The second part is an important milestone for me. Take the Big Dog - a marvel of robotics in itself. If it interacted with environment and its operator on a level that real dogs interact with environment and their masters, we would have a real breakthrough. An essential thing would be to make it learn new tricks, like a dog learns, instead of programming them in.

No, it doesn't.

I know it is cool to bash religion on /., and the Catholic Church in particular, but the pope, which grew up in a totalitarian country (John Paul II) stated 20 years ago:

It is possible if voters either agree on a set of totalitarian principles, or simply do not care. It seems that this is what is happening now in the US. I do not see mass protests against the Patriot Act, Guantanamo, War on Drugs, all computer-related discrimination and restrictions. It is also not popular enough among voters to build a new party, or to compell one of parties to change their stance.

As long as voters in the US either approve this new trend, or simply do not care, both parties will continue introducing further restrictive laws.

X7A, on which Piston is based, costs 999$. Good luck gathering adoption at this price point.

Steam on Linux beta, designed for Ubuntu, requires quite a lot of magic to get installed on Debian. Definitely within capabilities of a Linux enthusiast, but too much hassle even for a veteran who polished his system a couple of years ago and now just expects everything to work fine.

Warhammer Online (yes, still alive and kicking). 99+% of my gaming recently. I have tried to run it in Wine, same with LotRO, but to no avail. Got tired, rebooted into Win7 and had fun.

First of all Sweden seems to recycle as much as possible to the point they ran out of garbage and have to import it.

Second, this matter would decompose anyway releasing (as you noticed) methane, a much worse greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. If in those countries all this garbage would end up on landfills, why not to burn it thus both reducing coal burning and reducing methane emissions?

Third, nothing is lost. Do you think that if Sweden wasn't burning Italian trash, Italians would start recycling?

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need" shows that Communism must lead to totalitarian regime. Atrocities of Stalin, Lenin, Mao and Red Khmers were not "errors", they were natural consequence of the essence of Communism.

Greed and laziness will ensure that most people would overestimate their needs and underestimate their abilities. This would require some external judgement, by the state, by the party, by the system. So, basically someone else would judge how much you can work and enforce that you work that much. Similarily someone would have to assess your needs and provide you with goods according to this. So the result is that an individual cannot decide for himself, which would be... slavery?

And in fact, apart from short periods of enthusiasm e.g. right after WW2, all communist states were founded on slavery, both hidden (compulsory employment) and official (e.g. Gulag).

Typical fallacy of equating Nazism and Fascism. Did the Catholic Church supported Fascism? Probaby, I do not know. It did support Franco, if only due to "enemy of my enemy is my friend" reasons, but maybe for other as well. But while both Franco's and Mussolini's regimes were authoritarian and commited crimes, they do not in any scale compare with Nazis. Even today many tyrans oppress opposition and even attack whole cities (see Syria or Libya), but atrocities on the level of Nazis or Red Khmers are something absolutely unique.

So Einstein might have been right that the Church opposed Nazis even though it supported Fascism. In fact Nazis disdained Christianity as a Jewish sect propagating, as they saw it, "weakness". You know, that whole stuff about the other cheek and submitting to torture because of the God and the Truth - completely in opposition to "healthy" Aryan values of strength, victory and the whole "Ubermensch" concept.

While it is all true, I am all for such ways to spend ad and marketing funds instead of just paying celebrities. Apple has reportedly spent 1 bn for marketing of iphone and ipad. Have they made anything really cool with all this money? I know that it is a matter of a different targetted group, but most Red Bull campaigns and stunts are awesome and some even borderline useful.

Disclaimer: I have drunk Red Bull twice. Nevermore. Likewise other "energy drinks".

But now it is on a smartphone or a tablet!

Ummm, then we should also lock up anarchists, communists, nationalists, racist, Christians, Muslims, Jews, well, all religious people, atheists and quite a few others, because all of these ideologies/religions caused genocide at some point in the past.

Hell, we should start from locking up people who suggest locking up scientist and people having different opinions, because locking up people for such reasons is almost always the beginning for any totalitarian and terror regime.

Only if it is successfull. However even brief (e.g. several years) presence of a large army (think Napoleon in Prussia, partitioned Poland/Duchy of Warsaw and Russia) may leave significant genetic trace in the local population.

I wanted to click most of stories in that screenshot, from The Cure for Information Overload, through Here There Be Dragons, to Quasars Used for Encryption.

Compare it with three of five uppermost stories on the current frontpage: Google settles blah blah, Phillipines new legislation, Facebook Privacy Boosted. Ok. there is the MakerFaire and a test engine for 1000 mph car, but still...

Probably more sign of the times than the state of /. though.

The invisible hand works, just the results are not optimal for either suppliers or customers. It is the pork cycle mentioned above. Due to production lag and adaptive expectations, supply/demand and prices of livestock (and hogs especially) experience stable oscillations.

"The invisible hand" is nothing more than a complicated feedback loop. Anyone working with industrial control systems can tell you that in some circumstances feedback loops can have not nice equilibra: oscilations, chaotic fluctuations or runaway conditions. This is why governments attempt to influence the invisible hand, e.g. flatten natural cycles.

On purpose - probably yes. Sinister plan - rather not.

Every other version is pushing boundaries, taking chances, kind of like KDE 4.0 or Gnome 3.0. Then MS learns what did not work and releases a polished version. So you have Win 2000 followed by XP, then an ambitious failure of Vista followed by Win7. Now it is time for another push with Win8 and ideas tested with it will return in usable form with Win9.

So "stable" versions provide income while "experimental" versions provide UAT.