Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but your example really doesn't have much bearing. The US has 30X the population of Belgium. 40X the GDP, 56X the military personnel and probably 100X the impact on world events -- all of which means there are perhaps four orders of magnitude more people interested in killing the US President than the Belgian Prime Minister (these things scale non-linearly), even when the US isn't actively trying to piss off a lot of people. Which, unfortunately, it has been for several decades now.

Though on second thought, the fact that "Belgium" is the most offensive word in the galaxy (off Earth) may mean that there are more people annoyed at your country than we think. Perhaps Mr. Di Rupo should be more cautious. At the very least, he should keep a towel handy.

More recent than that. Until the New Deal the federal government was actually smaller than most state governments, and definitely had less impact on most peoples' daily lives.

I suppose, though I, at least, have never had a situation where I needed to reboot and make sure the kernel doesn't change. I've had mucked-up bootloaders aplenty, but the solution there is to fix the bootloader (and to keep a boot floppy / CD / DVD / USB stick handy).

Meh. It's just a slightly-faster reboot that's only usable when you don't need to change the kernel.

What do you do that makes you need kill -1 regularly? I think I've only used it a handful of times in 30 years, and not at all in the last decade or so.

Yes, the bad choice was as Lisias said, catching the attention of Microsoft.

Neither does Android. Oh, there are millions of apps, but most of them are completely uninteresting on a desktop or laptop and the rest won't run well. Oh, there will be apps, over time, but there's no huge number already available, developers are going to have to start more or less from scratch.

The index is new-ish, yes, but I still don't think it's going to provoke the sort of sea change the GGP supposes. If that were all it took, the Chrome store would already be doing it (there's also an index of apps).

No, what's really going to happen is that Microsoft is going to continue its slow, gradual slide into obscurity, unless it finds a way to create a new market for itself (which is likely, frankly, though no one knows what it'll be). Android apps on Windows may even play a role, but a small one. Phones and tablets are becoming the dominant computing platform for the masses, a platform they don't participate in meaningfully, and a combination of web apps, cross-platform toolkits (like Android, but also including Java, their own .NET, Qt and Chrome apps) and maturation of free/open source offerings are breaking their stranglehold on the rest.

Well, except for the bump at "100 bpm or greater". I didn't realize so many squirrels read slashdot.

Really? Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0. Yeah, it was a while ago and some things have improved, but most of the issues remain and I doubt another focus group study would find significantly different results.

The problem is that designing a UI that makes it easy for people who don't know anything about cryptography or security to achieve useful cryptographic security is really, really hard. Almost as hard as educating everyone about cryptography and security enough that they can achieve useful cryptographic security with PGP.

Java did that years ago. Notice how it destroyed Microsoft?

It's been happening forever. In the 1500s, a Catholic Priest dedicated his efforts to attacking the mnemonics techniques used to memorize scripture--and everything else--because they attached lewd and base images to ideas in the mind. This happened after one preacher admitted he used an image of a naked virgin girl in a not-so-puritan situation to help remember some odd line of the Catholic bible. Having such thoughts in peoples's heads was unacceptable, entirely.

I've noticed about five people have responded, and some of them have user IDs in the millions. That's a pretty small cross-section; and I've had up to 50 responses to posts on Slashdot in under an hour, when I've really pissed the crowd off with some uncomfortable fact. I'm not taking much stock in the overwhelming rise of the majority rule of morning people here.

There is some evidence that 80% of the population awakens far too early, to detrimental effect on health. The idea has gained some traction slowly over the past decade or two; in the next 30-40 years, I expect we'll link circadian disruption by bastardized early-riser sleep culture to the high incidence of stupidity, depression, and psychosis leading to school shootings.

Sticking your child in front of a video game to parent for you is NOT engaging.

Children need independence. Independence doesn't mean mommy isn't around; it means they make decisions and mistakes on their own, and are able to move away from their parents and return by their own action--even if they're instructed when to do so. Such instruction is engagement, as is parents asking where you're going, where you've been, what you've done, and having food prepared for you when you get home.

We can extrapolate theoretically from here, but that's not the point. Above illustrates that parental engagement does not require your child to be chained to a desk with a single activity when not engaged by the parent. My argument was on this balance of time, and on the impact thereof in regards to independent social and environmental experience versus isolation with a single activity.

To compare: we could also talk about break time spent smoking versus break time spent walking around the building. If you bring a healthy diet into this discussion, you are babbling on about irrelevancies.

This is 2014, and we're in the decade of reboots. This is the reboot of "sit your kids in front of the TV to watch the Children's Channel" thinking. The glowing, phosphorus parent of the 80s, now back with less Big Bird.

Put your kids outside. Don't put them on the bicycle of the Internet; put them on a *real* bicycle. I walked the 1/3 mile to school when I was 6; I could bicycle 1.2 miles in that time, a good 10 minutes walking by myself, well out of sight of my parents. When I was 8, I had a bicycle with a coaster brake, and would disappear outside for hours at a time--by myself, since I had no friends. Sometimes I came back home after the older 5th graders beat the shit out of me for some Freudian satisfaction related to their small penises (too impatient for puberty I guess), I'm sure; but, for all the baseball bats and tennis shoes they applied, they never managed to put a bruise on me, so I made out alright.

This is all a bunch of wanting your kids locked in a room doing a single thing, in a place you know, with the ability to look in and verify they're still doing that one thing and nothing else, so that you don't have to show any concern. My massive internal simulator predicts, via armchair child psychology, that this will not provide a robust set of varied experiences for the child, and so will slow their mental growth and reduce their ability to thrive. History will prove me correct--has proven me correct--but I'm sure nobody will listen and, when it's all well proven that this actually happened, will instead find the next substitute single activity and claim it's different, somehow, and fail to predict the same result.