Two things.

One, Correlation vs Causation? Another article I recently read stated that PC sales, as a whole are down. Why? Because computers built in the last 5 years are plenty powerful for most home users. My 4+ year old, quad core i7 with 8Gb of RAM and 2TB of disk space is alive and well, and fully capable of doing everything I could ever want it to do. Not to mention tablets hitting mainstream (http://newsstream.blogs.cnn.com/2013/04/12/pc-sales-down-but-not-out/)

Because of this, I have no need to build a new system, and no need to buy a new OS. OS sales are largely dependent on OEM sales.

Two, every 2nd Windows OS sucks... That is how it has always been. It seems Microsoft does something different and it takes two generations before people accept it.
-Windows 3.1, Awesome
-Windows 95 - Blah
-Windows 98 - Awesome (Compared to the previous two)
-Windows ME - Set it on fire!
-Windows XP - Awesome
-Windows Vista - Blah
-Windows 7 - Awesome (When compared to every other version)
-Windows 8 - WTF?
-Windows ??? - Profit?

Windows is far from dead. Microsoft tried something new, like they did with the Ribbon in Office for Office 2007 - people HATED it. Now, I couldn't imagine using Office without the Ribbon. People hate change.

its a spam bot, best I can tell - its been posting it as first post to almost every article I've read on /. the last couple of days.

Hopefully the fine folks over at /. or Dice get around to blocking it sooner than later

Back in the 90's when people had 56k modems, a WAV file was huge (10Mbit per 1 minute of audio) but since then our connections are pushing 100Mbit/second+ (Canada on Shaw) , with a nice average of about 15-20Mbit/second - With this you could download a 3 minute wav (30Mbit) in 1-5 seconds. Yes, I know some people have poor quality providers, or slower connections around 1Mbit a second but still 30-60 seconds isn't bad.

The other limiting factor back then was small hard drives averaging around 50-80Gb which were around $500 in 1999/2000. Now, you can buy 3Tb of storage for $130. 3Tb is enough to store 104,857 - 3 minute WAV files.

Even 64Gb iPod Touches have enough storage for 15,000+ songs in WAV format.

For a billion dollars, couldn't they just fly over North Korea and blow their military and government institutions to the stone age? Hell, could probably be done for a lot less. Instead of waiting for Kim Jong Crazy the 2nd to try and attack North America, why not just stop him before he has a chance.

With SimCity, I had no idea that it was forced cloud - 100% of the time. No where on the FAQ does it say that you must be online. I assumed that the cloud storage, and Live Service where there if you chose to use it. Like most games that require a central hub for multiplayer, I assumed this was the case here too, just to realize after that I couldn't play for 3 days. I still can't find anywhere that states the game is 100% online

I disagree. You don't have to browse to pr0n sites and download the too good to be true unlimited free pr0n browser, you don't have to use bearshare to download files from people you don't know. If people stuck to reputable sites without going off the beaten path looking for grey area content they wouldn't get in trouble You wouldn't take candy from a stranger in the real world, and if someone said "Hey, I have this awesome 55" 4k TV, its yours for $1,000" You would probably be skeptical, considering they cost around $20,000. People seem to forget to apply the same judgement they use in the real world when deciding whether to trust someone or something to the digital world. Also, in the real world people tend to read warning signs a bit more carefully, online everyone just clicks "OK" when a popup happens without actually reading the message.

Right, until you accidentally surf to a site like jailbreakme.com, which jailbreaks your phone instantly. Unlike Jailbreakme.com, which has white-hat purposes, using the same methodology a blackhat could have hacked any number of websites, installed a similar exploit, but instead of installing Cydia with a nice UI telling you what they are doing, they do a blind install, they installed a keylogger, call logger and proxy all your web traffic through their servers. You wouldn't be any wiser since there are no 3rd party virus scanners for iPhones that have access to anything outside of userspace.

If, after 20+ years of personal computers we still can't stop people from accidentally downloading malware, good luck preventing it on smart phones and other portable devices. The problem is, and always will be, the ignorance of the user.

I came here to say that, and you are correct. If Facebook wanted to give it an effort, they would have messaged every user, put it as a sticky at the top of the time line, or some other sort of pop-up bubble, like they do when they announce new features. The only way you learn about Facebook Governance, Security, or other things of interest is if you purposely seek them out. Off topic, but did you know you can sign up for a special "hacking account" where the sole purpose is to try and break Facebook's security through the UI? You only know about this if you dig around, like most cool things on Facebook :-) https://www.facebook.com/whitehat/accounts/

It seems to me, that maybe American children are more prone to putting things in their mouth that they shouldn't, which is the same reason why the Kinder Egg is banned in the states, because kids swallow the parts, which isn't a concern in Canada for some reason. Buckyballs needs to move their operations to Canada, where we have a greater degree of personal responsibility for doing stupid things.

I'm personally surprised that no one has bothered to build encryption in to the TCP/IP stack yet, an sTCP/IP if you will. Using a public/private key encryption model, each time the stack initiates a new connection to any IP, it would first ask the other side if it supports secure encryption, if it doesn't, the other side would probably return an error. Once it is determined the other side supports encryption, both sides generate one-time key pairs and transmits the public key to the other side. Once the connection closes, the private key is destroyed and must be renegotiated. Of course, this doesn't prevent against man in the middle attacks, because there is no central repository to prove who's keys belong to who, but something like this could be done.

I guess what I am trying to say is, SSL should be implemented in the stack, instead of the application level, then we wouldnt really need to worry about our ISP's or the big bad government sniffing out our traffic.

This may sound very ignorant, but when something is pressurized, can't you just open it up and release the pressure? Grab some remote control drilling rigs, plop it down in the crater and let it get to work, release the pressure slowly so that it doesn't come out with a bang at random. This way too, they can tell the surrounding area that they may have to evacuate during the drilling process, just in case, and potentially save lives instead of having a random boom?

From what I understand from a contact of mine who works for a news paper, their website has this functionality. They told me that when a spammer is blocked or their comment is deleted they are the only ones who dont know. They can keep posting and they think their posts show up, but to the rest of the world they don't exist. Their websites comments appear to be run by a company called Pluck by DemandMedia.

They have already replaced SMS with data as the new cash cow. 1Gb for $30? My home ISP gives me 200Gb of data for about $10more. And of course, you generally need data to use Facebook Messenger

I hate captcha's, especially poorly designed ones that display letters using strange, warped fonts that the letters used could be another letter, or number. Here is a better idea... replace captcha's with a 2-factor authentication. Like Facebook or Google does. You know its a real person, because they have to receive the text (facebook) or launch an app on their phone and copy out a code (Google) which is trivial to do, and is remembered by a cookie so you only have to do it once.