A phone is not a tablet. For most people, phones get replaced once every two years. While tablets are not like computers who have a lifetime of upwards of 7 years, they're in between, around 4 or 5.

And the developer base is different too. The moment Vista came out, people began migrating their applications off XP. But developers were until fairly recently still developing with Gingerbread in mind.

Yeah, Guinness was the asshole who refused to play Obi-Wan as some crazy wizard character that Lucas wanted Obi-Wan to be.

I'm certain the world was worse off for it.

So this-or-that company promises you unbreakable encryption or that they won't poke their nose in your data. Do you trust them? I don't. All it takes is a little firm chit-chat from the national security agency of the country your data is hosted in, and your "safe" data isn't safe anymore.

If you really insist on putting files and shit in the cloud, encrypt it yourself before uploading it. Better yet, run your own server and provide yourself with your very own fucking cloud. Those who want real security aren't lazy and do the work themselves.

GG never made sense. projecting data onto your visor for real-time augmented reality? that's cool.

Onto or into? That makes a huge difference here.

They won't, because they'll be dead.

And that's exactly the point.

It's not quite as short-sighted as business managers only looking after the next quarter, but when people are being asked to sacrifice now for a payoff that is beyond a human lifetime, that's a very hard thing to sell. Especially when no one believes that other major countries such as the BRICs will sacrifice as well.

Define "device".

"Device" has always meant the motherboard.

More proof that this debate is political and not scientific.

It has been political all along. Regardless of the scientific basis, the consensus view of the American public is that they do not want to sacrifice their lifestyles for the environment, especially in this case since the benefits are non-tangible. All of the political debate is simply an extension of that.

Take that a step further:

You exceeded the posted speed limit by an average of $Z MPH over $W minutes. You were an average of $V distance from another vehicle over $U minutes. You accelerated at intersections $T times. You short stopped $S times.

It'd be easy to build up a driving profile based on GPS data. In fact, insurance companies already do it.

You bought into that pile of marketing dog shit?

Reality is closer to land of the diminishingly-freer, home of the cowardly and ignorant but loud.

We're still freer than most countries (for example, we have hate crime laws, but no hate speech laws) and without a strong American traditional culture, more tolerant, which is freedom in a different sense. But we're not that much freer, and we're losing what we have little by little.

The best use I ever found for the Nintendo Power Glove was jerking off, as it felt like Vader giving me a handjob. Kind of like doing it after sitting on your hand for a while, but more high tech. And best of all, that activity didn't even require turning on the console.

If you live in the USofA, you are in more danger of being killed by someone in your family than by a terrorist.

I see where you're going, and fair enough on a statistical basis. But my family is composed of good, just, and law-abiding people. They are not the people I am worried about dying from

The question is whether you believe there are more terrorists in the USofA or more bad cops/contractors/other-people-with-access-to-track-your-daughter.

Without question, the former. My daughter is being raised to say yes sir and no sir, please and thank you. A proper respect for authority (be it her parents or police) but also the wisdom to understand that humans are not perfect.

You know who has trouble with "bad cops?" The people who don't respect authority in the first place. The people who have done things that harm others and the society at large. My daughter will never be in a confrontation with the authorities - never become a Michael Brown - because she has been raised to understand the need for the police and for keeping the peace (as much as I can teach her).

Once you sign away her privacy she probably won't be getting it back.

I grew up through the end of the cold war, the rise of the Internet, and the integration of Lawful Intercept into telephone communications. I am still here, still free, and still have my privacy. This is no different, and I expect to be able to say the same about my privacy 30 years down the line.

I dont like the scumbags that shoot up chocolate shops and newspaper offices or crash airplanes into buildings or blow up nightclubs but I would rather see 1000 terrorists go free than to see a single innocent person have their privacy, security, civil liberties or constitutional rights violated.

And I would rather not die.

Freedom is an incredible, wonderful thing. But there comes a point where I need to balance that with other things such as seeing my daughter grow up.

Let's start with the fact that "warming" is the wrong term to use (which is why people use the term "climate change" now). It's not really warming. It's energy retention. Warming is just one side effect of the atmosphere retaining more energy.

There are a lot of feedback loops and redundancies built into the world's natural ecosystem. You see it on a small scale, where a bloom of certain resource results in a bloom of the consumers of that resource, followed by over-consumption which results in the decline of the consuming population. On the large scale, there is the same type of feedback loop that's made up of multiple smaller ones.

Right now, what's happening is that these feedback loops are handling a good chunk of the extra energy retained by CO2 so that actual atmosphereic warming is not terribly pronounced. But there's a tipping point. Once the amount of energy exceeds the capacity for these feedback loops to handle, it's going to shut down, and the moderating factor suddenly ceases to exist. The precise points are uncertain, but we know it'll happen based on what we see happening in smaller systems. For example, as prey increases, predators will also increase. This results in prey decline and then predator decline. But if due to external circumstances, the predator population grows out of control, or the prey population is completely decimated, both predator and prey (whichever wasn't affected by the initial event) will die off.

The real open questions today involve when things will happen, and how bad they'll get when these things do happen. For example, if one system fails, it can cause a domino effect on all the other feedback loops and cause them to fail too. That's a possibility. But it's also a possibility that the feedback loop most susceptable to failure won't affect the others much. It's possible that this will happen in a century. Or it's possible there are yet more feedback loops that we currently don't know about that'll push significant atomspheric temperature increase farther into the future.

What we do know is that there's definitely more energy in the atmosphere today. Weather events are getting more extreme. Stronger, more frequent storms. Colder cold snaps and hotter heat waves. And global temperatures are increasing, even if not by as much as predicted in the short term. Just keep in mind when thinking about these things that the entire planet isn't going to feel the same impact at the same time. It's about averages, over the entire system, over long periods of time (geological time scales). Also keep in mind that while certain one-off events can throw the numbers off, the trends will continue barring no behaviorial changes on our part.

The ultimate point is, we, if not as a species then as a civilization, are not facing any imminent danger yet, but we're getting more vulnurable, and by our own doing. It'd be nice to not be digging our own grave, no matter if we're using a large shovel or our bare hands. Of course, it all may not matter in the long run and our civilization and our species will ultimately be doomed anyway. But I'd rather not think that way.

Maybe not tech, but it certainly can happen in other industries where women dominate the workforce.

The modded-up sibling comment should be sufficient to point out how juvenile the original (and parent's follow-up) remark is.

You're defending the question, but not why it's a "problem."

Why are there so few non-asian minorities in IT? Why are there few women in IT?

These both are valid, albeit very different questions. The answers may or may not be what people like to hear though, and the correct solution may exist and be easy, or it may exist and be difficult, or it just might not exist. And that last scenario is very hard for certain people to swallow.