well. i use google maps, search and google+. However my homepage and email are with a paid for provider under a jurisdiction i approve of.

The point is: googles business in understanding what you look for to provide you with the best advertisements possible.

The combination: "he agreed to meet casually with a group of friends (google+) at x after searching (google search) for y and while going there (google maps) he paid something at shop z (via NFC for example) and checked in at time t and while he was waiting he searched for s." is very valuable to google.

The main Problem is that analog electronic, discrete, and logic components get replaced by MCUs. Where you would have used a Threshold comparator, and analog trigger, a voltage regulator, and a flipflop before to make a simple resettable alarm, no you buy an ATtiny (and you can even skip the voltage regulator, if you buy the right one). The margin for sellign it is probably the same, and there is a certain minimum size of a shop to make in reasonable to have a full range of the MCU variants in stock. So Electronics shops started to put in low cost tech articles in their shops, which is something you can only compete if you are big enough, which most of them are not. I am not sure if a path of spezialization would have saved more of the shops, but i guess not. when buying electronic components for my work i am obviously using the internet.

Why should i upgrade a comparatively cheap console. Even if the games run, they never would be optimized to use the upgraded HW. Moreover, consoles are packed more densely, so heat problems can easily occur.

The design criteria for consoles, namely platform stability, dense packing, cheap production (solder wherever its good from a yield/repair point, ease of use (imagine that you have to provide technical support to completely unqualified people putting in a new CPU wrongly) exclude any move towards extensibility.

If you want to buy a PC you can already, and it unlikely that a market as big as for the PC will arise (unless you allow the customers to put in standard PCI cards, which really make the console a little big.

WADS = EADS

this may compete for the worst articles ever featured on ./

a) most interestingly, the seriously competing offer was from WADS

b) Since USA are not liked very much in the region (and dont like the region very much) and everybody knows that export issues in the USA for weapons are always very political, it is a good choice not to depend on the spare parts.

c) It is a good example on the misconception of the population in USA on that weapons designed for the cold war of the war with USSR are anyhow more convincing in modern (asymmetric) conflicts than weapons not on the cutting edge of this race. Yes. The American military planes are good. But if you look at Afghanistan, even the western forces would need *more* aircrafts and not *higher advanced* aircrafts. And the same holds true for india

Now, the question is: will Apple, Samsung and Motorla fight long enough to allow for a comeback of Nokia on the smartphone market?

Disclaimer: i have worked for a group competing with dwave.

What dWave has, and they claim not much more, is a system which is stable enough to use thermal noise (their unproven claim: with a small addition by quantum tunnelling) to find the ground state of a Hamiltonian to construct. This solves some tasks, but by far not all.

What the rest of the QC community wants is a computer which can generate and manipulate entangled state superpositions, enabling to execute arbitrary operations on exponentially scaling (in the number of qubits) sets.

My prediction: The thing (dwave) has is a nice patent stack. Once other groups solve the important problems dwave will sue the fuck out of them or agree on a technology exchange.

In my (former researcher who left to industry) opinion/experience its not the editors who put the pressure, but the possibility that you ignored a work of somebody who is important enough to referee for Nature or Science. There are some components of these phenomena:

a) Maybe the work really is important, and you did not know it because it's too long ago. There is usually nothing wrong with a referee saying "hey that is similar to what [xyz]" did, even if they are on the list of authors on the reference in question.

b) some referees dont react positively to not getting cited and will shoot down any paper not referring to *their* theory for other reasons (i believe that happened to me once)

c) In the abstract (which is the part really read by the editors before the refereeing process) you compare your paper to the previous publications. Authors are under the impression that comparing your work to previous important papers makes a better impression. How far this is true i cant judge. I found the editor stage *before* the refereeing in Nature and Science the most intransparent thing I have experienced as an author. Unlike the refereeing process there is no way to appeal, there is not information on what the editors disliked so much to refuse directly. (There is the saying that once you had Nature/Science papers it gets more likely to pass this stage, and i have seen at least one example of a paper being passed to Nature which for sure would have been rejected by the editors had it come from a less important group in the field)

What is "sidestepping the gpl"? Sony says for some products GPLing is for some reason problematic (which may be even not due to their own decisions), so lets write a free version.

IMHO GPL should be enforced wherever it was intended to apply. If i invest time in something, i want that this happens under my conditions.

Left to change society before globalisation marginalises Japan.