not surprising, since in Independence Day it was proved that aliens used Apple tech when Jeff Goldblum infected a mothership with a Mac virus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"Could run a PC" - what is that supposed to mean? If it just means that you can use an HDMI cable or wireless connection to hook it up to a larger screen like a TV or monitor, then phones and tablets have been doing that for years. If it means that hooking it up to a screen allows the use of a 'full' desktop OS, then that is just what Ubuntu tried and failed to deliver several years ago. Either way, not news, just an ad.

for which we all thank the heavenly host!

I particularly like them because the comments then provide information about better, usually open source alternatives. So they are essentially paying to have their competitors promoted instead of their products.

Opus means 'Work' (see 'Magnum Opus', so nothing to do with water.
Walrus is a reference to 'I am the Walrus' by the Beatles.
Squid probably came about because someone thought that it was a funny play on words with quid, i.e. a pound.
Oyster is apparently inspired by the Oysters found in the Thames and the phrase 'The World is your Oyster'.
The others are, as the parent suggests, probably related to things of local significance.

With a new Blade Runner film, I wonder if the name change is partly to distance itself from that - the Nexus name is a homage to the android models in the film, after all. Or maybe it has just run its course, it becomes harder to have distinctive model names for consumers when you just name it after the screen size in inches.

Alternatively, it is probably part of some evil scheme for Google/Alphabet to spy on us and control our lives by adapting the information we encounter until we are just robotic slaves ready to do the corporation's evil bidding!!!!1!1!!! or something.

Don't know where you are, but in the UK (home of "Mad Cow Disease") we were told that it was the result of using cheap cattle feed that included ground-up sheep infected with Scrapie. This induced BSE in the cows, which resulted in CJD when people ate a significant amount of the infected beef. It may be that the pasteurisation of the cattle feed was changed and so the Scrapie was not killed off, but I would say that a bigger issue is feeding ground up animals to herbivorous livestock in the first place!

As others have said, 'Game-based learning' can be a powerful tool for engaging people in learning and it allows the exploration of different scenarios, cause-and-effect, etc. However, the effective ones are designed to be more like entertaining simulations - that is, the educational aspects are considered first and foremost and the entertaining game elements built around that. Taking an existing game, tweaking it a bit and then claiming that it is now educational is extremely unlikely to work (though, if it makes money for the publisher then they will claim it has been a success).

As someone who has investigated this stuff a fair bit, I agree that the connected appliances that are currently being pushed are uninteresting and, frequently, pointless. However, an INTRANET of Things is a whole different proposition, with sensors connected to a central processing device/server that uses the data to make complex decisions and then controls various other devices to effect the required changes. That, to me, starts to look really interesting as the security issues are reduced by being a much more contained system, the owner has total control over what events lead to what actions, etc.

My own particular research interest is in how (whether?) the IoT can aid learning and teaching in universities, so fairly niche, but one that certainly looks like it might have some promise.

I wrote a PhD on this technique as a way to support collaborative learning by allowing third-party annotation sharing: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.431525

In essence, the only way to do this without storing a copy of the original page (which has merit, but is challenging legally and in terms of disk space), is to store the annotations, pull in the page and then merge the annotations and send the output to the viewer. So it is basically acting as a proxy, but means that there are potential issues with orphaned annotations - the more dynamic nature of the web today would cause real problems in getting any kind of consistent output for two different people, or even for the same person at different times. I have to admit, I was looking at the educational side of things and so the security issues were less of a consideration, but things like the injection of malicious code, invisible amendments (e.g. censorship) to the underlying text, etc. were all pretty obvious.

Anyway, the technique itself was far from novel when I started working on my PhD, but given the continued citations to papers that I published back (https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=KK_EFSUAAAAJ&hl=en) then it seems to still be an area of active research.

"horror" Can you give us a real example of its use in that way? I can't say I've ever noticed widespread use of the word like that.

For years I had heard references to 'South Korea' and 'Japan', but no-one ever seemed entirely sure what they were, so they were always shrouded in a bit of mystery for me. So imagine my joy when a /. summary actually provides a definitive answer. They are countries! and it seems that they are (probably) part of a contiguous landmass that also includes North Korea! So much now makes sense!

Yes, but you are pointing out products that are produced as competitors by different companies. This story is about a company with a strong product spending time and effort on another product that potentially competes with it (and thousands of other similar products, but never mind that!)

I'll take cash or a cheque, AC. I've written the bulk of numerous research papers, teaching materials and other learning resources on a Chromebook using Google Drive. Great tools for collaboratively writing materials, before exporting the content for some polishing up in a different piece of software.