I don't expect nerds to be excited about this one so of course we're going to see these "LOL CHROME IS LMAO" comments like below. But Chrome OS really is sufficient for what many people want to do with their computers. I don't think my mother could really tell the difference between a netbook with Chrome OS and one with Windows, except that the one with Chrome OS gets her to what she wants to do faster.

Finally, a band-aid made out of human penises!

Can't believe I didn't think of it.

Yep. Most of the advantages Flash previously had (animation, real client-side programming) for making rich navigation interfaces are now possible in a more open way with Javascript. The libraries are still a bit of a mess and browser support is always iffy, but dynamic, animated HTML looks amazing in the latest versions of webkit.

Truer words are rarely spoken.

Reverse the polarity? Good god, next you'll be wanting to cross the streams.

It's hard to say. I think you could make an argument that for SMART, RESPONSIBLE people, they end up bearing most of the cost of raising children but society reaps most of the benefits. Part of the problem is that it's not easy to measure how much benefit a productive member of society adds, so you can't quantify any of the benefits but you CAN quantify all of the costs.

I don't really want to go through the hard work of making the argument, but I can say that when I look at raising kids, I see a lot of work and cost for me, and at the end there would be another productive member of society contributing economically or producing research or whatever he/she decides. Or I can just skip that whole thing, and spend the many hours and tens of thousands of dollars having fun.

If I just follow my incentives, I probably will never have children and society will never have another productive member. But is this the best outcome for society?

I get a full-up kernel panic when trying to resume from suspend and have some troubles with VirtualBox too, but everything else is working ok.

I'm not sure piracy is a good thing: the costs to society, especially in terms of legal enforcement, are immense. I hope it becomes irrelevant over time. Frankly I dunno why people are still so enamored of pirating music when there is so much GOOD stuff out there that's 100% free, legal, and sanctioned by the artists that you could listen to new music every moment of your life without spending a dime.

Music, like other types of creativity, is in a race to the bottom because there's so much more content available than people can possibly listen to in their entire lives. I guess the only reason the music industry hangs on while the newspaper and publishing industries are dying is because music is harder for people to substitute... they hear a song on the radio or whatever and become enamored with particular artists, but the same doesn't really happen for particular writers.

Fixed that for you.

People respond to their actual incentives, not what you pretend the incentives are.

If people were held personally liable for damages caused by security breaches that they enabled, they would get smarter about security.

I'm not arguing that they should be held liable, just that it's going to be hard to make them care when they aren't.

The obvious coming trend is for a larger and larger proportion of game code to be controlled by larger entities. Instead of buying games, you'll just buy a license to play which will connect via low-latency pipe to your local game company where they stream game content to you online via video or some other medium. Or much like WoW, you'll get a game client but the majority of the game code will remain on servers controlled by the distributor.

It's just easier to control piracy when you never actually release the game code.

What's really impressive about it is that it's able to make any sense at all out of the terrible obscenely band-limited quality most phone messages are. I'm sure they have to use a bunch of statistical techniques based on their observations of common english text (eg, was "Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all" really what that person was probably saying?) to have any hope of producing something close to the correct answer.

The current major cloud providers (Google and Amazon) both replicate your permanent data to multiple hard disks (Google: 3, not sure about Amazon) in multiple areas of the datacenter, and I know Google is looking at providing replication to different datacenters (which is more complex than replication in the same datacenter because of the time delay).

Bingo. The same is true of many types of businesses including big blogs and sites like Slashdot. Marketers usually understand this, but it's an easy point to miss.

Worse, to get on the wi-fi you need to use some kind of Java applet that I haven't gotten to work correctly in linux yet.