The biggest 'hole' in the federal budget is $200 billion dollars a year in unfunded Medicare costs, most of which is because of Medicare Advantage and Part D, both of which were passed with a partisan GOP vote without any funding save for new debt. Overall that largess has had America's future generation pump more than 2 trillions into today's GOP voting seniors. Sure paying off two trillion in debt isn't a bad idea, but that does nothing to plug the GOP debt hole in the first place. The best idea would be to plug it in a separate bill. Using this 'one time' money for over due transportation programs is bound to generation at least 10 times the cost in economic activity.

You're really not. On the other hand, an electric motor spinning up makes it sound like I'm in a stinky packed tram or trolleybus, so I definitely prefer the ICE sound.

And that's hardly a secret. Designing a pleasant engine and exhaust sound has been around forever and everyone (appliance manufacturers excluded) is doing it. What is fairly new however is straight up faking it by playing pre-recorded audio through the sound system. At this point I think it's time to give up and admit that you're in a crappy 3-cylinder diesel shitbox that sounds like a tractor.

Yep, and my citation is watching the stream. They did mention "windows as a service" or something like that, which is what got misinterpreted, but it was fairly clearly referring to a whole larger infrastructure with Onedrive and other cloud crap, various mobile devices tying together to provide a comprehensive "service" to the users.

The summary is wrong. What they were saying is that you can upgrade for free during the first year after Win10 release. Then it works as usual, you get automatic updates etc.

Yeah I've seen that too.

In The Wire.

Your wife and I were also enjoying Big Bang last night, and not just in theory!

Hey, us corporate fucks have travel budgets to watch, too!

I worked on a PDA-phone hybrid 15 years ago. These things are ugly and useless and expensive and will never take off!

They made the calendar useless. But thankfully you can install it from apk on a KK device if you really want to!

Does the U.S. version of Netflix really use a library model, where they strive to keep content available indefinitely? Video streaming services here in Germany continually change the content they are offering, so it's more like a TV with very many channels and random access, and not really a replacement for a collection of your favorite movies and shows.

With Oculus Rift-like displays, you can have very very big 2D "screens", and very many 2D "screens", and also 3D Abax/"Sand Tables" and Environments.

And that's why I'm very disappointed with Microsoft, Microsoft Research etc, for crap like Windows 8.

High powered personal computers with such screens and a suitable UI could let you do a lot more, quicker than what's possible now (and also check facebook/slashdot in a fancier way ;) ). Add thought-macros and we might actually have what I'd call progress. If you head in this direction, the mobile devices won't be competing with your Desktop/Personal Computers, OS and UIs for quite a while yet. What is likely to happen is they become complementary or even synergistic. The mobile stuff will let you do your virtual telepathy, virtual telekinesis and virtual savant stuff (eidetic memory, fast counting/math, face/gun/etc recognition), while the desktop stuff will help you use up all the cores Intel/AMD can provide (see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... many people are capable of much more, a suitable UI might make it almost natural).

While it's true there isn't much of a market for such devices yet, but the OS and UI has to be in a position to support such devices first. You need the infra, APIs, frameworks so that developers ("Developers! Developers! Developers!") can start building stuff.

Even if it's merely an announcement of direction with no actual tangibles yet, it'll make me more hopeful and excited. The roadmap/direction they've been announcing has been disappointing for all the supposed creative geniuses they are supposedly paying. Who gets excited about Microsoft turning their desktop computer into a more powerful tablet?

Someone will eventually do it. I doubt the present Desktop Linux bunch will or can, nowadays it seems their idea of innovation is to make a UI that's worse than whatever Microsoft shits out. They're so bad that I sometimes wonder if they're being paid to sabotage Desktop Linux.

Maybe Apple might? If Google or Apple succeed in making a decent virtual savant/telepathy/telekinesis wearable device or make a better general purpose UI for Oculus Rift stuff I'd say it's genuinely "Insanely Great".

Whatsapp is a jabber client as well. I fail to see why this is surprising connection. Seems more like click bait.

Actually, we freeze human eggs (sometimes even fertilized) all the time these days. Seeds of plant are also frozen and the later planted. The only real 'trick' is to have a place to properly grow them. If an animal species is completely wiped out, it might be hard to find a good host to carry it to term, so an incubator might need to be developed, but it does mitigate the genetic problems that come from a small surviving group.

Actually, RAID can be used to speed up access and/or to survive a disk failure (depending on setup). While important in case of major disaster, restoring from backup generally knocks out the service altogether, while a simple (and fairly common in large data centers) disk failure wouldn't even be noticed by anyone but a system admin with a RAID designed to tolerate it.