Or provide open drivers (and the photo app) so could be ported to be installed there Android, Tizen, Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish or whatever OS the end buyer prefer. Is pretty bad how localizable i am carrying a cellphone, but giving away all my data makes it some orders worse.

Let the blackmailing games begin. Snooping all the information means that any people with access to that (and that means at least 5 millon) can use them for blackmailing anyone, foreigners and americans, from the lowest employee to Obama (as point the video). Give them enough power, and they will have power over you. Any chain is weak as if even the strong links can be blackmailed.

You are right, who knows how much Google Glass could eventually hurt our privacy if it ever get popular, better forget how Microsoft is widely doing it now.

Kermit would had been better. If must be a puppet in that position, is better if look as one. Actively voting for no candidate was the option, very few took it.

Would be interesting if other countries modify slightly their laws, putting into all the forbidding things (i.e. not kill, steal, rape, whatever) the "unless is done to an american" exception, so when its that case have no punishment. More or less this is what is doing US.

I would call it "Microsoft Windows". From this distance, you can only see a it's Blue Sky Of Death, but maybe some life (i.e. virus, worms and similar) could had evolved there.

With the surface area of those rotors gathering solar power (even when not flying) this could be a good combo for solar/human powered device.

Government needs an operating system (and office, database, etc) deployed worldwide owned by a company that fully cooperates with them on planting backdoors or just delaying fixing remote vulnerabilites. In the worst case can always bailout them, no matter how much losses are getting, anyway would be peanuts compared with the banks one.

The chairs will be saved (Ballmer actually have an use for them), is the people the one that will sink.

... is always people. Even if is just by stupidity (like going to one of those meetings with a cellphone), but could be plain malice, double agents or blackmailed "safe" people (and with all the data of the world you have plenty of material to blackmail anyone).

And thats the most worrying thing about NSA and associates snooping, you are getting 5 millon extra vulnerabilities in everything that surrounds all your data.

Ummm IBM iDataplex, and yea it's a PC with infiniband...

That's because it's just a server, definitely NOT a mainframe. Just because IBM sells it doesn't make it a mainframe. IBM's mainframes are under the "z" Series.

And look at the top500 and you'll see them all over the place.

The Top500 is a list of the highest-performing systems. In other word HPC. It's NOT a list of mainframes. The Top 500 doesn't CARE about mainframes at all, as evidenced by their benchmark being purely number-crunching, with NO attempt to record I/O performance, which is the specialty of mainframes.

Slashdot... Lots of fools who know just enough to be dangerous.

PC stands for 'personal computer', at least it did.

No, it stands for "IBM-compatible Personal Computer", and it always has. IBM called their first x86 computer a PC, and the name stuck. It does NOT mean any and every computing device designed for home use.

The laptop was the evolution of the desktop into a more broadly useful form factor.

Laptops are fully compatible with desktops. Same architecture, similar I/O connectors and ports, everything.

The smartphone, and the pad device are precisely the same thing - just other points on the spectrum, not a whole different genus of computer.

Tablets and smartphones are ARM-based devices, not x86-compatible computers. Even if they did have ATOM CPUs, the lack of a BIOS, keyboard, and other legacy cruft would probably break backwards compatibility, and still make it NOT count as a PC.

Of course you CAN make PCs in tablet form-factors. Microsoft and Intel are desperately trying to force manufacturers to do so, which gives us laptops with hinged touch-screens which can be used as ultra-bulky tablets. If those caught on, instead of ARM-based devices, then you could call them PCs.

While blaming IT for their problems may work once or twice, those who do it more often look like idiots themselves. The project manager who delievers on time gets a raise, and the one who never delievers on time gets fired, even if he constantly blames IT.

Best thing to do is put a process in writing... One that will make it clear that last-minute requests will go in the queue behind all others. If you can point to a procedure some sociopath was not following, then they dangle on the hook for the late delivery, while you get off with a minimum of back and forth about it.

And yes, looking for a new job is always a good idea. I stayed at one for a few years, as things were slowly improving, only to have the root cause of the trouble get promoted to the top spot. I left, days later.

But in this one you know that the NSA (and associates, around 5 millon people) all have direct access to everything put there. Should be ok if what i put there is public anyway, but for companies and private stuff this should be considered malware (trojan, ransomware, spyware, etc, pick your labels for it).

Dropbox and similar services are the last-gasp of web hosting. Things will be going the other way, quite soon.

It made sense to have a web hosting provider when people were on dial-up, and could slowly upload a file once, allowing many people to download it quickly from a fast host. But now, we're on the verge of the stars lining-up to make the peer-to-peer distributed internet practical for everyone.

First, internet speeds are getting faster... Google, FIOS, and others have made "gigabit" internet the new "FAST", even while most people can't get 100Mbps internet service yet. Very high speed services like FIOS are expensive, but the price will keep falling, quickly, until everyone can justify the price. Then, downloads from your home box will be just as fast as downloads from Dropbox's servers.

Second, IPv6 is just around the corner. Comcast was practically forced to use IPv6 for their network. 4G LTE networks are natively IPv6. And we're just plain running out of IPv4 address space, and carrier grade NAT is unpleasant enough that it won't win. An IPv6 service is basically a static IP service, so you can buy any DNS name you want, and point it to one of your home servers.

Third, low powered devices are proliferating... With OpenWRT, a number of very low power and dirt cheap WiFi APs/routers can be used as full-fledged Linux systems, and with USB ports, can act as a full-fledged SAN, all with no increase in your electric bill, noise, space, etc.

Finally, SSDs. No longer does keeping a server running mean noisy, spinning rust. Once some form of SSDs are large enough to store your entire media collection, and cheap enough that everyone is buying them, then your home file server can be silent and low power, while performing well enough to rival Dropbox and the like.

It's just over the horizon. As long as all of the above pans out, which all indicators say it will, the internet will become a much more symmetric place, just like originally intended. And all manner of hosted services we have now, will be reduced to a tiny niche, as they stop making sense for most use cases.