Unlike the desktop, most people use the browser supplied with their smartphone/tablet. Apple doesn't allow any application competing with their own as far as I know and on Android Chrome is a central part of Google's all-or-nothing package of apps and services. Maybe they think that for once they'll be the default browser on something. Then again, they're not a first party browser on the desktop either so why they need to have delusions of grandeur I don't know. What I do know is that they have zero chance of pulling off a whole mobile ecosystem with apps and everything. Even Microsoft struggle like hell and they have poured billions into Windows Phone, the Nokia buyout and whatnot.

My first OCZ Vertex - the original one - I did nothing to optimize it and spent as temp drive for everything, including torrent downloads that I later archived. It does 1.5 years later after eating through a 10k writes/sector endurance, if I read the SMART data right it had 9.6k write average and 14k writes worst case. My replacement drive from WD I did all the basic stuff to optimize and kept my torrents to a HDD, it lasted about 3.5 years and the lifespan indicator said it should have another 1.5 years left but one day it just wouldn't boot.

Now I have a Vertex 450 (before you say anything it's for boot and gaming, I keep my documents on another drive...) and it has 9589 power-on hours, that's 400 days and 96% life left. At this rate, it should last 25 years or more. It seems to me they've done a lot to fix write amplification and other issues, that easily killed some of the early drives if you actually used them.

Strange how so many people around the world choose to use these "mostly useless" products. I'm not saying it's all for the better, but the "OMG I can't use this app it has a ribbon" people really should find some kind of job frozen in time where nothing will ever change. Funny enough, this place is crawling with all sorts of new languages yet very few go like "OMG I must learn a whole new syntax and standard library", then it's like change and multiple skills is no problem at all. Whatever they throw at me I'm sure I'll find a way to work with it...

And the US is not? Sure it's quite a bit different with State/Federal instead of Country/Union, but there's places in the US going to shit too like Detroit while others are doing well. Some 337 million Europeans use it daily, most of them for the last 16 years (exchange rates were frozen end of 1998, bank notes came in 2002) and there's one country of 11 million who might bail because they can't print their way out of a debt problem. Tough shit, but not worse than every US state has to deal with, they can't print their way out of trouble either. It's only vital if you rely on it to bail you out of loans you can't pay back.

Bullshit. The largest creditor to Greece is the EFSF and they're not paying a dime on the principal until 2023. They're choking just trying to pay interest and no, taking up more credit card debt to pay off this month's credit card bill is not a sustainable way to go. They do have a problem in that their GDP is going down, meaning they earn less to pay interest with. That will eventually make paying back the principal harder too, but that's not their short or even medium-term problem. They can't even manage their debt, much less repay any of it.

Yes, today >75% of Greek's debt is either the EFSF, ECB, bilateral loans from EU members or the IMF. Some was bought significantly below the nominal value though, so the net loss will be somewhat less. Of course at the time they very reasonably feared another wave of dominoes falling, either in the banking market or due to a jump in national debt interest rates. They bought time to show the other countries are past the peak and on a slow recovery and they built a giant insulating buffer. Some got bailed out, but Greece may also fall without triggering another crisis in the EU economy.

This is why I don't think Greece really understands the position they're in now compared to the position they were in a few years ago. The Greek government is pushing the EU into a corner where it would be politically unacceptable to make it look like Syriza won. At the same time everybody can see that the austerity isn't working very well, so if the EU decides it's better to let them crash and rebuild and at the same time put the blame at Syriza's feet now might be a great time. They're not just playing with fire, they've set themselves on fire and is gambling that the EU will put it out.

That aside, watching a mars rover live is like watching paint dry. Opportunity has a top speed of 0.18 km/h and on average it has moved 10 meters a day. It spent over 11 years on a marathon that runners on Earth do in two hours. Everything else it does is equally slow, it makes a sloth seem energetic. The reason is of course that it's running on a tiiiiiiiny trickle of power, but it doesn't make for great entertainment. It's like for example CERN, you get a huge splash when they find the Higgs boson but between that it's months and years between something newsworthy happening.

Well, maybe not the actual scientists but there are quite a few dead cultures and species wiped out because guns and bullets beats spears and claws. And I don't think anyone doubts Oppenheimer was a bright guy, even though he wasn't the one dropping the nukes. Since you mention cats, would you like an AI treating you like you treat the cats? My guess is you would not, particularly not when they decide we're too fickle and resource hungry and would rather not have cats.

The reason I'm not worried is because we have no clue on how to build systems with self-awareness. The software is running, but the computer can't look at itself in the mirror and realize I need electricity and CPUs and RAM sticks to "live". Wake me up when we have a computer that can actually refuse me from hitting the off switch.

As for trapped AI, you should all see Ex Machina, great movie.

Like you I'll get modded Troll for defending you, but I won't do it anonymously. You are about half right: there _are_ people who teach gay behaviour, and it is right now not politically correct to say so because the whole issue is very sensitive to people on both sides.

I have no more problem with gays than I have with Muslims, Jews, blacks, Beiber fans, or pot smokers. Each one wants to live his life as his morals, upbringing, and internal inclination direct him. Some feel the need to preach their way of life to others, some feel the need to coerce others to live as they live, and some say "live and let live". I'm really only comfortable with that last category, the first two are sometimes problematic.

So I have no problem that my haircutter is gay, nor that two of my childhood friends were gay, nor that I have gay neighbours. I do have a problem with assuming that everyone is gay until proven otherwise, and raising children "gender neutral" through deliberately gender-confusing means. I don't buy my daughters toys, dolls or airplanes, until they _ask_ for them. They get both, dolls and airplanes, when _they_ express interest. If my baby to be born next month is a boy, he'll be _allowed_ to play with both dolls and airplanes, but he'll decide what to ask for. Just as if he were a girl. He'll _probably_ learn to prefer airplanes over dolls if he sees other boys playing with airplanes, and that's fine. He might prefer to play with girls, and he'll have two older sisters to learn from, so he'll probably express an interest in dolls as well. But none of that will come from parents' agendas.

Some people have a problem recognizing that outliers are just that: outliners. They exists, and we should treat them as we treat anybody else. But don't confuse the existence of a few outliers with the fact that the bell curve is heavily weighted towards the norm. Like it or hate it, the norm is that boys want to play with airplanes and grow up wanting to fuck women. Likewise, the norm is that girls want to play with dolls and grow up wanting to fuck men. If 0.1% or 1% or 10% of the population is gay, there is still an extreme bias towards straightness. That doesn't mean that gays are any worse than tall or short people, smart or stupid people, fat or skinny people. I wouldn't even consider then "not normal" at 0.01% of the population. But children, adopted or birthed, should not be deliberately pushed off the edges of the bell curves of normal behaivour in any of the above cases. I'm sure quite a few /.ers will tell of how pushing children to be 'smarter' has hurt them, the same is true for pushing them to be dumber, fatter, skinnier, straighter, or gayer.

Pardon me, I might be one of those godless heathens but I suffered through quite a few years of Christian teachings - what exactly has the Bible promised us apart from forgiveness from our sins and heavenly bliss in the afterlife? The old testament was as I remember it mostly punishments. Punishment for eating the apple, building Babel's tower, Sodom and Gomorrah and of course the flood to wipe out everything. We're all sinners from the original sin and if we don't repent it's hell.

The new testament was pretty much all allegories on how we should live, there were a few "one-off" miracles while Jesus lived but all those who saw him raise the dead, turn water to wine or walk on water has been dead for 2000 years. So there's good and evil in the world, but that's pretty indistinguishable from good and bad people with free will without God or Satan pulling anyone's strings.

So I'm curious, what is it you feel God has promised? And what do see that makes you feel he's delivered? Because I can't find a lick of difference, the devout believers get injured, sick and die like the rest of us and terrible sins go by without being struck down from the heavens. It's of course possible that all of this gets tallied up and justice is served in the afterlife, but here and now in this life I can't find any sign of God. Maybe I should ask this in the opposite direction, if you were to envision a world without God what exactly would be different?

There were a few things (GDI handles and suchlike) that had very small limits. Once you exhausted them, the system was basically unusable. There was a little program you could run that would show the number allocated vs allowed. By the time you'd launched one program, they were normally 60-90% gone.

These two are related. OS/2 needed 16MB of RAM to be useable back when I had a 386 that couldn't take more than 5MB (1MB soldered onto the board, 4x1MB matched SIMMs). Windows NT had the same problem - NT4 needed 32MB as an absolute minimum when Windows 95 could happily run in 16 and unhappily run in 8 (and allegedly run in 4MB, but I tried that once and it really wasn't a good idea). The advantage that Windows NT had was that it used pretty much the same APIs as Windows 95 (except DirectX, until later), so the kinds of users who were willing to pay the extra costs could still run the same programs as the ones that weren't.

I never ran 3.0 on a 386 to try that. On Windows 3.1 it wouldn't work, because the OS required either (286) protected mode or (386) enhanced mode. Running 3.0 on a 386, the DOS prompt would use VM86 mode (yes, x86 has had virtualisation support for a long time, but only for 16-bit programs). Windows 3.0 could run in real mode, so would work inside VM86 mode. In real mode, it didn't have access to VM86 mode (no nested virtualisation), so probably couldn't start again.

I'm not sure if it ever became a real product, but the Novell guys did have Netware running as a paravirtualised Xen guest. Apparently it was quite an interesting challenge, as Netware was one of the few operating systems to use rings 1 and 2 on i386.