And when Romans took slaves, the often taught them a trade and, after a time, freed them to become Roman Citizens. Mary Beard (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01gknyq) takes an interesting look at daily life in Rome. Worth watching. I'm watching a 12 hour documentary on New York City and the day-to-day stories of Roman slaves don't seem that much different than those of the immigrants in NYC in the 1800s. Life was shitty and hard, but there was a path up. Some of those large memorials you see in Rome are from freed slaves that went on to become quite successful citizens, who then had their own slaves. There was a lot of death by disease in Rome. Their solution was to steal people and make them Romans.

No, people in cars hit other people in cars all the time. The vehicle of choice is not the problem, it's the distracted dumbass driving it.

We need to stomp out this kind of idiotic "it's his own fault that he dies because I plowed into him, he was driving a vehicle that is less safe in a collision than mine" mentality.

People need to learn that it is completely unacceptable to drive drunk or distracted or otherwise impaired. Cell phone usage is a major factor in this, as is the mentality that driving is a right instead of the privilege that it is.

You fucked up in traffic and hurt people or put them in great danger? You lose your license and your vehicle. Fuck you, you are not fit to drive in a responsible manner.

It must be so embarrassing for the Iranian government to be in a dick-waving contest with the US and the world when the best they can show is a tiny example of 50 year old technology. The fact that they'd even think to brag about it shows how much their internal media must be censored, or how stupid they think their people are for them to be impressed by this "accomplishment."

What happened to their threats to reverse engineer the drone that crashed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H they captured. Can we expect to see that in 2061?

I do own a thumb drive. But it's not for "storage". It's for "sneaker net" between offices.

Rumour has it that the inimitable Richard M. Stallman might have some experience with "office living"... :P

I don't find it strange at all. Metro locks users in to Windows 8. None of the compatability systems like Wine are ready to support Metro, and are unlikely to do so in the near future.

If you can get even a fraction of open source and "learning" systems built using Metro, that's some segment of the user base that now has to use Windows 8, or forego the application in question.

More importantly, it seeds the developer community with people that only know Metro for Windows 8, and have no experience in using the "traditional" APIs and toolkits.

What? You thought Microsoft would stop trying to lock people in just because of those pesky "abusive monopoly" charges and oversight committees?

How seriously you underestimate the lure and power of the almighty profit.

BTW, I always thought the Microsoft image on Slashdot should have been of the Grand Nagus rather than a borgified Bill. :)

The point that the article makes is that Facebook cannot adapt in the face of rising use of mobile internet. They may be able to offer users a good mobile experience, but they will not be able to monetize that experience. Personally, I think that's a bit of a stretch. Even if Google and FB can't come up with an effective way to serve ads on mobiles without pissing us off too much, they can still mine and sell our data. Even better: mobile data often comes with location info.

On a side note, I find it a bit sad that the business models of two of the most succesful recent tech startups revolves around finding new ways of serving us more goddamn ads, and selling our data to marketeers who will use it to "improve" their understanding of the market, whatever that means.

I don't see why an employee would need a service like Dropbox while working for a large corporation like IBM.

They already have all kinds of subversion, document, and content servers in-house, readily available by logging in to the VPN (securely!)

External services like Dropbox are fine for consumers whose employers don't already provide intranet "cloud" storage for data, but employees of large companies? What kind of employee shoot-myself-in-the-foot insanity would place cricital corporate information on a public cloud service instead of securely within the intranet cloud?

I tend to think we need to split out "Artificial Sentience" from "Artificial Intelligence." Technologies used for expert systems are clearly a form of subject-matter artificial intelligence, but they are not creative nor are they designed to learn about and explore new subject materials.

Artificial Sentience, on the other hand, would necessarily incorporate learning, postulation, and exploration of entirely new ideas or "insights." I firmly believe that in order to hold a believable conversation, a machine needs sentience, not just intelligence. Being able to come to a logical conclusion or to analyze sentence structures and verbiage into models of "thought" are only a first step -- the intelligence part.

Only when a machine can come up with and hold a conversation on new topics, while being able to tie the discussion history back to earlier statements so that the whole conversation "holds together" will be able to "fool" people. Because at that point, it won't be "fooling" anyone -- it will actually be thinking.

Congratulations indeed on passing such a major test of the systems that we've been hearing about for so long! :D