The reason main reason why tablets are a success, is because a lot of what we do with computers nowadays is pure media consumption. A lot of people generate very little beyond a tweet, email or facebook message.

For that kind of usage a tablet is great, especially if the battery can last for 8+ hours.

The tablet isn't replacing the PC or it's cousins the laptop and smartphone. It's replacing books, magazines, newspapers, TVs, notebooks, sketchbooks, clipboards, etc.

It's a media consumption device. It has the potential to be as disruptive as the PC was. It could replace the TV and nearly all things we print to, or write on paper.

It has had this potential for a long time already. It's only that with the iPad we're starting to narrow down to a working design. It will take a decade before we'll see it become ubiquitous. By 2020 we'll know if the paperless office has finally arrived.

I think that once these things get below $50, they'll start replacing books and newspapers at an astonishing rate. Companies like Xerox could go the way of Kodak.

I've started on BASIC as well, but it would not be my first choice to teach someone programming. Back then it was the only thing around, everything came with a BASIC interpreter.

I think nowadays I would go with Python. It's not perfect either, but as an interpreted language, it has a lot of the advantages that made BASIC such a hit back in the day. A big problem is that nowadays it's harder to do graphical stuff and there is no nice IDE to hold people's hand. With BASIC graphics were easy, if your flavour supported it.

It's one of the things that Borland had going for it with TurboPascal/Delphi: A nice language for learning and a good IDE. (TP6 and up at least). But I don't think going that route would be a good idea in 2012.

I hate spell checkers that correct-as-you-type. I'm fine with those that put a red line under a word it thinks is wrong.

My general problem is that I write a lot of Dutch and English, but spell checkers aren't smart enough yet to recognize that.

Yeah, there are still some of those high end tape systems in our basement. Used a lot in radioastronomy up until a few years ago. A single tape unit can do 500 Mbit/s, we have 16 I think. 8 Gbit/s to 2 decade old hardware is still impressive. They don't get used much any more. No new recording, only playback of some old data. But when they are running it's impressive, IIRC they do 20 m/s tape speed.

I've seen plenty of SGI and Cray and VAX iron in the early nineties at the various physics departments when I was an undergrad.

Particle physics and astronomy are some of the disciplines that have the biggest amount of numbers to crunch.

The limits of what can be done often are major design constraints for the devices being built.

Everyone knows about CERN, but I'm currently working on LOFAR, a low frequency radiotelescope in NW-europe (NL, DE, SE, UK, FR)

Our regular data flow is 200 Gbit/s, we can get up to 10 Tbit/s in burst mode. Even after heavy averaging we write about a Petabyte a week to disk. Most data only is kept for up to 4 weeks, we only archive about 5 Petabytes of end products a year.

It's not Google or one of CERN's big toys, but then it has cost only a fraction of what they spent.

LOFAR is one of the first radiotelescopes to use off the shelve hardware (IBM BlueGene, GPUs, high end linux clusters). Before it, most hardware was custom designed and built DSPs and other custom electronics coupled with very high end tape systems (500+ MB/s to a single tape going at 20 m/s, these things were amazing!).

What I really like about the modern smartphones is that instead of a lot of gadgets I only need to carry one. It's all of the following rolled into one: Map, TomTom, MP3 player, phone, address book, calendar, alarm clock, compass, portable gaming device, portable email device, portable browser, music tuner, metronome, noteblock, etc.

I used to carry an iPod, PDA, mobile phone, metronome/tuner, compass, TomTom, Gameboy, and sometimes even more stuff. I used to buy coats with a lot of big pockets.

Now I just carry a smartphone.

What I've seen between myself anf a lot of colleagues and friends that own smartphones is that those with an iPhone buy the applications, while those with an Android phone use illegitimate copies.

I think the main reason people buy more stuff on the iPhone, is that it's much harder to put illegal copies on an iPhone than it is to put something on an Android.

The biggest purchases I've made on my iPhone are various TomTom applications. These have been very useful during business and holiday travels. Most of my friends and colleagues with Android phones all have illegal copies of map apps and trade them a lot.

Android is the new Windows.

I think it might be good news for Google, but bad news for software developers.

I'm surprised that apparently it had a big enough effect that it did change their mind. Can anyone guess how many domains might have left them over this? Or make a guess how many that would need to be? How big is GoDaddy?

I'd even go so far as to say that it's a myth perpetuated by the politicians themselves, even more in traditional two-party systems like the USA and UK.

Over here in the Netherlands, where we have a lot of small political parties, each occupying their own niche on multiple political axes. There are at least clear distinctions on the Liberal-Conservative, Capitalist-Socialist, Confessional-Atheist and Industrialist-Ecologist lines of thinking.

It's hard to come up with a left-right narrative in such a diverse landscape, even though still some do try, in general you see shifting alliances along all the lines I have identified above.

And those are only the parties big enough to get at least one seat in parliament.

As I understand it, their intention is to figure out how to combat something like this when it will appear in the wild. Which it will do at some point, given how viruses work.

To figure out how to combat it, they needed something to study and test.

As I understood this is quite normal procedure.

That assumes the terrorist wants to live. There might be people around who want to wipe out humanity entirely if they could.

I understood that the research was done to better understand how these types of viruses work. I'm not an expert, so I can't explain it any better.

It is supposed to help scientists understand how to combat viruses like this. Preferably before something like this appears in the wild. (viruses tend to do that).

By publishing, they share it with others trying to do the same. And maybe with someone with a death wish who wants to use it as a weapon. But that's a risk for far more research.

And even then, maybe someone reads the research and figures out a way to combat this. That would help us both in the cases where a madman makes this and when it eventually appears in the wild naturally.

I would mod you up if I could.

As I understand, a large part of current US Senators and Representatives pride themselves on never having used the internet.

At all.

http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/12/16/dear-congress-it-s-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-the-internet-works