Can't tell if real or sarcasm. Well played (or my sympathies) .

"Hold your fire - there's no life forms aboard."

The engineers working on Windows 8 knew the Metro UI was crap for the PC. The usability studies all showed that the Metro UI was crap for the PC. It was senior management that forced the issue over the protests of those involved.

The reason I have hope for MS yet is the result from all that. The entire management chain responsible for that, right through the CEO, all of them gone. Gates, Ballmer, Larson-Green, and middle managers below her well fired or moved away from PC computing. Someone, somewhere, decided enough was enough.

Will the new guy be better? Who knows. But we've had decision after decision that left consumers saying "WTF?" being rolled back, starting with firing that X-Box VP whp insulted the customer base and reversing his decisions on used games and always-on DRM and hopefully through the restoration of the start menu. Of course, if Windows 9 ends up sucking, MS is as dead as a very dead thing.

Had TC been an open standard, it could have been a great thing. Think: locking down one VM such that no virus can taint it, which you can then use to scan the rest of the system with assurance that the results are valid.

But instead it was a joke. I was doing standards work while the TC "standard" was being hammered out, and while they were in the same Hotel as real ISO standards work, you had to be there from a member company and sign an NDA to even listen to the discussions. We didn't take them seriously (the normal ISO/INCITS rules are that anyone who shows up can participate, you only need to be from a paying company to vote, and that minutes are always public).

Forest coverage of America has grown quite a bit over the past 50 years because so much farmland - most of it, in fact - has been abandoned as unneeded to feed us, or to saturate the export market. By far the majority of arable land is no longer cultivated, out of lack of need, unless you count tree farms.

but in this case the authors were anonymous - they are NOT going to de-cloak to enforce a trademark.

It's probably better for the security of the community at large to carry on calling it TrueCrypt (3.0, clear who the new team is, etc.). Trademarks exist to prevent confusion - in this case, using the same name is the minimally confusing option. The license is unenforceable and securing people's communications is more important to society than the wishes of the retired authors.

Imaginary property ain't real but the risks of electronic adversaries certainly are.

People just look at domains at BestBuy, then purchase them from Amazon.

I have found that asking the following about a potential workplace is a remarkably good predictor of the entire work culture and acceptability for devs:
* What version control tool is used
* What bug tracking system is used
* What technological measures are in place to prevent anyone breaking the build, with no need to back out changes
* What automated testing infrastructure is in place, and are new check-ins automatically sanity-checked immediately

You can really learn a lot from the tools used. Are the tools in place those that devs would choose, or some horrible crap sold to management by a good sales guy? Did projects to make dev life better by automating the programmer workflow get funded, or get blocked? How short-sighted is management when it comes to productivity?

Software dev as an industry is out of the downturn. Demand is way ahead of supply right now, mostly because devs still think there's no point in looking. Well, times have changed, and a dev has a lot of "pricing power" right now. E.g., my team has quite a few open positions, no one with experience seems to be looking, and we're definitely not going to lose anyone qualified we actually manage to find due to being cheap!

Sign of an engineering field that hasn't matured yet. Most big companies do have engineering promotion paths all the way up to VP-equivalent now, so that's something, but you still don't see as many devs in paygrades equivalent to senior management as you see senior dev managers. They're not really taking that career path as seriously as high-tech "real engineering" jobs yet. But, yeah, at least find a place that has a non-management paygrade above the one you're applying for!

We can trivially feed 11 billion today. The farmland once used in America alone could do it (though that would be a bad approach for many reasons).

Your ideas about nutrition are way off. Calories are key to survival, and meat is not where you get calories, carbs are. Meat is a tasty luxury that requires more farmland per meal than eating vegetarian.

Fresh-water availability, as I already said, is only an issue in large cities that insist on drawing down their aquifers (well, and a few low-population areas with regular drought). Cities tap their aquifers only because it's cheap compared to proper sewage reprocessing. No magic technology required, just infrastructure spending. There are very few big cities that actually lack the surface water (e.g., Dubai), but they have desalination already. Wikipedia has some notes on the plants currently under construction and operating around the world. Again, it's not high-tech, as long as you're on the coast.

Native-born net population change is either negative or barely positive in every industrialized nation. Many places with high barriers to immigration are in population collapse right now (e.g., Japan). America is only growing due to immigration. It's a common pattern, well, researched and well understood. People have enough kids such that enough survive to help them in old age. Pre-industrialization, that's 10 or more. Post-industrialization that's 2-3, or fewer once a good retirement safety net is in place. There's a one-generation blip seen in most places during industrialization when people are still having 10 kids, but all of them survive to adulthood, so population explodes.

The news that population was expected to peak at 11 billion is at least 10 years old - not sure why it's a /. story, but we do like old news here.

Sure, sure, preventing discrimination is good, but that's a somewhat limited excursion into regulating who can do business that ensures more people can participate in the economy. But what we usually see is government doing the opposite granting monopoly, and otherwise excluding people form the market, instead of busting trusts and otherwise enabling participation.

We see this in spades in the entertainment industry in the US, with cable monopolies being granted like localities were competing in "monopoly granting" as an Olympic sport or something.

But anyway, none of that has anything to do with giving the government access to what books you read, or what movies you watch, or the like. Governments just need to stay the Hell away from that data, even if it would be convenient for the government, well, too bad!

No, really, why is it anyone's business at all?

Governments' legitimate interest in regulation is in product safety and fraud prevention, not in deciding who gets to do business with whom and at what price.

We've had far too many "regulation: good vs bad?" debates here on /., and we should really stop that, as that's a silly question. The interesting question is "regulation: what scope?".

Is there any legitimate reason for a government regulatory body to inspect and control subscriber lists for an entertainment product? Any good reason for it to examine who has watched what? I can think of only evil reasons: to target people with the wrong tastes in (legal) entertainment as anti-government dissidents: likely troublemakers to take pre-emptive action against. That's an old song that many governments have seen before, and one we don't need ot hear in Canada or the US!

How about trying *actually" being in the woods with your friends?

Right. My kids visited with some family friends, and their kids play Minecraft 3-4 hours a day.

I guess it's entertaining, and they do neat stuff _in_ Minecraft, but it'll all illusory.

When they came home they asked me if we could get Minecraft. I told them, "of course not - go outside and build a treehouse. Get some sunshine while you're at it".

Minecraft is conditioning the factory workers of tomorrow. If we're to build a digidystopia, at least my kids can be running the thing. :/

it shows that neither know what they are talking about

no kidding - you could make a drinking game about how many elements of this story sound like they're from 2002.

The industry already settled on mp3, sans DRM. The market is not demanding anything Apple is offering.

And Bono can keep on trying to make sure poor African kids can never listen to his music (they'll never pay two days' wages for his post-Zooropa music). It's just sad that he pretends to care otherwise.

Some 3d printing services can print ceramics ;)

Services like that exist online, and they're excellent, albeit rather slow. I personally use iMaterialize because they have such a wide range of material options (everything from rubber to titanium) and finishes (for example, 4 different options for silver), but there's lots of others out there, and some are cheaper.

If you've ever played around with 3d modelling, I definitely recommend giving 3d printing a try, even if just a little test piece. :) Note that plastics are a lot cheaper than metals, although metals look the coolest.