I don't know about niche needs. I know my use of a hud for motorcycle turn by turn directions would be niche, but I'm pretty sure Google's intentions are anything but. By convincing people to record and upload more data from more personal places, they're looking to greatly expand their data mining. I don't know about "don't be evil", I think their new moto is "just don't be obvious".

+1
Last thing I want to do is interact with anyone wearing google glasses. In a normal social enviroment, they're like the uber-bluetooth headsets for the uber-douchbag ... but as a HUD for my motorcycle, with my speed, a little direction arrow before turns, the last 30 seconds of video catching the twit running me off the road (or worse)... That I would like to see built into my helmet.

I keep getting suckered into this articles just to see if the failing PC market has finally forced them to pull their heads out of their *sses and reinstate the desktop by default and the start button...

Maybe I'd better luck wishing for some higher res displays as standard on notebooks... How is it that cell phones need 1080p displays, but for doing real work, 1366x768 is supposed to be great ?!

Nice and concise.
I hate ethanol, it's a massive drain on our water tables and a drain on the economy. More personally, I'm sick of having my car run like crap and getting 20-25% lower gas mileage than when I get the ethanol free stuff (check out http://pure-gas.org/ ) and it really messes up my motorcycle. The gas goes bad in half the time, fouls the oil, and eats up the rubber lines and gaskets.

If the government wants to prop up alternative energy production, it should be going into the electrical infrastructure and actual clean energy research and production.

If you go by machine time, 99% +/- 1% of my printing at home is with PLA on an Ultimaker.

I just spend the long weekend shopping for a new laptop for my wife. Overpaying for the 'features' that will make her happy is a bit like having your fingernails ripped out, but it's still less painful than spending the next 4-5 years listening to how crappy her laptop is.

First time I've ever bought a Sony, and if you spend the extra $30 to upgrade to Windows 8 Pro, they'll let you select a clean install without any crapware. I'll be throwing an SSD in anyhow, so I saved the $30, but I think it's a fair compromise on the crapware front. Sony was the only company offering a sub-$1000 notebook with a touchscreen resolution greater than 1366x768. I think that's a bigger travesty than the crapware issue. It takes 15 minutes (not including updates) to install Windows (with an SSD and a quick thumbdrive), but you're never going to fix a cheap screen !

That's kind of narrow view of what tech is. If you want to have a real conference, you should be trying to develop a discussion which requires different perspectives. I don't think diversity is a function of color or gender, but if you go looking for differing ideas and opinions the odds of getting an all white, male group are exceedingly low. If a conference doesn't introduce you to new ideas, what's the point of going.

It's hard to imagine that in a country as diverse as the UK would produce a panel consisting entirely of white males without there being some bias on the part of the organizer. Maybe he just invited his friends, in which case he probably wasn't getting the "best", he was just getting the most agreeable (to him).

A couple points, I wonder if this is the magic factor Microsoft has been banking on to drive wireless carriers into selling more Windows Phones (as opposed to pushing Android). ?
Has anyone trademarked Paranoid-Droid yet ? I think I see a future Android/Linux fork possibility. I'm not sure how much more data Google would really gain by directly providing the service vs. what everyone is already willing to give away.

I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out how this isn't exactly like the anti-trust situation where Microsoft bundled their own browser with Windows. Except that Microsoft didn't actually restrict the software you could install, only the default/bundled stuff.

The scanguage II gets its information from the ecu via the can-bus just like the instrument cluster on the dash, and as such, is no more accurate. The only real way to properly gauge average fuel economy is by comparing the litres or gallons put in vs. the km or miles since the last fill up.
I will say that while the Kia we own doesn't get the claimed fuel economy that was on its window sticker, at least the speedometer doesn't read 8% higher like the '08 Mini Cooper S we traded in. The scanguage is only as accurate as the ecu, which is never more accurate than the sum of its sensors and calibration.

I'm one of those people affected by Kia's bogus mileage claims the most with the 6mpg difference. I traded in a Mini Cooper S for a optioned out Kia Soul Exclaim Premium. Both cars had the same ratings according to the window stickers, 28 city, 34 highway, EPA ratings have gotten significantly better (with some obvious exceptions) in recent years. I typically get about 2mpg less than sticker due to my driving style, the crappy 15+% ethanol laden gas, and the hilly terrain around where we live, but on longer drives the highway mileage always lines up if I compare the gps-read-miles and the gallons out of the gas tank. True to this finding, our Soul has been getting 6mpg less than it's rated and other owners on the Kia Soul forums say the exact same thing.
Really it's common sense and I knew the window sticker wouldn't be completely correct when we bought the car. Any time you see claims that a companies top of the line trim with much bigger, wider wheels, a larger engine, and an automatic gets the same mileage as their entry level trim with the little engine, skinny tires, and a stick shift, you know someone's not doing the math. I am a little shocked to see the EPA actually picked up on this and delivered a solution. Kudos to the guys in charge for once. I'm also pretty happy with the solution. I know some Mini-zealouts will rage on me for saying this, but our 2012 Kia is 100x nicer to drive around the city and on longer road trips than our Mnii was and it's even better now that they both are on equal (effective) gas mileage terms.

Good point.
And kudos to whomever spotted that script. I thought they were being sneaky using the light grey font so it didn't stand out. I popped the page over to my portrait monitor and sure enough the layout changes quite naturally to keep the Samsung notice out of sight.

Reminds me of when RIAA went after pirates of "The Love Guru"...
You can hardly call it a lost sale if no-one really wanted it in the first place.

I stopped installing Firefox onto all the machines I work on earlier this year when Flash instances started crashing it. This has been going on since about Firefox 13-present and Flash 11-present. I'm not going to mourn the eventual death of Flash, but I'm not limiting my browsing while I wait for the websites I use to replace it. If I wanted a sucky web experience, I'd get an Ipad.

It's one thing if you couldn't install Firefox or Chrome on your PC, but the whole browser issue is a bit of a dead horse. I don't see Apple getting smacked around for the browser defaults in their OS, nor Google. Faulting Microsoft for setting up IE is a bit like getting after Ford for selling a car with seats already installed.

Seriously, learn the shortcuts.
I was as upset about the loss of the start button as anyone, but having come across a list of the new windows key shortcuts, I'm now able to get things done faster than ever. The final version of Windows 8 is a 10000x better than that buggy POS preview edition.

Steam is full of crap as far as Windows vs. Linux goes for gaming. They're just shooting their mouths off like Acer did because they're afraid of any competition. I've got Steam and all my games installed on both my pc and notebook on the Windows 8 desktop and they run just as well, if not quicker now than they did under Windows 7. It wouldn't take Steam more than half an hour to turn their storefront into an "app" just so they're searchable in the marketplace. PC gamers aren't so stupid that we can't find the desktop or the site that sells PC games.

If Valve wants to invest in making Linux a more consistent experience for millions of different hardware configurations with a slick interface, that's super ! I don't think they can do that, but I'd like to be proven wrong.

We had a guest speaker at an ASME meeting a month and a half ago talking about this very issue, Dr. Bonnie Dunbar. She was speaking about her talks with congress about the importance of replacing these weather satellites and the response she got from the representatives was "why do we need satellites, can't we just get our weather from the internet".
A republic only works if you send your best and brightest off to handle the day-to-day decisions.Representatives that got their job via a popularity contest are usually no more fit make technical decisions than guys and gals who won the homecoming king & queen positions. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrrj9Wc2L84

Well put.
The MS approach is quite different from Apples. I'm not crazy about the extra mouse clicks required to get some things done under Windows 8, but a seamless experience across all my devices (or screens) feels like a net productivity gain. I ve tinkering with Linux and even OSX, but I still use Windows everywhere I want to get things done. Linux has some great components, but 2 copies of the same distribution aren't even guaranteed to be binary compatible let alone sharing a common structure. At the end of the day I want to be able to log into my profile, launch solidworks, office, or whatever program I need, and get work done.