Quickly, Downolad! To the Up-mobile! We must get to the bottom of Lepto-man's strange plans. He may be on top for now, but he won't charm this city forever.

I do. The common mantra seems to be, "Enough privacy to get people to stop complaining." Google, Facebook, Myspace, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe are all guilty of this thinking, and they're showing no sign of letting up.

You're free to find a paid service for your email and web searching needs. When you go to Google's page, you're choosing to trade a little privacy for free services. Most people find this trade worthwhile.

To me the most important factor is whether an ad-supported service makes the effort to respect their users and to be careful with how they use the information they obtain. Places like Google and Yahoo seem to take the approach of respecting the users, although Google has made mistakes recently. Facebook, on the other hands, seems determined to strategically take every advantage possible from their users.

I get it... you were in for spamming! I think I will not email you. :)

The video of last year's winning AI player is impressive, but it's not anything like watching a real person play. For next year, they should add a Mario Turing contest. The goal is to make an AI player that is the hardest to distinguish from a human player.

This would be relevant to game design, as having opponents and allies who seem to act human can greatly improve a game.

Can anyone say how close to the path one needs to be in order to see/hear anything?

"Do not look back at the auto-automobile with remaining eye."

Good points. It makes no sense to take features which have proved useful on the desktop and make them available in the browser environment. Also, someone needs to stand up and tell people to stop developing these browser based applications.

If you want to edit a document, you should install a native application on every PC you want to access it on. You should have to sort out all the details of network storage and collaboration yourself. If you don't have the time or expertise to set that up, you don't deserve to be editing documents. If you accept the convenience offered by such online companies, don't be surprised when many horrible things happen to you!

Even an email would be fine. A simple message saying that "Bank X has requested your credit report in order to process an auto loan. If you have not initiated this loan request, please contact so-and-so at Bank X immediately."

It's interesting to me that my idea received one positive and one negative mod, but your negative, dismissive response quickly shot to +5 insightful. We could do with a little open-mindedness.

Depending on the implementation, my idea could result in a bloated mess. I readily admit that. But it's really easy to criticize an idea and call it impossible. When browsers were first released, it would have been thought impossible for them to do anything close to what they do today, and yet here we are. Javascript performance has made great leaps forward because Google was willing to question if those leaps were possible.

I can see two factors which could help my idea succeed. One is the continuing increase in computer power. The other is the chance to actually simplify and optimize the core windowing system code. For it to be sufficiently flexible, it would need to be carefully written. For example, when displaying a tree showing directory contents, the developers wouldn't be thinking about the specifics of the graphics, colors, and spacing. They'd be writing to a general case, which could be made very simple and efficient. Then another piece of code would apply a style to this element. CSS has already shown that styles can be applied with great efficiency.

I'm really tired of the trade-off between simplicity and functionality. This trade-off should not be inherent to either windowing system. Rather, the variety of options presented to the user should be configurable. Each distribution should be able to decide how simple or how configurable they want to make their windowing environment when it is first installed.

A great windowing environment would be able to be made to look very similar to Gnome, KDE, Windows, Mac OS, etc. I don't just mean superficially similar - it should be configurable down to the menu options presented and the types of configuration options presented in dialogs. All of this presentation of options and behaviors should be managed in a special layer, much like CSS is used to configure the presentation of a website.

For example, Ubuntu might choose to ship with a very simple, user-friendly interface. In the system administration, this interface could be changed to a more configurable preset if the user so desires. It wouldn't be a matter of switching from Gnome to KDE. Visually, the change might be as dramatic as a switch from Gnome to KDE, but the basic windowing system would just be running with an alternate configuration.