No. Microsoft reports that they have SHIPPED 100 million copies of Windows 8. Only if every single retail outlet and wholesale PC manufacturer sold 100% of all current stock, and zero inventory remained worldwide, THEN we would say "sold over 100 million copies" but not until then.

Windows 8 has "sold over 100 million copies" as much as I have lived to my 100th birthday. Don't mistake potential for achievement.

Open online courses in educational methods are a great step in the right direction. My big concern is math education in the US: I have 2 kids in middle & high school, and one of the huge peeves has been that many parents have been driven to home education for basic math thru algebra, out of frustration with poor performance of "Discovery" and "Connected" math programs (aka Chicago Univ methods). I'm not a hater of the programs per se, just the results. Apparently these programs are pretty good at keeping low-performing and low-aptitude students involved and learning, and are quite popular with school systems facing NCLB cut-offs. But for kids with a high aptitude and good applied sense of math? The results are terrible: Kids consistently describe the program content as repetitive and boring (because moving ahead out-of-pace creates great difficulty for the teacher) while the structure is confusing (kids who are adept at the math still find the topic progression confusing). It's as if they decided to teach math topics like a 'round' in music class, and anyone out of phase gets squashed. As a result math teachers routinely use high-performers to tutor others or send them off to do unrelated schoolwork rather than skip ahead. This yet-another-new-math is a hot mess, but it's financially attractive for struggling districts.

What to do? Personally we've been collaborating locally with other parents to supplement the math course with better materials and homegrown syllabi with a more linear progression through math and algebra topics. We've also leaned heavily on crowdsourced materials, Khan Academy being the largest. Not only does this make it easier for kids to progress logically and smoothly through the material, but also gives kids a sense of control/ownership and interest in the material. (Nothing so pissed me off as how much the Chicago program kills enthusiasm for learning: "I'm good at this, but screw this homework - it's the third time we've done this topic.") But tutoring and homegrown programs are a *lot* of work, and inevitably fall down in some areas. I wish the public educational system could improve to handle it, but most teachers don't have good methods or support to improve from within.

Open coursework for educators can help in two ways:
1. Teach the teachers better. If US schools are going to continue to adopt a mediocre math program, at least the teachers should teach it right. Causes of the woes above, after the lousy program itself, include poor education of teachers on how to deliver the program. Without firm understanding, even good teachers can't deliver the material well, and excellent teachers are not prepared to bend and adapt the material to fit their students. To wit: If an apprentice needs a 28oz framing hammer and you give him a Fubar(tm), he'll probably keep bashing nails in but you've got so show him which part was intended as a hammer. If you tell the journeyman that part of the tool was hardened for use as a hammer, he'll probably use it correctly and might even reach good performance (even if making a 48oz do-10-jobs-but-none-of-them-well tool made additional work for him)
2. Give teachers more tools to contribute to open courseware content. This is a good step in the direction to support open course content, and an environment where curriculum can live and die by its performance -- not by the quixotic whims of the biggest textbook buyer. This has far wider reach than just my personal math concerns. The potential is really great.

A few years ago I made the mistake of grabbing something to eat outside the SeaTac security theater zone when I was in a hurry. There was no line (very late at night) but the flight was leaving soon, so I asked "Does my burrito constitute a 'tube of gel' or can I take it through to the boarding area?" Three luggage monkeys wearing aviator glasses at night and a harrumphing silverback later, they came to a conclusion.

They x-rayed my burrito.

How is it possible for me to take them seriously? I do risk management for a living, and -- while my jackass question and their retarded response was funny at the time -- there's no way to examine the situation that doesn't indicate heightened overall risk due to bewildered agents looking for irrelevant indicators. Sure, morons joking about a bomb and the forgetful gun-toter need to be weeded out, but neither is a material risk to the lives of anyone on a flight. A good revamp of the TSA would start from undesirable risk outcomes and work its way back to a determination of effective controls... nah. Not gonna happen.

What's old is new again. A decade+ ago, Documentum and OpenText Livelink both had plugins that let MS Office open and save documents directly into top-notch version-controlled repositories. Then along came Microsoft with some badly-written Frontpage extensions called Sharepoint, lacking any real version control...years too late, claiming they invented the idea. Same pattern for online doc editing: Google built/acquired years of prior work to put together Google Docs/Drive, refined over multiple iterations and actually quite usable.... Along comes Office365: a pale imitation of desktop Office, yet positioned as the next big thing.

So I find the Office2013 pitch about local+cloud kind of funny, as LibreOffice/OpenOffice and Google Docs already do this... better.. cross platform... with more features...and has for years. In addition to the usual stuff at www.libreoffice.org/download/3-6-new-features-and-fixes/ .... Check this out:
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/ooo2gd
The extension is old, but it still works like a charm on the latest LibreOffice, and provides relatively bulletproof editing and storage of documents locally/cloud and keeps them under version control. If you've seen that Google commercial where people repeatedly do a few seconds of work on each device before it's shut off or destroyed, and the work is all saved and available.... Yeah. it's like that, and it works across desktops, phones and tablets running Google Drive, and anything with a decent browser. Even my kids can't break it. Sweet.

Ah, but what is experience but information in context? If i read a book, then I receive the essence of someone else's experience purely through words that I associate with/affects my own experience. So an enormous brain in a vat with internet access might end up with a bookish personality, but there's a good chance that its experience -- based on combinations of others' experiences over time and in response to each other -- might be a significant advancement toward 'building a mind.'

Mod parent up. Seriously. Loudly: TRACK-CHANGES IS NOT VERSION CONTROL.
Say it again: TRACK-CHANGES IS NOT VERSION CONTROL.

"Version" implies, well, a version of a document, a stopping point, a revision of the whole. Tracking a version of a document is a point construct; not at all the same thing as tracking the flow of changes over the course of a period of work. One is a node, the other's an edge. One's a pixel, the other's a vector. Not the same thing.

Both are really useful, but they're different tools for different purposes. As the parent posted, if anyone in a workgroup hits "accept all changes" the tracking is gone. Anyone using track-changes as version control -- expecting never to accept changes, and worse, puttering along with the idea that rolling back through tens of thousands of incremental changes is a remotely practicable rollback function -- is a moron.

On the other hand, true version control is analgous to an audit function. Writers in a workgroup should not be able to defeat version control adopted by that workgroup. Seriously, it should not be easy to lose track of versions or toast the ability to roll back to an earlier version, which in the current state of word processing software (local or in the cloud) means version control has to be external to the document itself. Google Docs' record of explicit saves is pretty close. Wikipedia's history of change commits is dead on. Track-changes is something else entirely.

When I see this news, all I can think is "Great, now there's an easier way to transmit and receive fraudulent vote tallies." What the USA really needs is a short & sweet federal law that says something like:
"It shall be illegal to certify any public election tallied by methods or mechanisms not available in their entirety for public inspection."

No more of this secret-sauce craziness. If you can't show how you count, you're surely up to no good -- and it's high time for that reality to be codified in law.

I caught a few of the threads where the apparent perp was outed, and I was very encouraged at the volume of comments that basically said 'that's enough data, now let's turn it over to the authorities.' Crowdsourcing of evidence-gathering is terribly powerful, and it's nice to see that even in a large pool of people (in a vigilante mood) the majority still have a sense that there's a line between prosecutor and jury. Sure, there are issues with naming potentially innocent people, but when the crowd refrains from attack and turns to a judicial system, it's the best we can do.

> it's swipe, sign, optionally-type, done.
> I've done hundreds of Square transactions, and it takes seconds. You don't know what you're talking about.

You are clearly an unusually adept expert. Oh wait.... no.

The standard *actual* usage scenario is... hand my card over, wait for the person to dig out his/her phone from their pocket, wait for them to dig out the Square dongle from some other pocket or purse, wait for them to plug it in and swipe, swipe, swipe to find the app, start it, fiddle with the dongle because it's not reognized, pull it out, plug it in again, swipe the card, set it down, check the amount, type it in, no wait... clear, and type it in again, hand it to me to "sign", take it back to submit, I ask for a receipt, they say they don't know how to do that, I say click the 'receipt' option, they ask their partner/manager/boyfriend whether that's ok, there's a minute of mumbline and quibbling, they push a button and hand it back to me... I type out a number, then they click submit... and wait... and wait... and if we're lucky, THEN the transaction "takes seconds." If we're not, the transaction fails for any number of reasons (mostly crappy signal/data service drops off), and I'm standing there even longer watching some slackjawed yokel tapping at his ifruit, wasting my time.

You're either an atypical client in a stable location (in which case you could get a much better rate elsewhere), or you're a salesperson for Square.

Online retailers don't process cards the same way as a "card-present" (Visa/MC/PCIco's term) transaction, don't get full track data, have different terms, easier chargebacks, etc etc. OTOH Square reads full-track data, and processes it thru an uncontrolled consumer device with encryption that terminates at the next proxy... Yeah. So I have the highest-disclosure type of activities happening thru the highest-risk type of merchant processing. 's no good.

Square? You mean the purveyors of the butter-slice sized "I-can't-believe-it's-PCI-compliant!" (tm) mobile payment system? The first time I had some hipster process my card with his iPhone, I was apalled that there was a system that *can't* issue a physical receipt. I know, I know, most people swipe their cards and wave off the receipt, taking it on faith that the merchant will charge only the amount shown on the till and not a little more... or the maximum I just authorized with the card-present swipe. If the charge is off, you have no proof, no way of coming back, nothing at all.

Oh sure, I can stand there for another 2-3min while I ask said hipster to email or text me a "receipt" (at least it has a transaction number) usually accompanied with a lot of huffing and puffing about how giving me a receipt is a hassle and why do I want one anyway....? Because I just did the electronic equivalent of laying my wallet on the counter and saying "Take what you need." I'd like some acknowledgement of what was taken. Is that such a burden? I still write a few checks for bills and such so there are multiple transaction types debited against a single account, and I like to reconcile payments and balance my account periodically like a grownup.

I might slide more easily into the paperless future if the rate of "error" (not really) wasn't going up. Even in my run-o-the-mill consumer usage, I've had a few instances in the past year where a person (a local drive-up barista, a dude selling t-shirts at Comicon, etc) where there was a discrepancy between what I was told and what was punched in. It's never in my favor, and if I didn't catch it in tiny print on a smudgy screen before faux-signing with my finger... And when I ask for a receipt -- even a text pseudo-receipt -- they got all flustered, and one even refused (that was the one who'd added an even two dollars). Persoanlly, if you're that hard up to steal a buck from me, you can have it. But that doesn't mean it's right.

All of a sudden this older type of "skimming" is coming back into vogue, something that I haven't seen since... well, ever in my lifetime. My parents used to talk about deli guys with a finger on the scale, and cashiers with pennies on the counter to count how many dollars in the till they'd lifted from customers (so they could balance the till by pocketing the right amt of cash at the end of the day), but I thought they were funny old-people stories. Any now Square comes along with a magical box that re-enables a petty crime by depricating auth logs... and few people seem to give a crap.

Everything old is new again.

Bigger is better. Here's my reasoning:

No touchscreen is so 90's. Gotta be able to use apps with simple gestures. On the other hand, no physical keyboard means the screen is covered with smudgy dots (ew), and typing on a touchscreen requires direct attention (NTSB stats show that even dialling on an ifruit while driving is profoundly poor judgement). Gotta have both.... So since I have to have both keyboard and touchscreen, I run things I'd characterize as "applications" on the device. Browsing slashdot? Editing a long email? Yeah. Much more screen real estate than a weather widget or disgruntled birds "app".... So now I'm looking at 800x480 or even 1280x600 screen in my hand, and the browser renders pixels 1:1, so the damn thing had better be at least 4.5-5in across. (Think of it this way: the "retina" display is marketing nonsense, but it's a good marker of the point beyond which increased DPI has no purpose, because humans can't discern the difference.)

Oh, and when I put my phone in my jeans pocket, it falls over sideways and wedges over my thigh when I sit or kneel. A slightly bigger screen will stay vertical in my pocket -- the 5in tablet style phones are just about right.

That or narrower pockets in my Levis...

0.o

Far be it for me to defend DSM IV; personally I think it's a relativist p.o.s and contains opinion-based nonsense such as "oppositional defiant disorder" which doesn't pass the giggle test. I'm just pointing out that by the current even-if-crappy standard, mental health doctors have label for a category of behavior; the category has qualifying criteria; and "asserting a social relationship with a domestic animal on the same level and depth as a human is solidly in the middle..." of the criteria for HF Asperger's, a "pervasive" mental disorder.

Actually, yes. That's how measurement works. If you accept that IQ is a reasonable measure of Bob's intelligence, then you have to accept that it's a reasonable measure for Alice too. The APA asserts that DSM criteria apply to all people. If you don't like the system, its metrics or the resulting label, criticize that, but don't assert random exceptions.

(shakes head) 'Deviates from the norm' to a sufficient degree that it has been clearly labeled as a disorder. Ponder the word "deviant." Are you a happy deviant? Isn't that ok?

Have a look at DSM-IV 299.00 Autistic Disorder. Specifically, Asperger syndrome is primarily characterized by a person's one-sided social relationships and imbalanced interactions. Research shows (generally) that HF Asperger's sufferers have an inability to recognize or process social cues, communication, and other information when interacting with other people. Mistaking pets, machines, or entirely inanimate objects for persons with which one has full human relationships is one of the red flags for this diagnosis.

This spectrum is classified under "Pervasive Developmental Disorder" ...so "Insane" is maybe not the right word. However, as much as PETA likes to use the phrase "pet parents," asserting a social relationship with a domestic animal on the same level and depth as a human is solidly in the middle of "mental disorder."

Pets are meat. Children are minions. There's a difference.

Mod parent up. This is brilliant, probably the best thing I've seen on /. in years. Following Bradbury's theme, how about.....

HTTP 451: An error in your society has prevented your client from receiving the specified content.

(And I love the fact that HTTP 450 paves the way for this.)