. Meanwhile, the BBC has a chance to reinvent Top Gear with younger presenters and a reinvigorated format (there are only so many new Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Aston Martins that can be driven around a track in a cloud of smoke every week and only so many routes for contrived road trips through war zones in ancient sports cars).

No. You are trying to explain a mechanical failure of a door right at the moment when the aircraft suddenly starts descending into mountains all the while during which the copilot also does nothing to try to correct this unscheduled descent and also ignores air traffic control. Seriously if it has wings and floats on the water and looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. Your version requires many, many things to go wrong at once. The simple answer is, of course, only one thing went wrong - the co-pilot locked the door and set the plane to descend. Occam's razor, and all that.

Adding fuel to this theory is that the co-pilot was detatched and monosyllabic when receiving the briefing about landing in Dusseldorf - he had already made up his mind that he wasn't going to reach Dusseldorf. If the pilot wasn't going to go to the bathroom he probably was planning on killing the pilot anyway.

Anyone who is designing such systems around "accurate time" hasn't got a freaking clue how to build such systems.

For example, when dealing with spacing on self-driving vehicles, you rely on radar or laser tracking to maintain the separation between vehicles, not some wildly inaccurate network message about the velocity and position sent by other vehicles.