For narrow domain searches like installed software, I simply find a hierarchically organized series of visible prompts to be a faster alternative than a series of tiled blocks that I need to scan. Typing the name of the program to find it, as Unity on Linux does is all well and good, if you remember the name.

Unable to admit mistakes, there will be no start button that brings up an easily navigable menu. There will be a bitmap that brings up the desktop or something equally stupid/lame.

In other news, Microsoft will give developers no clue as to their long term language strategy. Developers, with no interest in investing limited time, money and resources into Microsoft language technology shambles, will go elsewhere. Top managment at Microsoft will continue to be baffled as to why nobody is writing Windows 8 Apps, or Windows anything apps, anymore.

Well, if you live in Europe, I propose this little hypothetical for you. Tomorrow, the USA's contribution to NATO disappears. No more bases. No more soldiers. No more weapons. No more obligations to defend. Suddenly, every country in Europe must pay for their own defense.

So, how long, do you think, your generous social benefits would last under those circumstances? Please provide numbers, and sources. Not hot air.

Though your response intimated that my basic assumptions about resource allocation by governments and industry were wrong, that too is useful insight. I'm not sure it's entirely correct, however.

Both private industry and goverments are littered with failed ideas, and I am skeptical that one really does better or worse than another at picking winners and losers. Private industry, I think, simply has more active public relations machinery.

Capitalist societies seem to act more like a bacteria colonies, successfully reacting to resource availibility and strategies with immediate results while ignoring long-term consequences of their actions. Capitalism, it might be said, doesn't think ahead. That's what governments should be for, although in a democracy with a 4-year cycle, this view is often too limited for useful long-term action on matters like hydrocarbon energy depletion and global warming.

OK, I'm more than willing to admit we don't have a clue about many neurological disease processes. Schizophrenia and Bipolar disorders may be dozens of different specific diseases that happen to present in a similar way. I get that.

But until we *know* what those diseases are, schizophrenia is useful in that it describes a set of symptoms that commonly occur together, that we can treat.

Theoretical models are never "right" or "wrong." These are meaningless terms. They are only more or less useful in that they provide some predictive and/or manipulative power. Period. End of story.

True, I'd been scripting automated testing systems in C++ for 3 years prior to that, but at 40, was forced to learn vb.net and vbscript. Vbscript begat powershell. Vb.net begat C#. And these days, at 55, I just work through whatever syntactic abomination is thrown my way, no matter how fundamentally unnecessary and pointless (I'm lookin' at you, WPF).

LOL. Have you ever *been* to East Texas? The "office building" would have to be a broken down trailer, right next to the fellow who lost all his teeth in his last meth holiday (I have a cabin there).

than actually making products that don't suck. Implication? Corporate leeches and legal parasites have changed the legal environment to favor their existence by purchasing laws via bribes labeled as "campaign contributions." Tell me again how, as an individual ISV or inventor, I could *ever* be successful in the USA's current legal environment?

..when dealing with anything you want to keep secret, and your problem is solved. Internet security has always been and always will be, sheer fantasy for gullible managers.

Any questions?

As always, failure flows from the top, starting with Ballmer, with help from those immediately below him.

As long as Microsoft's internal fights keep shifting strategies, as long as they keep firing competent programmers who didn't happen to get management's notice that year. As long as they continue with the 90's teen nerd arrogance that seems to say, "I know better than you," they will fail, and fail, and fail again.

They need to dump most upper management, change evaluation procedures to eliminate the constant paranoia, and start acting like mature adults creating and selling the products people *want* instead of solving problems that nobody has (e.g. Metro, WPF, etc.) with pointless cutting edge whiz bang.

Flood Syria's government with Dell's. After a month, when the first 99% break, the entire government will be online with two Indian technical support technicians who will both try and get *them* to take apart their own machines even though they purchased the "premium" support package.

The regime will fall within weeks. My compliments to the CIA operative who suggested this.

You've got the tools. You've got the know how (sort of). First one to intelligence wins the world, more or less.

So MOVE!

What we're after is NET energy, which has been declining since the first wells were drilled. Whether we've reached peak quantity of oil doesn't matter so much. It's Net energy/price over time that matters.

The bottom line is that nothing scales to the amount of energy that we get from oil (about 160 exajoules per year) except nuclear, and to sustain that, we'd have to start using thorium.

That, plus improved battery technology may keep a few billion or so from starving if we build the plants and infrastructure in time to keep supply chains running. Otherwise, we're in for a little "extinction event" around the turn of the next century.

Yes, thanks for responding, and by the way, you're an idiot and you represent everything currently wrong with the American business education system.

The oil companies don't depend on financing they pay some of the larger dividends found in the large cap space.

Yes, like this I suppose ( http://www.marketwatch.com/story/exxon-sinopec-aramco-complete-4-bln-financing-for-china-jv ). Yes, some oil companies pay dividends - today. Should their stock price tank, tomorrow (assuming you can think that far ahead), those dividends will halt with an almost audible screech. Their "capital," much of which is tied to their stock value, will no longer be available as collateral to finance exploration and they will have to start dipping into cash. This will work. For a while.

Access to credit is not something big oil thinks about as a 'risk'. In the past, they didn't. If they don't now, they're going to be out of business with some rapidity.

Which is not to say they don't use it in these days of near zero sometimes negative real rates; but they don't *need* it and they don't worry about it.
The people not worrying about it are nitwit "analysts" at a financial firms who have neither useful feedback nor consequences for failure. Executives at oil companies, and owners of small to medium sized exploration companies are worrying about it a great deal.

The major oil companies are promoting "No peak oil" stories to influence google results. They need to do this to keep asset prices up, soothe investors and keep the financing on which they depend flowing.

For a numerate look at exactly what we're facing, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil

"Peak oil" itself is a bit of a straw man. The problem is declining net energy from hydrocarbons. Net energy from shallow easy wells that produced light sweet crude was great. Net energy from deepwater gulf wells producing heavy sour crude or oil sands where the bitumen has to be heated in order to be liquid? Not so great.

So bottom line. The absolute quantity of net energy in the first half of the oil on the plant is much greater than the net energy in the second half. Oil supply is NOT the same as energy supply.