Never once heard of anyone referring to "B-School" before during my own time in college. I did actually have to take one class in the business school, come to think of it. The material covered was so obvious and easy, it did nothing but reinforce my amusement that anyone would waste their time getting a degree in that place. Like most others here, I imagine, I was busy getting a degree in a technical field and most of my friends were also in technical or scientific fields. We occasionally made fun of the business school people, but that was about the entirety of our thought about them.

Anyway, my peers were too busy building an autonomous robot car for a DARPA competition to care much about college nicknames. Individual colleges were mostly referenced by acronym, actually. Maybe the "B-School" people called it something different than the rest of us, but it was "C.O.B." to everyone else.

There are going to have to be anti-theft measures on these drones, which will inevitably result in a loss of privacy. Every drone will have multiple cameras and other sensors on it constantly active and relaying back to Amazon as they fly over your backyard and skylights. Even if Amazon takes measures to, say, auto-delete these recordings as soon as the drone returns home, who's to say every Amazon employee is trustworthy enough not to tap into the feed, or that the next company to launch a fleet of drones won't be a little less concerned with privacy.

Before long we're going to have to accept that with robotics and automation approaching full-blown AI, our economy needs to transform to something very different, or we're going to end up with most people out of work and only the people who own the robots will have any money at all.

Eventually, we'll get into some kind of energy credit post-scarcity thing where humans no longer need to labor at all and just have a basic right to a fraction of the total robotic output, but it's going to be a very messy transition.

If you really believe that every world government does not spy on other world governments, you're an idiot. If you think that friends don't spy on friends, you're an idiot. The NSA has a bigger budget, and probably more expertise and technology, but every country is doing it.

All this supposed outrage by foreign leaders is simply to deflect attention from the fact that these same foreign leaders are currently spying on their own citizens just as much as the NSA is spying on US citizens. These foreign leaders don't want their citizens to ask questions about the other revelations, here, about a government spying on its own citizens, and instead be distracted by something that is obvious yet rarely talked about. Otherwise, the citizens of Germany might have questions about what intelligence the German government is collecting on them, for example.

All the American citizens outraged that the NSA is spying on foreign government officials are absolutely crazy. That's the NSA's job, you fools. You should be outraged that the NSA is spying on YOU, decidedly against its mission statement, and in violation of your constitutional rights. I for one am glad the NSA is spying on foreign heads of state.

I've been saying it for years, but nobody will listen! Jellyfish aren't from this planet at all, they're intelligent aliens creating global warming to xenoform our planet to better serve their purposes!

Why won't anybody believe me?!?

Rugby Football existed before the Rugby Football Union, dating back to at least 1845, predating even Cambridge Rules. The sport of Rugby branched off into Canadian Gridiron Football (1861), American Gridiron Football (1869), Rugby Football Union (1871), and all of the variants of Rugby and Gridiron we enjoy today.

If anyone should be arrogantly claiming the title of the one true football, it should be Australians, as theirs was codified before any other extant football rules, ahead of the Canadians by two years, the British by four, Americans by ten, and the Irish by twenty-eight. The Australians use their hands plenty in their football, so maybe we should give up on the notion that football is played with only the feet (especially since it's not, in any variant, actually true).

I say, why can't we all just be friends, and enjoy as many footballs as we care to invent? Every type I've ever played or watched, I've enjoyed. Who really cares which was first, or who calls which one by a common nickname?

Well, and the whole football name criticism is a bit disingenuous as well. There is no such sport as "football." That's merely a common shortening of the name of several sports. In America, technically it's American Gridiron Football, whereas what most of the rest of the world calls football is Association Football, which itself is a "ripoff" of Rugby Football and Cambridge Rules Football. Then there's Australian Rules Football, Canadian Gridiron Football, Gaelic Football, two major kinds of Rugby Football, and a host of other related sports. Most of these involve a fair bit of hand use, with Association Football being the exception, though let's not forget the goalkeeper uses his hands quite a bit. All the games involve the feet, and all the games share a common ancestry. Just as we didn't evolve from chimpanzees, both species evolved from a common ancestor, the same can be said of the various football sports.

I think there's something to be said in spreading it around. It will garner more interest worldwide, and probably have economic benefits as well, with more money flowing into the competition from more than just three or four countries.

I would take it a step further, though. Instead of 3 permanent cities and 1 floating competition, how about 3 permanent continents and a floating one? It could be sort of like the Olympics, with the events moving so it's more of a worldwide competition. Moscow may be a good choice for representing Asia, but what about China, India, and Japan? Let the Asian chess championship tournament move around all of Asia, then have a European chess championship tournament bounce between Amsterdam and Linares if they like, and other cities in Europe too. Then put a third one in North or South America moving to various cities. The fourth championship can hit up any other cities in other continents not on the permanent continents.

And for those saying the US has no good chess scene, how do you think it's supposed to get one? And who cares where the players are from. Not only is the money there in the US to support a tournament, but there's plenty of chess players, regardless of skill, who would be interested in watching a tournament hosted in the US.

FIDE should absolutely get involved and set up a Grand Slam of some sort, but the reasons aren't purely for determining who the best players are. It's also about bringing new players into the game. For that, they'll need a global outlook.

Truly the greatest thing about America is its ability to attract immigrants that then add to its greatness. We should be very careful not to ruin that, either through policy or xenophobia. It's the one thing we can compete in better than anybody else, and that fresh infusion of energy and labor keeps our economy and culture going.

Yeah, unfortunately it's named after an obscure Californian inside joke, as if the whole world revolves around California. They should have just named it Sea Lion to hang a lampshade on this terrible chapter, then dropped cutesy nicknames entirely with OS 11+.

John Siracusa's reviews of OS X over at Ars Technica have always been in-depth and informative, and while John Siracusa himself may be a fan of OS X, he doesn't shy away from being very critical when it does something not-so-great, or he sees a problem with Apple's direction. This year he (rightfully) railed against several UI elements that are pretty bizarre. It's hardly a puff piece. It's more educational, than anything.

In general, I find his reviews much more about explaining how things work, than actually praising or criticizing. It's a review, in the sense that it's an overview of the new operating system, rather than some sort of grading of the operating system. He's not comparing it to anything except the previous versions of OS X, and then only in objective technical respects. It's not about competing views of different products, it's to tell existing OS X users what they can expect if they upgrade.

Mostly Siracusa talks about under-the-hood workings of the operating system and computer hardware, and past Siracusa reviews have even included code examples to explain new APIs to developers interested in the platform, and users who may be the beneficiaries of developers using new APIs. This year it talks quite a bit about race-to-sleep and other technical issues that apply to computing as a whole. It's exactly the sort of review somebody would want to read if they were technically-inclined, like the Slashdot audience. I would say a Siracusa OS X review is entirely appropriate, here. If you're just looking for some kind of Windows vs. Mac (vs. Linux) argument fodder, it's not the review for you. I wouldn't want or care about those sorts of reviews on Slashdot.

Hands-down, would be the best option. I want to be able to nap while my car drives me to the next state over, and then just wake up when I arrive. If every car was driving itself, it'd be a lot safer than me driving while tired (and the guy driving in the car next to me is tired too).

How, exactly, do you propose to do that?

Honestly it's hard to imagine any program of any real size and complexity would be safer open source than closed source. Even experienced coders aren't necessarily going to understand every part of a program at the required level to understand the combined whole. Backdoors are likely to be very well hidden, and disguised as bugs, if nothing else. Open source means more eyes, but it really just means there's potentially many more people trying to put those backdoors in to begin with, and you likely don't know much about who they really are. Then comes the degree of trust you place in your compiler and operating system. Are you sure that the good code you can see is actually going to compile and work as written? What back doors are in the third party tools you use to double check that a compiled program is working correctly?

Ultimately it comes down to trust, no matter what kind of source software is. Even looking at the machine code, how do you know there's no backdoor in your hardware, and the CPU is really executing instructions on spec?

That's not to say open source doesn't have its advantages over closed source. The ability to modify a program at will is incredibly useful for people who need to modify a program at will. I would argue that is a very small subset of software users, but for those users it's essential. Open source also provides wonderful educational opportunities for new coders, and it's "free".

The legal system cannot work without officers of the court acting with honesty in the interests of justice. In this case, officers of the court (Samsung's lawyers) disobeyed a lawful order from the court in order to give their client an unjust advantage in that client's negotiations with a third party. This is called contempt of court, and it violates their obligation to act in good faith as officers of the court. It's similar to suborning perjury, or helping your client flee the jurisdiction to escape justice, or hiding evidence they have full knowledge of. On the prosecution side, it would be like destroying evidence that clears a suspect of charges. There will be severe penalties for the lawyers in question. They will likely not be officers of the court for much longer.

Samsung, to be fair, didn't violate any such obligation. We don't know if they encouraged lawyers to do this or not, but we do know that they took unfair advantage of it. A company acting in good faith as part of a legal process would have put a stop to it immediately, fired said lawyers, and informed the judge and made whatever efforts they could on their end to limit the damage. We know Samsung didn't do this, and in fact bragged about their corporate espionage. It's a murkier issue as to Samsung's actual liability or criminality in this, but if it is determined they induced this contempt of court by their lawyers, I imagine the consequences will be severe for them as well. Certainly Nokia has cause to sue Samsung's lawyers, if not Samsung directly. Apple will no doubt use Samsung and their lawyers' actions in this matter as argument for further limiting of their confidential information in current and future cases, and I imagine courts will agree. The fact is Samsung persuaded a judge that Apple should give up certain confidential information, that judge gave an order that only Samsung's lawyers would be allowed to see this information and no one else, but Samsung's executive team got the information anyway after their lawyers took this confidential information and sent it to Samsung in violation of court order.

At a minimum, Samsung got caught not reporting unethical behavior by their legal counsel, and taking advantage of it for their own gain, likely in the many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Considering Samsung's history of destroying evidence and other legal shenanigans, I don't think it's such a stretch that they somehow induced their lawyers to commit contempt of court. Logically, the lawyers would need such inducement, as why would they risk being disbarred if they weren't being pressured or incentivized in some way by their client?

The nature of the court order that was violated is not the issue here. The issue is a serious breach of obligations by Samsung's lawyers, and Samsung subsequently having an unfair advantage in their negotiations with Nokia, and an unfair competitive advantage in the marketplace with Apple.