Sadly, the same thing largely holds true in meat-space, as well.

A quick googling reveals that the 'Communications Liberty and Innovation Project' is an offshoot of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Big Business PR body-shop. Fred Campbell is nothing but a water-boy for the Koch Brothers and other right-wing loonies. His anti-neutrality stance says it all: he's in the pocket of the large ISP's. Why bother listening to this rabid asshat? He has zero credibility.

No, the GP is right. Of the 50-some teachers I had from kindergarten through my last year in high school, only ten or so are memorable. The rest were mediocre droids who merely droned on and did little to facilitate true learning. That's the nature of the beast in this country -- due to the fact that 'education' departments in most universities are something of a joke, the discipline doesn't exactly attract the best and brightest. Most of the teachers I know are nice if not all that intelligent. Maybe if teachers were paid more we wouldn't have to put up with people whose main draw to the profession is a three-month break every year.

Your proposal sounds like a perfect Kickstarter project. If you can make an adequate sales pitch to IC designers and other such people, it shouldn't be that hard of a goal to realise.

Military over-expansion, you witless prat.

I disagree. Different presidents have actually delegated quite a bit of power to their VP's -- all within Constitutional parameters, of course. Obama has given Biden quite a lot of responsibility, due to the latter's vastly greater political experience. The office of vice president is not necessarily toothless. And remember, as president of the Senate, the VP always has the power of breaking ties in case of otherwise intractable gridlock.

Uh, under the original system, McCain would've been VP. He wouldn't even have had Palin as a running-mate.

My prediction: Project Blue (the incremental upgrade that MS is promising sometime next year) will be officially christened Windows 8.5 or Windows 8 Second Edition and bring a return to the conventional Start Menu, and be targeted exclusively at desktop/laptop users. It will of course retain all the benefits of Windows 8 (better virtualisation, faster booting, et cetera) but ditch the Metro UI since it's so poorly suited for knowledge workers and content producers. MS will acknowledge that bringing Xbox/desktop/tablet/phone onto a single NT-based core is a worthy goal, but that forcing the convergence of wildly different use-cases into one inferior computing experience was a stupid bet. Windows 8 on tablets has enough vestigial desktop baggage that it's confusing for new users; correspondingly, desktop users hate the arbitrary and tacked-on feel of Metro. Over in Apple-land, longtime Mac users have been screaming that Apple's iOSification of Lion and Mountain Lion has only succeeded in dumbing it down and making the Mac a more awkward platform for content creation: MS would be wise to take heed, rather than slavishly copying Apple's missteps as well as its perceived successes.

THIS . Such as system worked well for decades, and fostered compromise between the parties. We need to return to this system ASAP. It would also reduce the mudslinging between candidates during the campaign, because they would both know they have to work with each other for the next four years. Abandoning this protocol was a deeply regressive move, IMO.

Unfortunately, you're the newbie and the onus is on you to prove that you know WTF you're talking about. One way to gain Bob's trust and respect is to volunteer to organise the documents into some coherent order -- but tell him what your plan of attack is before you do it. If you come off as a cavalier who's going to take no prisoners and engage in a scorched-earth strategy, all you'll do is make enemies and leave the place worse off than you found it. Nobody likes a back-dooring interloper. Take some extensive time to learn all the interplay amongst the board's members, and in the meantime develop some policies that will prevent the system from getting to its current state ever again -- with buy-in from all the key players. It'll probably take you a year to achieve all this. Oh, and please help Bob clean up the existing system. Whether or not you transition to a new system, you're going to have to muck out the stalls anyway.

What you need to codify is a workflow -- a process -- for creating/updating/deleting data. Without this, you could drop hundreds of thousands of dollars on an OpenText or Documentum CMS and it would quickly become the unmaintainable mess that the current solution has become. As usual, people, not technology, make the difference between a solution that succeeds and one that fails. If you have undisciplined idiots who can't be arsed to provide updated material in a timely manner and comply with reasonable policies and procedures, any shiny blingy new solution is quickly going to become fucked up as well.

I also share others' reservations about choosing a cloud-based solution. The 'cloud' should only ever be used as a backup solution, not a primary one. I'm not saying that Google will go belly-up next week, but you'd be at their mercy because they house your organisation's crown jewels. Also, Google has a habit of decommissioning technologies they view as marginal or simply not providing the profit margins they seek -- and as they're a profit-making enterprise you can't really blame them. If you're going to adopt new infrastructure (and it's vital that you have policies and procedures agreed upon and implemented first), then keep it in-house and only use Google Docs as a backup. With their published API's, it shouldn't be too hard to cron a periodic dump to Docs.

No, but the threat of switching will provide that extra minute push to ensure Intel's continued refinement of Atom chips, and perhaps force them to release subsequent generations a year or two sooner than otherwise. Now that MS is actively promoting ARM-based tablets, Intel should be worried if not outright scared.

Maybe they can use the HAL from Meego and mash something together. Who knows.... All I know is Android needs a viable, open competitor to keep Google on their toes -- so scratch Windows Phone and iOS. Too bad Nokia completely fumbled the Symbian ball.

I'm not crazy about Romney, but Paul Ryan ('Eddie Munster') positively scares the fuck out of me. He really is an odious, red-eyed demon. If Romney wins and decides to delegate a lot of (albeit constitutional) power to Ryan, we could be in for a world of suck.

WebOS has an elegant interface that in terms of UI/UX puts Android (even Jelly Bean) to shame. Its problems were two-fold: 1) underpowered hardware that didn't showcase the software stack effectively; and 2) lack of developer courtship from Palm and later HP. Hopefully the open-sourcing will rectify these points. In comparison to WebOS and iOS, Android is the ugly, freckly ginger stepchild. I think people willingly overlook its flaws because of the relatively decent hardware it tends to run on.