Governing is a responsibility, not a privilege. That governors have repeatedly not lived up to their responsibilities does not change this fact.

I can't speak for the adult experience of living in a suburb, but as a child growing up there, "You have to drive to get anywhere" means "Unless you're friends with the neighbors or have a car, there is nothing to do."

I didn't get my driver's license until I was about 18, which means that if I wanted to go somewhere, I was begging friends or family for a ride. I perhaps could have gotten on my bike and rode a half hour through traffic, without sidewalks or bike lanes (I have a few times, uncomfortably; also, this was Texas, where temperatures are often 100+ in the summer) to get to a small variety of stores, but I couldn't get, for example, to the mall, or a decently interesting strip mall.

And asking parents for a ride...? They commuted an hour each day to get to their jobs and were not terribly interested in jumping in the car just to satisfy my boredom. It probably would have been easier if I'd had older friends, but I didn't.

Everywhere I wanted to be and everyone I wanted to be with I couldn't reach without begging someone and potentially making them upset. So yes, I would say it crushed my soul a bit.

The last holdout of red tape was China, and they gave it up in late May. The deal was finalized a couple days later and a Googler was made CEO. It's been fairly quiet since then--not a whole lot of headline-busting changes to Motorolla Mobility--so I'm not surprised you haven't noticed the transition. There have been some, though, especially lately.

If anything's going to kill Facebook, it will be decisions made by people who were only hired to make money. People who have no interest in what it's for, never will have interest, and are only there to monetize.

Facebook will have to be very, very careful to make sure the user experience doesn't completely vaporize in the face of money-mongers. But I think if they were planning to be that careful, they probably would not have gone public.

Correct, voice search has been there for a while. According to the video in the article, this is more like a direct port of the new google voice search (as it debuted in Jellybean), with enhanced results on voice queries, like movie showtimes, wikipedia entries, etc.

"At best". Nobody was talking about you.

I disagree; I think the reason is that in the 90s, nobody was trying to industrialize game creation, or at least they didn't figure they'd gotten it right. A lot of the shining examples from back then were people that were self-motivated, self-organized, and given some free reign by publishers. As Big Business really got into it, they took the previous profit model--industrialization--and tried to apply it; that meant several things:

* Keeping up with the Joneses - If there's another competitor in your field, you compete with them by going point-for-point on comparable metrics, rather than differentiating your product

* Labor is expendable - "There's nothing special about what we're doing; it doesn't take a skilled artisan with a decade of coding experience, nor even a talented enthusiast, just a codemonkey twisting his wrench over and over like Charlie Chaplain in Modern Times."

* Brand reputation is expendable - It may seem counter-intuitive; after all, if you churn out 100,000 jalopys and can't sell them, your auto-making business will disappear. But company leadership can always sell off whatever's left over to the competition. The skilled labor changes hands, designs change, and some other rich shmoe becomes the new CEO and makes the same decisions as the last one. All of a sudden, it's a new company! Wow! The previous reputation means nothing.

HOWEVER, this is an entirely different thing when it comes to software, because intellectual property (software names, the characters, situations, and setting, along with art and other resources) is attached to the brand. Only one person gets to make, for example, Starsiege Tribes games, and if the person currently making Tribes games is making something you don't like, sorry pal, there's no equivalent good. What's that? You've been waiting 10 years for a sequel and it's a dud? What's that? You think you could do better? Sorry, as a matter of law and intellectual property, it ain't gonna happen. Maybe you could do better, but you won't be allowed to try. That's copyright/trademark for you! Hugs and kisses, signed, the Government.

* Customers are expendable - The industrial age brought the idea of mass consumption of goods from one single source. Compare beer and soda; beer is pre-industrial and there are so many brewing traditions the world over that many places have no need to produce it industrially, because there's enough local supply. However, local supply only matters if locals will buy your product; in contrast, a global product only has to turn a profit in one of the many regions they supply, and then cut their losses everywhere else. If your bad marketing decisions make you the enemy of a locale, culture, or nation, say sayonara and kick back with profits from other areas.

* The product is expendable - As long as you create something good enough to pay back costs (and things become "good enough" quite rapidly if you advertise enough--they're only really thinking about sales), it doesn't matter that your industrial process is flawed. If your process inherently creates defects, it will show up in ever product line you create for a decade, because oh well! Management decided that we're going to move on to the next product, which means not stopping to see what we did wrong. In any serious project management there's things like Lessons Learned, internal and process reviews, etc. I don't know but I'd wager a guess that most gaming industry companies don't take their work seriously enough to study their own behavior and improve it.

* Marketing is god - Industrialization doesn't start local. You don't make a run of 10,000 cars and sell them to the 10,000 closest people. You need sales people on the ground anywhere there could be a sale, sniffing out any profitable deal. If that means greasing palms in a few places, obnoxious billboards, and overpriced TV ads, well, it's paid for on the margin of each unit sold. Who cares if your marketing budget costs as much as 500 of the cars you're selling--you'll be selling twenty times that many! And if small-time suckers can't afford it, go cry in the rain.

Anyway... the indy scene is turning the trend around a bit, but you can still see traces of it. Look at mobile games--I personally find it incredibly frustrating because so many of the products are "me too"s who think they're competing with industry on industry terms. They don't care about the product, the customer, or the brand, and I bet in those cases if they could outsource the labor and still make a profit, they wouldn't care about the labor either. The market is best served by people like Rovio, who are making a boutique product with modern distribution networks--they DO care about the product, and the brand, and I assume the customer too. Would that there were more like them.

It's probably not possible because of distance and interference, but satellite links are highly directional as well as ubiquitous; if a technology like this could be used to increase the bandwidth of terrestrial satellite links (by which I mean a dish at your house connecting to a satellite in fixed or predictable orbit), you could get pretty incredible broadband speeds in very remote areas--including internationally.

I think you forget what the Nexus line of devices is. Reference platforms are made, among other reasons, so that the people behind the OS know what they're programming for. If people are already using this form factor (size, approximate resolution, pixel density, aspect ratio, etc), then a Nexus-line device standardizes that. (There is some problem with that when it comes to Android devices, but whatever, you get the point) That (in principle) helps app devs, OS devs, and yes hardware devs too.

I note that they call it the Nexus *7*, which also implies they could be making a Nexus 10, 5, 8, or other screen sizes in the future.

Devil's advocate: Then you're teaching what the statisticians who supposedly polled, for example, climate scientists tell you to. Frankly I have absolutely no knowledge of their methods, nor do I know enough climate scientists to make a statistically significant rebuttal. Do they ask every graduate in every country? Do they do telephone surveys? How many people don't answer those surveys because surveys are retarded?

I don't for a moment think that the religious arguments have any merit, but at the same time, I hear a lot of people touting "Scientists believe X." Which scientists where? I'd really appreciate knowing the margin of error on that statistics, which people specifically were polled, and especially, which weren't. I don't know the bias of any of these statements, and as far as I can recall, I've never, ever seen it mentioned. Considering that that is extremely important in social statistics, it seems lacking.

Yes, programmers shouldn't program in their off time, just like artists shouldn't draw and singers shouldn't sing. Which, unfortunately, a lot of people believe.

"What are you doing?" parents and peers always say. "You're wasting your life." And they keep doing it because they want to.

I say screw people like you, and more power to people like them.

People who say that never go into why copyright infringement isn't theft. Understand, in the following, that IANAL, and it will show, but I think it's important anyway.

Copyright and sales licenses are agreements between people--none of them me, you'll note--that so-and-so gets to profit from sales of a particular work. So-and-so, being so caught up in the idea that this license is exclusive, creates artificial scarcity and does other kinds of social engineering to drive up prices. They use the legal system--which was created to stop or punish abuses of power--to make sure the license remains exclusive, even though what's happening isn't sales of the work; it's free distribution, in ways that violate the exclusivity clause of the license.

Basically, piracy is "But you said only WE can do that! Make them stop! Mom! He won't stop! Make him stop! I want to be a millionaire! Make him stooooooop!"

If your representatives were behaving exactly as you wanted them to, they'd be making your case before the House and/or Senate. If they were really good, they'd find a way to leverage the wit and knowledge of their constituents to make the argument more powerful.

Representing you is. their. job. It is what the job exists to do. Voting on any particular measure is only a small fraction of representing you, and therefore is only a small part of their responsibility.

If you had a full computer (mail, etc), displays around the house, TVs, Radio, and an audio system that moved the sound (and voice input) with you... you might be able to do interesting things. Audio notification and voice input from everywhere; video notification and text input from various places around the house.

But the problem is that it's still more about "cool" than function. "I don't have to look at my phone to get text messages" is crucial in the car, but not at home. "I can always get notified of new mail" is a problem solved by smartphones; it's only a minor inconvenience to carry one around the house. And while you may be able to come up with a plausible use for networked lights if you stretch it, the advantages over dumb wiring aren't all that high.

Arguably, "home automation" might be better suited for office environs than home environs; smart locks, location awareness, power control, lights, etc... it makes more sense for you to invest in infrastructure when you never know who will need what services when, or where. But a house is just a house; it's what, four people on average; unless you live in a mansion, you're not controlling dozens of doors or hundreds of lights. It's "cool", it's playful, but it's not what I would consider practical.

"Cloud, cloud, drive, spam, box, spam, and drive. It hasn't got much spam in it..."

I was going for a monty python reference, but I'm sure enterprising netizens will find a way to put the other kind of spam on there, too.