If you look at the hard data, this whole bee thing is overblown. The groups that said there was a bee problem said cell phones were the problem for the longest time, and lo and behold they were wrong (I swear they had something before that). Europe has put in a ban on the 'dangerous' neonicotinoids for the past couple years. There hasn't been any change in bee populations as a result of the ban. That is how you do a controlled experiment, and so far the data isn't looking like it is a problem (and there is a problem with us not using that pesticide). If you look at bee stocks, many bee farmers didn't see any problems. Some did, and there could be some problems there, but what isn't be told is how these bees are used and bred. Due to the queen hive structure, they are generally very genetically similar, this is a bad thing in general as it means the populations lacks robustness. Now consider that most of these farmers use queens from a central industrial bee farm, further limiting the genetic pool. This is not a recipe for success. Now, take this genetically crappy bee hive and now truck it all around the country to pollinate at different times of the year. Now, remove more honey and give them sugar water instead over the winter. Put this all together and there may be other reasons why there is a population problem...

Agreed. I have the windows app of Uber and its permissions are significantly more limited.

I don't know about that. I heard he was caught in a catch loop for the first two hours until he managed to use a throw command.

I am glad you're not in marketing then. Marketing 101 says don't use names you aren't legally allowed to use. Microsoft purchased part of Nokia, not Nokia, and so doesn't own the rights for the Nokia name (at least in the long term). Part of the deal was the transfer of the Lumia brand from Nokia to Microsoft for exactly this purpose.

Canada is much more business friendly than the US, believe it or not. The corporate tax rate is even lower :)

IE uses less RAM than Chrome... so given the freak out of 2GBs of RAM it makes sense.

Try to be a bit impartial. You are comparing the two saying they are equivalent in terms of functionality. Let's say that is the case - why wouldn't a chromebook need antivirus? It is a computer system that has vulnerabilities, like any OS. Maybe nothing has been written for it (that we know of at least), but your comparison isn't reasonable. The boot time from shutdown on a Windows 8 machine has always been under 10 seconds. I have an old PC with a mechanical hdd and it boots up in 8 seconds. From sleep the boot is basically instant. So why did they come out with this? Well it does about the same thing, it is good enough for most people and most people still use a windows machine. Because of that most people will stick with it. This machine will meet most people's needs entirely.

The Nokia aquisition added 25k to their roster and they are cutting 18k. So why all the big hupla?

I moved from IT into business development and now product management. My ability to use a computer and know the underpinnings of systems allows me to translate how it should work for everyone else has proven to be exceedingly valuable. It is nice to be able to talk to the IT department, speak their language and understand how/why they have concerns, and translate those into something the bosses on the business end can understand. It puts you in a really neat role, bridging the gaps between fields. It can also provide huge value to a company as it stops them from developing stupid crap, or taking approaches to development that minimize errors or redundancy. This of course assumes that you can speak to people and can understand the more business-side of things.

Amen to that. This is why you ask the appropriate person the question. I ask my pharmacist about drugs, the nurse about practical elements, dietician about food, etc.

Why oh why is it just Apple, Google and Amazon battling it out? Honestly Sony and Microsoft have a huge leg up on these guys already. And then there are the other 'small' companies out there that tried and failed, like Samsung. Sorry but why is this crap being posted? It's barely an article.

Well you can look at the OECD reports for one thing, specifically around math and science. There are other peer-reviewed journals out there.

Because the current education system is working -so- well right now. Evidence based is good, but only if you have good evidence. The current teaching methods in the US are falling further and further behind other countries. Many teachers are teaching to the test, which is what the evidence has decided is "the best way to see how they are learning". So while a "my way or the highway" approach isn't ideal, tell me when the last time you heard a group of educators get together and make a decision that was positive, controvertial and complex... all in a timely manner. Hell the current system is allowing for creationism and is still debating evolution.

It isn't a secret that Nokia was working on this phone for a while and their exclusive deal with Microsoft prevented them from releasing it until now. Part of the reason why MS likely acquired Nokia now was because the contract was set to expire and they could lose their largest handset manufacturer. From Nokia's POV, they've been making this for a while and why not show off the hard work? I am sure it is a bit of an ego thing on their part. And with the timing, in the event the regulatory stuff prevented the purchase from Microsoft, it is a good idea for Nokia to keep proceeding as usual and go ahead with the release. Remember that Nokia is only selling their handset side of the business to Microsoft, with a 5 year use of the name. After that time Nokia may consider getting back into the mobile space and what a nice way to come back by having a product that may wet a few appetites (it worked with their N9 and Meego, look at the diehards for those on /.).

I don't personally think economic analysis is an effective way to do look at this. But if you insist... The supply side - it is a bit more complicated than making a widget. In the 1980s scientists came up with a brand new antibiotic class that the world had never seen before. It turned out to be a matter of months before the bacteria figured out how to become resistant to it. That is how life goes, and why diversity in populations is awesome for survivability. ROI isn't the complete factor, but spending money into this is not exactly effective. Most antibiotics fall into a few specific classes, each class was found in nature and modified to have different effects. Making new drugs is not as easy as you think it is (I majored in it). Our understanding of the internal workings of a bacteria are still... I think infantile best describes it. The best analogy I can think of for /.ers would be imagine the internet as one giant organism, and each computer on it as a piece of that organism. Now have a team understand how each program on each computer works and how they all interact in such detail you can actually predict roughly how things will work. Then, try to boot the NSA off the net completely. :) Good luck.