When they do a mapreduce, each node might take minutes or hours to do work.

I'm sure they have processes that require fine grained, millisecond parallelization, but mapreduce is not one of them.

To prevent piracy, there is a 25 MB/day cap. A company spokesperson assured us that this does not affect the average person, as it's equivalent to over eight copies of the entire Lord of the Rings series -- much more than any mortal being could possibly plow through in 24 hours.

You'll never in your life get $14 million worth of enjoyment out of a boat.

There are probably half a billion people in this world that would claim that you could never in your life get $25,000 worth of enjoyment out of a new car.

Millions would say that never in your life would you get $400 worth of enjoyment out of a PC or smart phone.

Are we going to allow application programmers to start making direct calls to the hardware?

But that's the thing: there is no hardware. In a virtual system, the hardware is implemented in software.

On a physical platform, the lowest level operations are things like sending disk requests or pushing Ethernet frames, because it would be madness to implement a CPU instruction that reads a file by name from the filesystem.

On a virtual platform, that's not madness, but actually rather convenient. When the lowest level platform operations are basically on the level of syscalls, you don't need an OS anymore.

Let's do it. This would solve the growing cost of pensions, and open up lawns for kids everywhere.

The part that worried me was more the fact that CO2 was still produced, it was just contained within the chamber (the benefit of their technique seemed to just be less/no air space required in the chamber).

Sequestering CO2 is not simple, and is currently done mostly by pumping it into used oil fields. It's not certain whether these costs were factored in.

You're assuming that the majority of web programmer reads RFCs and the HTML5 spec.

It's not unreasonable to think some people in less anglocentric parts just know tag names as character sequences rather than words (and science backs up the fact that arbitrary character strings works as commands when you're used to them).

Even if they do know the meanings of every word used in HTML/CSS markup, they still might have no idea how to conjugate "to be", much less read english prose.

The fact of the matter is that people who want to do drugs, do drugs.

Desire for drugs is not a dichotomy. The world is not divided neatly into "the straight edge public" and "junkies who will do anything for drugs".

Alcohol is legal, and research shows that an increase in price causes a decrease in consumption.

Alcoholics will keep drinking viper fluid even if you ban alcohol, and teetotalers will not touch it if you paid them, but the whole gray area in between is influenced by availability.

I don't mean to rain on the geek parade, but both The Gimp and modern Photoshop runs natively and smoothly on my x86 based Windows 8 tablet.

Whether Windows 8 makes for a better tablet UI than a cross-arch emulated Windows 3.1 with twenty year old software is another discussion.

I can actively avoid going to jail or Apple. However, once I have an iPhone, I can't just walk away by installing Meego on it. If I've bought a bunch of movies on iTunes, I can't just walk away by installing Linux.

I can throw away everything, of course, and so can you -- by hanging yourself in your cell.

I would venture to say that people would discover side swiping before they discovered the four finger iPad gesture.

As there is an absolute minimum

There is no absolute minimum. The IQ scale is well defined towards negative infinity.

it won't benefit Windows any more than it would BSD, Linux or OSX

It will benefit Windows and OSX a lot more since suspending there actually works.

If you ever successfully unsuspend a *BSD or Linux box, you should post a bragging video on youtube and never, ever update anything.

If the accident was caused by a programming error, do you think Google would have admitted it and risked killing all th new legislation that's being passed, and thereby also the project?

See how lost she is? How the OS isn't giving her a damned clue about where to go or what to do?

My folks needed help when starting to use the web, wifi and digital cameras. These technologies didn't flop as a result.

I, for one, think Windows 8 is awesome. It's basically the Windows version of Maemo -- a nice touch interface backed by a fairly complete desktop OS. I'd easily ditch my iPad for this, and would even be able to dock it with a full keyboard and high res screen for using Visual Studio and similar.