They are streaming content to a device; in other words, calculation happen on a central server and your device acts as a (somewhat) dumb terminal.

It's the mainframe world of Multics again, only 30 years later, much more complex, and servicing trivialities instead that business critical apps.

The "cloud" has become a buzzword for many, but deep down it's just some central servers doing the grunt-work, and you displaying that data. The reverse of a decentralized, democratic and transparent system; more control to the companies, less control to the user.

And there is nothing bad about it; I also like CoffeeScript over Javascript, when possible. Not to mention the Vala language, that "compiles" in C.

If browsers do not support the syntax you like directly, there is nothing bad to ease your developer's work server-side, go with a DSL, and make it work in a browser as a standard-compliant code.

You sure do not expect that these changes first get voted on by the W3C, before they make road into browsers! That is my whole point, NOT to wait for them, but use a intermediate mechanism that benefit both the user and the developer, while respecting the outdated standard.

And while they are so slow finalizing the CSS standard, I use SASS and CSS 3.0. SASS is not about adding new features, just some basic common sense in the grammar, allowing for nesting, variable substitution, and another couple of sugary things.

Next step they'll finalize a standard on BASIC from the 80s. :-p

Actually, it's not exactly true if you are brute-forcing. If you have a nine-characters-long password, of which exactly one letter is uppercase (assuming you can determine that), you would have 8 lowercase letters (26^8) * 26*9 possibilities (because the uppercase letter can appear in 9 different places), so that would make it 9 times the time required to bruteforce an all-lowercase password. That's why they recommend you to use digits, special characters and uppercase letters; they DO increase a LOT the amount of work due to break a password). If you do not know if there *is* a uppercase letter (0 or 1 uppercase letters), that makes it 18 times harder (26^8 * 52*9).

Sony is becoming the bitch of the Internet. Every hole is getting someone through. Soon enough it will be too abused to be appealing to anyone. I already see mascara dripping from Stringer's face.

If you are really protesting about something related to WikiLeaks, why would you publish false information on a dead rapper? Why not something about what you are claiming your are for/against?

You are protesting against what you believe is false information, and then you do the same?

I am not condoning this act, they should be put under investigation and trial. But the logic of this act eludes me.

Sorry, I lost you here. I believed socialists countries like Sweden or Norway did not in fact buy votes from the mob; they provide good basic services to all people, such as education, healthcare, etc. What you are referring to is a part of populism and of lobbying, and has nothing to do with the fine socialist tradition we have in North Europe.

And if you think of socialism in a negative way, see it like this: I got to school for free, to the university for free (because of merit, of course), I get cured for free. I am more than happy to give back more than 50% of my income in taxation, because the services are all there were I to need it, or my family.

Contrast with the US, what you call "a socialist" country. As far as I know, if you get ill and you don't have insurance it's your damn business. Or look at the sorry state of the education system (I've recently seen a nice movie, "Waiting for superman", on the subject).

Really, that statement does not make sense, and is offensive to me. You seem to be stuck in the McCarthy-ist era.

PS4's hardware could be less impressive than the PS3 at its launch. I think Microsoft will really be able to put the screws to Sony in the next console war

It is not about how big your hardware is, it is all about how you use it.

Joke aside, the most important thing for a console is having games support. If all the games I like are made for another console, I will go with that, no matter if it has eight or twenty cores, and six or ten GiB of RAM.

And who could realistically try to replace oil (someone had this idea about hybrid cars, which is a transition stage), DDT (somebody did...), horse-trained carriages (I had this idea about a thing named "car")... do you really need the water at your throat to start changing your conservative views, right? Sheesh, fortunately there are people who try to make the world better, not just accept the status quo.

They are proposing to stop building new plants, so they will have to find an alternative for an increasing demand. That will probably foster research on renewable energies, which by the way seem to create much more job employment.

If you never try, you'll never know.

And, by the way, the comment "You can't expect to shut the country down on calm/cloudy days", if it was referring to solar power, is amazingly incorrect if you build your grid properly. (Actually, if it is cloudy because of a natural disaster, I would prefer to be near a solar grid than to Fukushima, but my first complaint about nuclear power is about it's exceptionally uneconomical background, not about the health hazards).

But, not everyone can be brilliant. Isn't one of the purposes of education to teach people, even so-so ones, a job?

Actually, no, it isn't. Well, it's an half truth: let's say that as far as higher education is concerned, you are wrong. It's better that untalented or disinterested people go immediately to work on less-qualified jobs (clerks, factory workers, etc.) because: a) we need someone to do also that, and b) it will make life easier for the rest and c) we don't have the money to pay everyone as if it were a graduate.

Access to classes up to high school should be open to anyone, and they should teach everyone how to tackle a job on generic terms (as well as understand your rights and duties as an effective citizen). From there onwards, it's only an extra burden on your taxes to maintain who has no talent.

People with merit, however, should be able to access the higher levels of education independently from their income. That's why you have scholarship (I am not claiming the system works right now, mind you, just that the mechanism is there).

Oh, for trolling sake. Then write your own desktop environment. I hate XFCE and KDE4, but love gnome-shell, for instance. If you are not happy with the Desktop Summit contents, don't go there, or post here. Why wasting bytes here when you have all the choice you need (including cranking up some code?). These people put a lot of effort into a release, and the summit is a great occasion to sit down and try to understand what was rushed, what worked well, etc.

This is free software. Don't like it? Fork it.

Do you think that any high-school student receiving a free console will study anything for the next year?

Of course, you might point out that most of these students already own a console (often a Xbox, too). Then these might be sold on eBay to Taiwanese students, and at least it's worth 40-50 $.