The summary made me laugh. 'scientists says it has verified that quantum effects are indeed at work in the D-Wave processor'. Exactly the same claim could be made about pretty much any vaguely computer: how do they think transistors work?

Was that also back in the day when the search engine was altavista.digital.com?

With the exception of a very few fairly simple algorithms, anything that you can do in the cloud using homomorphic encryption, you can also do on your laptop without it...

...anything that doesn't have pointers fails the OP's test... which is a lot these days.

And my point is that it's a dumb test. (Granted, I did say it in response to you. :-))

Pretty much all of it. I don't know what a good business model for a FOSS game would be. Probably the same one that the TV studios use: provide a partial implementation (a pilot) for free and charge people for you to finish it. Once you've got enough funding, finish the game and release it. TV studios use channels as middle men in this situation, but there's no reason that it wouldn't work without the middle men.

I would say that Python and Lisp at least are both reasonably strongly-typed (just because they're dynamic doesn't mean they can't be strong). PHP and Perl are both definitely weakly typed. The others I don't know well enough to evaluate.

But at this point I honestly don't know what people really mean when they complain that X language doesn't have pointers. Because basically everything out there offers something like Java references. Are people really missing pointer arithmetic? How often do you need that?

However, it sure would reduce cognitive load to not switch languages between browser and server ends.

I have heard one argument I find somewhat convincing, which is that using a single language means that if requirements change or people discover a better way to do something, it's possible to move or share code between client and server side without rewriting it. If you do something on the server side now and then say "hey, we'll get more responsiveness if we put it client-side", you can just move that function to the client side and call it.

Not being a web dev, I can't actually evaluate this claim with high confidence, but it sounds somewhat plausible at least.

The vast majority of software companies sell Free Software. Free Software just means that the person receiving the code has a set of rights to use, modify, and redistribute it, which is the case for most bespoke software, which is what most software companies (and, indeed, most software developers) sell.

It is difficult trying to combine selling commodity off the shelf (COTS) software with Free Software, but fortunately for 'FOSS Shills' COTS software has never been more than about 10% of the total software market.

Forking does that, because the GPL doesn't require that you contribute your changes back only forwards: you must give the code to the people you give binaries to, nothing more. It's easy to fork a project, make some structural changes, and then release your version that has all of the code that isn't necessary for your use removed and other things that are annoying for anyone who doesn't have access to the rest of your system added. The code is still available, but the cost of merging changes back upstream is often greater than the cost of rewriting them from scratch.

This is fine according to RMS, because the GPL is not meant to protect the authors of the original code, it's meant to protect the users who receive products based on it.

Precisely my point. There is clearly room for improvement.

But if you're in one of the instances where you're trying to access a program that you don't use very often, and don't remember the exact name of it, the hierarchical menu is light years beyond the start screen.

The Win8 start screen -- IMO that's essentially unusable. (You could make it usable if you put in a bunch of effort to arrange tiles the way you want, but it'd take a while.)

But: there's an "all apps" view or something in Windows 8 that basically gives you a flat presentation of the start menu, including grouping icons by what folder they're in (in the start menu) and showing the name of that folder.

I don't know which is better -- start menu or all apps -- as I basically never use either. In fact, I forget how to open the all apps screen. But I suspect that about the worst you could say about Win8 is that it's reasonably competitive there. I'm with vux984: the Windows Vista/7 start menu is really bad at just navigating through. It's too short, it's too narrow, if you open the wrong folder you have to click it again to re-collapse it, etc.

To be fair, the start menu was never that great. It was just better than what came before and went through a couple of improvements (and several worsenings) over its lifetime.

Actually I'm one of those people who think that it never went through a worsening, at least until now. There were certain aspects that I don't like about some of the changes (e.g. with Vista & 7 it's harder to browse because of the limited size), but I think each of the changes was a significant plus overall. There haven't even been all that many changes... The most controversial I would guess would be with XP, but I really liked even that because I loved the the automatically-maintaned frequently-used programs list; XP was when I started to back off on keeping my start menu organized sanely, and with Vista I stopped entirely.

What would you consider one of the worsenings? (Other than metro.)

"Increasingly", true, and I do try to support cross-platform games and will do so even more in the future, even if I primarily or only play on Windows. But it's still a looong way off from being the norm unless you're willing to restrict your game choices a lot.

Wine would open up a lot of options, but I don't really feel like messing around with it when I can just run Windows and be done with things, especially considering that some of the games I play aren't even rated all that highly on the appdb.

As someone who uses Windows at home, there are two main reasons:

1.) Games
2.) I use Linux at work, and it's nice to have my OS piss me off in different ways depending on where I am

The biggest thing is the fact that you can search all sections (Apps, Settings, Files) with a single search bar now. No more having to type, mouse-move, click, and then find the option I want!

For a while that was actually my biggest complaint about metro actually, and then I learned about Win-W, which will open the search interface set to settings (like if you pressed Win then clicked settings). Presumably there's one for files too but I never use that anyway so don't know what it is.

It's still kinda annoying and I'm glad to see that they're going back, but it's a lot better than having to mouse.