Ah, the Internet... where men are men, women are men...

(puts on glasses)

... and children are FBI agents.

We have a lot yet to learn from our six-legged colleagues, from the sound of it. Recently some work was done on optimizing machine vision using an algorithm derived from the way the house fly's vision works. The termite's wood-digesting gut is a prime object of study for those seeking to manufacture fuel from biomass efficiently and cleanly. An insect virus (the baculovirus) is the new hotness for gene transduction in mammalian cells because it can't actually cause disease.

I think this might be the next step in bioengineering. We've been grabbing genes out of various organisms and sticking them in bacteria to produce useful biomolecules like insulin and factor VIII. Maybe the insect is our next stop.

It seems to me that Zynga is trying to end-run Facebook's attempt to take control of virtual currency transactions in Facebook apps. If they can get a patent on virtual currency, they can try to extort a big fat patent license fee from Facebook or otherwise escape the new Facebook Credits.

It will be interesting to see if Facebook contests this patent application.

Why do we remain in the virtual dark ages

Because those in power don't want transparency to be a two-way street. They want to be able to peek into every aspect of our private lives, ostensibly to seek out some tiniest sliver of evidence that we maybe once upon a time didn't think it was necessarily all that great an idea to disembowel Osama bin Laden and stuff him with pork sausage on live TV. But they don't want us to be able to peek into their private lives, or even the seedier aspects of their public ones, so they take any opportunity to shut us out. The closed-source voting machines are just one facet of a much larger situation.

A great example of the way public officials form a "blue [pinstriped] wall" has just come up in the news again, Anita Hill's accusations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas. A right-wing bloc in the all-male Senate of the day tore into every minor aspect of Hill's own sex life to try to discredit her in the eyes of the American public. They protected Thomas partly because he was a Republican but mostly because they knew how they would feel if their own mistresses (or male lovers, for that matter) came to Capitol Hill and aired out their dirty laundry, and how they would want the Congress to deal with those situations.

Um, I'm willing to bet that there are plenty of other reasons Opera has a small user base other than the lack of plug-ins...*

*(not that any of them is necessarily rational or deserved, mind you)

There you go again, always complaining about black holes. You can bet that if they produced a whole gang of planet-destroying white holes it wouldn't even make the back page of the crime section.

Why is this an issue? Non-friends can't add you to groups at all, you can withdraw from any group ad libitum, and you can block obnoxious misbehaving friends who don't stop doing dumb shit to you.

There's a learning curve, but honestly I find it a thousand times easier to use than any other alternative input method out there.

You might already get this a lot, but you should take a good long look at Dasher, a novel form of text input that's suitable either as a short-term or permanent replacement for the keyboard. It can be used with a variety of different input devices, basically anything that points. This includes mice, trackpads, trackballs, styli, nibs, nubs, and even IR eye movement tracking (Dr. Hawking's preferred method).

I'm a keyboard junkie and even I have to admit Dasher is pretty badass. It's like Tetris, only instead of accumulating points you write things.

I have a hard time believing that anything RMS is even partially responsible for is anywhere near as important as GCC, from its humble beginnings as a replacement for CC on UNIX to its present juggernaut Compiler Collection.

Thanks Richard for leaving your fingerprints on all of my object files! GCC is the awesome.

It's ironic that you chose Prometheus as the dubious divinity because he's been adopted by our culture as the patron saint of progress. You'll find his image everywhere that human ingenuity is celebrated, from the famous statue in the Rockefeller Center to Ayn Rand's paean to Prometheus in Atlas Shrugged. As a god he celebrates the best part in all of us, the cleverness that separates us from the animals.

In the U.S., morality is praised over quick wit.

Nothing gets a Monday started like a great joke. Thanks man!

You're a liar. He stole nothing. Next time why don't you post using your real name, or don't you have the stones??

Yeah, that's kind of Microsoft's problem. Windows is the Helvetica of the OS world. To most lay people it's just "the computer" or "the windows." It has basically zero brand recognition, in spite of these ridiculous ads I keep seeing on TV about ordinary people "inventing" Windows features.

Apple has spent decades cultivating public perception of its products in terms of its difference from Microsoft, the consumer default. When Jobs came back in 1997 they put that strategy into overdrive, and it has really paid off for them. It's like all those BILLY MAYS ads where they have the Super Product compared against "Brand X." Everybody knows what Brand X is, it's whatever happens to be sitting in their mudroom. But it has no face, no personality, and gets no recognition of its own characteristics.

If Microsoft wants to get back into the consumer foreground on the OS side they need to give their products some personality and possibly even engage in self-competition.

How about a completely new ground-up operating system that they sell initially as a niche product alongside Windows? That worked really well for Apple.

How about giving Windows features names that don't sound like they were thought up by a Congressional committee? I mean, come on. Who in God's name is going to prefer Windows Shadow Copy or Windows Media Player over Time Machine or iTunes? Also, they need to drop the "Windows" prefacing everything. That probably kills consumer recognition of the individual features as well.

So far Microsoft's only been willing to take these kinds of chances in emerging markets, like search and mobile, and then they come up with names that sound like they're trying to be cool but failing miserably. "Bing?" "Kin?" Yeah, those are really hip and with it. I recognize the logic underlying the two names but again they sound like they came out of a committee.

In short Microsoft needs to stop acting like a Soviet-era bureaucracy if it wants to reclaim mindshare.

The Irregular Webcomic guy has the answer:

http://www.irregularwebcomic.net/393.html

The most painful loss can be summed up in just two words: Ovid's Medea.