These articles about company or product X bowing to the Chinese censors are often accompanied by calls to boycott the product in the US. Completely insane.

Wake up. We are in a trade war with China and must be complete agnostics when doing business there. We should cheer every inroad a US company makes in China. Attempting to hurt a US company just because you disagree with the way China is run is like shooting your foxhole buddy because you don't like Nazism.

Wrong target and wrong tactic. You cannot win unless you remain on the playing field.

Establishing the ability to comment using a verified, real username in no way inhibits you from continuing to use all the fake names you wish - i.e. when I want my opinion taken seriously, I can use a real ID, and if I'm just wasting my time (and everyone elses), I can use an anonymous one.

Might be an interesting experiment to establish a website that allows you to link a verified name, address, picture, etc with IDs used on various websites. For example, if I used "stinky123" on Slashdot and "clueless987" on CNN, I could associate both of these with my real identity. Over time, would sites such as CNN limit commenters to those users brave enough to provide a real identity? Would sites provide discounts to those users or special trusted features?

Again, being able to use a verified ID on some sites doesn't prevent me from continuing to use the anonymous, IQ-lowering crap we have come to know and abhor.

Only allow people to comment that have provided some kind of verified name and address. It's easy to heckle someone from the cheap seats, but if you are up on center stage, your comments are likely to be much more civil.

There must be real-life social consequences to making an ass of yourself before you see any improvement in the tone of the average comment forum.

That's my 2 cents, and my username is my real name. (admittedly unverified since there is no way I know of to do this currently).

After reading this announcement, I tried to imagine the earliest possible year in which a technical reader would be able to comprehend what is being described. 2004? 1998? Last week? Never heard of either the Remus Project or the Xen hypervisor, and yet here I sit, merrily cranking out successful commercial software products, as I've been doing for the past 30 years. It took me a bit of browsing to understand what was being described.

I wonder how many readers completely understood this announcement at face value without doing a little digging. 5? 10? Everybody but me?

I think if you tried keeping up with all the technology/terms in our field, it would be a full time job.

Same thing happened to me a few years ago at Disney World when I was attempting to juggle a hot dog, my digital camera, and some Mickey Mouse balloons I had bought for the kids. The strings got tangled in the camera and when I went to munch on the hot dog, the balloon slipped from my fingers and I watched helplessly as my camera sailed into the unknown.

But it gets better!

Several weeks later, I received an anonymous UPS package containing my digital camera! A quick glance showed that the Disney shots were still there, but there were some added shots that were somehow snapped on my camera's inadvertent journey. Some brief examples: (a) a shot of a 757 passenger jet with some astonished but blurred looking people looking out at Mickey; (2) a shot that showed a rocket launch at the Cape - from above!; (3) a nice clear shot that showed another group of brightly painted balloons that read "Visit Exciting Sydney!"; (4) a dim but unmistakable shot of the Shuttle as it came in for re-entry.

Of course there were a bunch more boring random shots of earth from way up high, but who cares about those?

I suspect I am not alone in this - has anyone else ever run an inadvertent "experiment" that accidentally took you to the edge of space? If getting close to the final frontier is actually this easy, it won't be long before we make it to the moon!

The idea of having a searchable, hyperlinked encyclopedia at my fingertips that didn't require online access is quite attractive, but much less so if I can't slip it in my pocket and carry it around. I'd prefer a thin, iPod touch-size doobie with the same super battery life. If it had the form-factor, I'm OK with it's other limitations.

I've followed the development of these extremely small flyers for some time and it seems to me that the real technical issue is not the smarts and sensors that you need to build into them - after all, we can make custom circuits just about as small as we need to. The real issue with these flyers and even smaller nanoscale devices is a viable power source. Every video you have seen to date has run these things tethered to an external power source. It just won't be real until the bee (or nano device) can lift off the ground while carrying its own power supply, whatever that might be. Until then, it's all just marketing hype (not to take anything away from the incredible technical achievements so far).

I get it - you sit down at your workstation and seem to be able to find any number of things to do rather than code - read Slashdot, check the news, etc - and before you know it, it's lunch time. And after lunch, you figure why start now, half the day is shot....

All the suggestions I've read here such as "take a relaxing walk", "you might just be burned out", etc - are wussy excuses that won't get you back in gear. If you *really* want to get back to work, talk to your boss (if you have one), and work out a firm schedule of milestones that must be met on the road to completing the project - real milestones that involve demonstration of completed code or GUI. And then insist that they check up on you daily to determine your progress. But most important, make your job contingent on meeting those milestones.

Nothing focuses the mind like having your way of life on the line. When goofing off at work means that you lose your house, your car, and that big screen TV, and have to move back home with the parents - that's when you will learn whether you intend to be a contributing member of society or some welfare junkie that the rest of us carry.

Think your grandmother had days when she just didn't want to drive any more rivets into B29 bombers? Think she got advice to "take a long walk and clear your mind"? Please.

To paraphrase Patton, years from now when you are bouncing your grandchildren on your knee and they look up at you and ask "What did you do during the dawn of the great Information Age"? - you won't have to sigh and say "Well, I played World of Warcraft and wolfed down Fritos".

I restore early systems as a hobby and have the following in bootable, working condition:

An 1976 IMSAI 8080 with 64K RAM, dual 8 inch floppies, and 5.25 and 3.5 drives, equipped with a Centronics printer and a ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader.

A 1977 Genrad Futuredata firmware development system with dual 8 inch floppies and EPROM burner

A 1974-era duplicate of Jonathan Titus's Mark-8, a 16K 8008-based system as shown in July 1974 Radio Electronics

Recently sold my working 1975/76 Altair 8800 with dual fixed-format 8 inch floppies, 64K RAM, Centronics printer, ASR33 Teletype with paper tape reader. All original MITS boards. Would boot Bill Gates original BASIC, as well as Altair DOS and CP/M 2.2. Complete with original doc in MITS binders.

A 1977 TRS-80 Model I 16K

A good number of misc S-100 boards for IMSAI and Altair

80's stuff:

Original 128K Macintosh with dual 3.5 drives - boots and runs

Cromemco SBC with 3K Basic in ROM

Masscomp 68010 RT Unix - boots and runs

A bunch of old accoustic modems...

After five years we should *own* that country. The fact that we aren't even close shows just how badly we dropped the ball in Afghanistan. We should pull out completely and let the country devolve into chaos. Then when bin Laden makes his triumphal return to organize the mess, nuke it into non-existence, which is what we should have done on 9/12.

As far as blasphemy? All religions - without exception - should be eliminated from the human experience. It is shameful that a species that can explore other planets still includes members that seriously believe in sky fairies.