Sure you can. Right click, Inspect Element, Delete Node. Presto! Works every time.

Yeah so the aunt Tillys of the world learn they have to hold an extra key down to install the dancing bunnies. What's the difference?

This is not remotely insightful. MS is positioning Windows 8 as a tablet OS to compete with the iPad and Android. Games are extremely important in that arena and the better the games the more likely people will buy your product. MS knows this so, yes, they most certainly do care about DX and the suitability of W8 for gaming.

What are the chances that flawed legislation would get these kinds of revisions if people didn't speak up? If the constituency hadn't voiced their concerns would SOPA have just died a quiet death too? Yes, crying wolf at every little thing loses its effectiveness after a while but when the criticism is justified you'd better speak loudly while you still can because when the law gets signed its over.

Not sure what games you're playing but I've found just about anything I care to play runs just fine on mid-range gear. Skyrim, Crysis, Deus Ex, Gears of War, etc. all play very well on my system and I know I'm not pulling anywhere near 500 watts. I'd have to put it on the kill-a-watt but I'd guess 200 at most.

Sure you could regulate the really high end power hungry stuff of the market but to what end? Most people don't buy that stuff anyway so the victory would be pyrrhic at best and what you can definitely expect is the mid range to be the new "high end" with the requisite price tags to boot. People that insist on the best of the best will just chain several cards together so the power envelope for the system isn't likely to change anyway.

Seems like pointless meddling to me. But then again the EU isn't exactly known for its domestic graphics card industry so why not drum up a little jingo support and throw a little red tape on foreign companies in the name of environmentalism. Kind of reminds me why it costs so much more to rent cars at the airport. It's a hell of a lot more politically palatable to tax visitors that can't vote for the other guy than to aim the gun at the home team.

Sure but knowing the way bureaucracy works, they'd just get dinged anyway on the higher end part. Not only that but how much would that capability add to the cost of the typical discrete card? I'll bet the driver development, additional silicon, and added complexity comes at a fair price.

The market only bears so much especially when you are talking about bloating high end GPUs with components that have nothing to do with the singular purpose of the almighty frame rate. I guess those are the headaches the marketing people get paid to have though.

My hovel for a Slashdot admin account. You'd be +15 Hilarious and -10 Buy Me Another Dr. Pepper and Keyboard!

I've found that when someone I know takes an interest in programming and comes to me for help I usually steer them towards the language I'm most familiar with that's high enough level that the learning curve isn't going to kill them. If the person thinks they want to write little scripts to perform various little functions behind the scenes on their computer I'll introduce them to Python since it excels at ease of use and is very good for systems programming and automation.

If they have any interest in making things happen on the web then I naturally suggest html/css/javascript. Especially since if they have a few websites that they spend a lot of time on, they can get started easily writing greasemonkey scripts to add cool functionality. With a fairly brief introduction, they can start hacking right away with the javascript console that ships with most browsers and see results immediately.

So, yeah, I'd suggest Python or Javascript for the 9 year old. Probably Javascript as he'll get the most bang for the beginner buck out of it and most importantly he'll be able to impress his friends sooner!

Exactly what I was thinking. But, hey, why inject common sense into public discourse, right?

Huge multi-national discount chain doesn't want to sell a product the sole purpose of which is to get people to spend money somewhere else. News at 11.

According to what I could dig up their results are an amalgamation of about 50 percent Bing with the rest being wikipedia, wolfram alpha, Yahoo, and its own web crawler. So it does serve a little more purpose than to just throw a direct api pull from Bing on the screen. I figure much of the straight up web results are probably from Bing while the custom stuff like the special site search tools are their own sauce. But even the ":wq" for wikiquote is essentially the same as typing "site:wikiquote.org" on Bing. It would be trivial for the ddg backend to translate ":wq" or any other special search of that type into the equivalent Bing compatible form and you'd never have to know. I'm not saying they do that or they don't but it would be trivially easy to do so maybe they are. For what it's worth though, I just did a direct comparison of ":wq leonard nimoy" and "site:wikiquote.org leonard nimoy" on ddg and bing respectively and the results seemed different enough to have distinct value and neither seemed subjectively superior to the other.

I hate to be the one to break the news to you but every OS has unpatched vulnerabilities. Every. Single. One. Check Secunia or your favorite security site if you don't believe me and marvel at the number of known security holes that vendors have left unadressed. There are something like 500 million Android devices in the wild. When some malware epidemic of epic remote Pwnage happens then you can call Android the new Windows XP. Many hackers might consider an Android device an even juicier target than XP since it is almost guaranteed to contain intimate personal details. Yet life goes on and despite the weekly scare stories the security press likes to churn out, Android users are mostly free from pretty much any malware that they didn't explicitely install themselves either by pirating apps, using third party unvetted app stores, or the rare malicious app that slips through Google's fingers and ends up on the official Play Store (a rarity that is only getting harder for authors to succeed at since Google started really paying attention). My daily driver is a fully updated Galaxy Nexus but you'll have to pardon me for not getting too up in arms over my assortment of lesser Android devices as they've all been trundling along on whatever version of Android they shipped with/got updated to and not a one has yet to show any signs of being the worse for it.

By an attack that requires the victim's phone to first actually be on (NFC deactivates when the screen is off), within a very small number of centimeters aligned at just the right place with the attacker's device, in communication for an extended period of time, have NFC actually on at all, and the user to be totally oblivious as a stranger who both miraculously is on the ball enough to strike at just the right moment and takes advantage of all of these variables being perfectly aligned for him to do his dirty work. Um, yeah. Maybe I should play the numbers too since I'm apparently the recipient of the cosmos' so ridiculously contrived you can still smell the glue statistical outlier joke of the day award. Or I'll just have a shirt printed saying "The Universe hates me and all I got was this lousy t-shirt".

To get basic results, you are correct that the search engine doesn't need any personal information. However, being charitable and assuming that the technology is mature, having a search engine that can produce individually tailored results can be immensely useful. The fact that I can just type in the word "restaurant" and Google will automatically give me results tailored to my location and food preferences is quite useful. I would imagine looking up searchers' locations via ip address for every search would be pretty slow so them knowing where I live or getting the GPS data off my mobile device makes a lot of sense. The realistic alternative being for me to type "restaurants $ZIPCODE" is just annoying and thanks to technology pointless. Google being able to identify me as a user also makes it easy for me to use their "block site" filter in the search results so the same undesired domains don't keep popping up every time I search for things that trigger them. Of course, while I may question the usefulness of a particular site, that doesn't mean somebody else might not think it's great so just spitting the exact same results for every single person like the soup line in Oliver Twist seems unnecessarily simple-minded and even worse it introduces a cognitive burden on the user that can be avoided with an accurate enough set of pertinent user characteristics.

It's hard to see how a suitably designed search engine can't produce superior results by knowing more about its users. I understand the privacy worries but, assuming they didn't exist, I believe it's fair to say that most people would have no qualms about a modern day "Oracle of Delphi" that isn't limited to just giving canned answers to every phrase entered into it. And as search engine technology gets more and more sophisticated, the good answers should get even better. Ultimately culminating in you not even having to ask in the first place. Some people might think that's a bad thing but I for one look forward to it.

There will always be providers for the niche that prefers their results in the raw and that's a good thing. Personally I use Google and provide them with as much information as I am comfortable with and I have been happy with the results. Thanks to competition, you shouldn't have any problem satisfying your preference of getting the same answer to "sushi" whether you are in HI or NY (first raw result is for a restaurant in Santa Clara CA). While I'll be enjoying my lunch at the place right down the street that I never heard of before but happens to be the very second result Google returned for me.

We're having pretty good luck advertising on Google. Maybe MS should raise the bids on their adwords a few pennies. Can't hurt.