I worked in an office that did a trial to migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice. Every issue we had was either a missing feature like lack of the ability to resize images or a bug in the import/export filters. Of the 7 bug reports I filled out, all of the were cross platform and cross versions. The problem with OO is not related to difficulty in verifying bugs. If someone did fix some of the interoperability issues, it would go a long way to making OO more appealing to small businesses that want to use open source software.

I'm an IT pro, and I have flashed thousands of devices in my career. Hundreds of MB'a and countless HDs, cd-roms, RAID controllers, and amd network devices like WAPs. The only time I have bricked a device is when I lost power in the process. Even then, I was able to recover the device with some googling.

Maybe I've been lucky or maybe just buy H/W from good manufactures like Cisco, Dell, and HP.

As someone who suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved his silky smooth 3GS, but left the walled garden for a Galaxy S2, I am thrilled about this. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water, yet I still find the experience more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back.

Also, I really like the idea of a gesture based UI. So far the reviewers have loved the Blackberry gesture based UI.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/02/review-blackberry-10-is-better-much-better-late-than-never/

If there is a build for the S2, I will definitely flash it. The chance to have the open platform of Linux/Android with the native speed of IOS is worth at least trying out.

The current system gives copyright protection for the life of author plus 70 years. I would propose that after 10 or 15 years, you would have to file for extensions that would be treated like a property tax. And limit these extensions to another 10-15 years.

That's exactly what I meant. If you don't renew and pay taxes, it would go to the public domain.

Publishers and the recording industry want people to think of IP like real property. If that's the case, then if they want extensions in perpetuity to their IP, it should be taxed or it should enter the public domain.

This is another good example of abusive DMCA take down requests circumventing due process. RIAA and MPAA abuse the law to suppress our creativity
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk862BbjWx4
  and are destroying our cultural heritage.
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2001/11/48625?currentPage=all
To top it off, their outdated business model unfairly reimburses the artists for their hard work.
http://www.salon.com/2000/06/14/love_7/
Copyright needs to be reformed. Some changes that I'd like to see are:

  * Abolish the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.
  * Intellectual property should be taxed like real property. http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oew-weaver20feb20,0,1675278.story It is an asset with a value, right? If you no longer make enough to pay your taxes on it, it goes to the state.
  * Copyrights are supposed to be an incentive to create. One that lasts unto your grandchildren are a dis-incentive, because not only are you not creating any more once you are dead, neither are your descendants. Copyright should last half a working lifetime (20 years), so that you have to get off your ass and make new stuff.
  * Someone who makes copies without permission should pay a fine, but it should be at the regular royalty rate for the item x copies made. So upload a song, it's iTunes price x number of downloads, with perhaps a factor of 3 penalty to discourage doing it, not $150,000 per copy.

If you feel the same way, you can make a difference by donating to the EFF
https://supporters.eff.org/donate
or at least signing this petition urging reform.
http://www.fightforthefuture.org/fixcopyright

"Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves."
-Abraham Lincoln

I agree. With a sufficiently powerful computer, we most likely could simulate a brain. However, even today's fastest computers struggle to simulate thousands of biologically accurate neurons, nevermind the 100's of millions required to simulate a brain. So we resort to the simulating the boring old perceptron that can't even change its own behavior.

Fortunately the field of Neuromorphic engineering has recently made great progress. Having the right hardware could shave 10-20 years off the goal of achieving strong AI.

I have java installed, but it's configured to run only when I click-to-play. I need java for my stock trading platform and also to access some old PIX firewalls. I cannot disable it completely.

Native Android? Hell Yeah! I would love to flash this on my S2. I suffered with a laggy HTML5 based WebOS Pre, then loved my silky smooth 3GS, but hated the walled garden, so moved again to a Galaxy S2. My S2’s H/W by all accounts blows my old 3GS out of the water,and yet I still find the Android experience more laggy than my 3 year old 3GS. I’m sure much of this is the Java VM holding Android back. I can’t wait to have an Linux phone with the native speed of IOS.

Before buying one, I'd want to test out this swipe based UI. If I was happy with it, and the all of my critical Apps were available, then yes, I would buy an Ubuntu phone.

Geoffrey Hinton’s work in back propagation and deep learning are an incremental improvement over the overly simplistic neural networks of the 90s, but "real progress", not even close. His focus on Bayesian networks has failed to deliver just like the symbolic AI that preceded it. Until AI researchers like Hinton get over their obsession with mathematical constructs with no foundation in biology, we will never have true AI. To succeed, we will need to will need to borrow from nature's engine of intelligence, the neocortex.

This is exactly what Kurzweil argues in “How to Create a Mind”. He describes the brain as a massively parallel pattern recognition machine. At the core of the neocortex are millions of hierarchically arranged pattern recognition modules working together to model and predict our environment. By using the neocortex as a model for new AI systems Kurzweil has a chance to make some "real progress" at Google.

This is a great move for Google's AI research, since their current Director of Research,Peter Norvig, comes from a mathematical background and is a strong defender the use of statistical models that have no biological basis.[1] While these techniques have their use in specific areas, they will never lead us to a general purpose strong AI.

Lately Kurzweil has come around to see that symbolic and bayesian networks have been holding AI back for the past 50 years. He is now a proponent of using biologically inspired methods similar to Jeff Hawkins' approach of Hierarchical Temporal Memory.
Hopefully, he'll bring some fresh ideas to Google. This will be especially useful in areas like voice recognition and translation. For example, just last week, I needed to translate. "We need to meet up" to Chinese. Google translates it to (can't type Chinese in Slashdot?)
, meaning "We need to satisfy". This is where statistical translations fail, because statistics and probabilities will never teach machines to "understand" language.

Leaders in AI like Kurzweil and Hawkins are going to finally crack the AI problem. With Kurzweil's experience and Google's resources, it might happen a lot sooner than you all expect.

[1] http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/06/norvig-vs-chomsky-and-the-fight-for-the-future-of-ai

They should have waited until they could get the cost down with 512MB of RAM. Having used both the 256 and 512 Model B, I found that no amount of tweaking could make the 256 model run a web browser acceptably on a Linux desktop. Modern Linux desktops and browsers have gotten too bloated. LXDE is painfully slow, while KDE and gnome desktops are just downright unable. The 512 model has no such issue.

"This trait spans multiple games, cards, and operating systems, "
First of all the article only tests 2 cards accross Win7 and Win8. Considering that Win8 is basically just Win7 SP2, it's hardly fair to make that statement. Micro-stuttering an issue that mainly affects multi-GPU cards. Both Nvidia and ATI have had issues with this in their SLI and Crossfire cards. You can read more about it here:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1317582

I've worked extensively with ATI, Nvida, and Intel Linux laptops and unfortunately there is no ideal solution. First, you need to decide whether you need open source or proprietary drivers. Proprietary drivers give vastly superior performance and expose the most OpenGL features. If you want support for the life of your laptop, be aware that manufactures will drop support after a few years as was done with my ATI X1800.

The open source drivers tend to give the solid 2D experience and have great support for wayland and compiz. You also don’t have to worry about kernel updates breaking your drivers. With open drivers forget about and serious gaming. OpenGL performance is still terrible compared to proprietary drivers. Intel has the best open source drivers. If you need more performance than an integrated GPU can deliver, ATI has the 2nd best open drivers.
TL:DR Propriatary -> Nvidia, Open -> Intel or ATI

As a web developer, I would love to see FF support WebP. As an end user, I wish the UI was responsive and it took advantage of more than 1 of the cores in my multi-core CPU. Do they even make single-core CPUs anymore?

Sounds like his was an older and even Cheaper model. My 10" screen did not require a stylus and was definitely a capacitive touch screen. Besides being low resolution, something like 1024x800, the main issue I had with the screen was related to the poor quality of the charger. According to these guys:
http://www.arcfn.com/2012/10/a-dozen-usb-chargers-in-lab-apple-is.html
It's a big problem with counterfeit and low quality chargers