If citizens of Mother England are going to act like assholes like that then yes, the colonies are going to do everything they can do distance themselves from such pointless snobbery.

My experience says differently. I had given Google Docs a chance years ago, but it outright stank. I couldn't image why someone would want to use it.

Then a few months ago I started writing for a major tech publisher. When I asked what file format they wanted they responded "Word if you must but we love Google Docs". So Google Docs it was. And I was very pleasantly surprised. It worked slickly, speedily and no unexpected surprises. (This is with Chrome on OS X.) Compared to the OS X version of Word, which reminds me that the The Spinning Beach Ball of Death is still a real thing, I almost overwhelmingly preferred Goog.

There are a few things it won't let me do that I'm used to. Captioning images is one. Which doesn't work well in Word either, but is apparently not possible in Docs. I also use tables a lot and the table formatting options stink. But otherwise I found it met all my needs and worked better and faster than Word.

Well, your commend didn't add a damn thing to this discussion, so it seems like you're brining the rage to this party. Good luck with that.

Getting a site destroyed by /. is a lot more rare mostly because servers are vastly more robust than they were in the past. I have a Wordpress blog hosted on a $10 a month shared server that was linked on Slashdot last year. Brought in tens of thousand of hits in an hour if I remember correctly. Site stayed up, though a little slow. And that's just a single shared server, No AWS. 5-10 years ago that would have cost serious money for a site that could handle that. Now it's the cost of three cups of coffee.

I think Twitter is worth it because there are very few privacy concerns. Twitter is 98% public, and everyone who participates knows it. (I hope.)

Facebook is a privacy nightmare, and is crap for driving business to your web site. It does everything it can to keep all information on Facebook, including jerking everyone around. And that will only increase.

Once you post something on either service it's out of y our control. With Twitter it's pretty minor, 140 characters, and it will be gone eventually. (I believe they only archive the last 2000 Tweets or so.) Facebook is trying to make a timeline of people's entire lives and won't stop trying to make money off your content until well after you're dead.

... It's for the ability to east the separation of me from my money. I constantly think about it, every time I use a computer. "The one thing lacking in this OS, the one fault of the developer, is that not once did they think about my pocketbook and how it's too full. They really should divert development time from other features to make it easier to spend money. I really don't do enough of that, and there are so few ways for me to do it."

Dammit, and I was just getting to like Ubuntu as a mature competitor to the commercial offerings. I had even convinced a few friends to try it. Now I'll look like a fucking shill.

And here I was always told that security by obscurity was no security at all.

Because those are the only ones where he'll be marginally safe.

I wish they'd catch this guy so he'd shut the hell up. He's not Jason Bourne or James Bond, he's just another rich eccentric, and an attention whore.The world doesn't need more of either of those.

Not trying to sound like a troll here, but what is the point?

Sure, for hobbyists, it might have a place[...]

Don't know if that's a troll, but you did answer your own question. There are only 315 preorders for this thing. Sounds like a hobbyist device to me.

Yeah, for most people it's stupid, but that's the definition for every piece of equipment that every hobbyist buys, regardless of the hobby.

Now the actual project feels a bit dicey to me. First of all the Fixed Funding campaign. That means that he takes all the money regardless of if it reaches its funding goal. That's very suspect in a hardware project. Hardware projects need an economy of scale to get decent volume pricing. The fact that he apparently doesn't care how many he sells tells me he's either a) clueless, b) a scammer, or c) making a not-insignificant profit on each and every one. Which means this is a rebadged $50 tablet, which means it's shit.

The January ship date means it's obviously an OEM tablet. So the "building" part of "building a powerful tablet" is obviously BS. If he was actually building a table the startup costs would be 100x and the delivery date would be at least 18 months out.

He also says "Given the busy holiday manufacturing and shipping schedules we will not have the devices before Christmas." which makes it seem like he's getting the things specially built. Except he's not, he simply can't at that volume and price. The real reason it's not a good Christmas gift is that the software won't be done. In fact I doubt if he'll hit a January ship date, just looking at the updates on the site, there is a ton of work left to do to clean this project up.

Yes, he's doing some software development, putting together the free work that others have contributed. And he's not selling software, he's selling hardware, which feels like a bait and switch.

He doesn't need to sell the hardware. As mentioned elsewhere up-thread, there are tablets out there that can do what this does. He's just looking for a way to get paid for free software.

Why would anyone go to a trade show?* It's me, going out of my way to be advertised to. I can think of few things less enjoyable.

Conferences on the other hand, I love. A chance to talk with the people who actually made the stuff the trade shows are advertising â" That's incredibly valuable and well worth the time and effort.

*The most common excuse I see is that it's a free trip to Las Vegas or somewhere, which is why they hold them there and not Des Moines. But if that's the cost of a trip, I'm not sure it's worth it. (Then again I live in my favorite city. Traveling out of it is a step down.)

I wish you luck keeping your personal email address spam free. All it takes is one of your trusted family or friends to get a virus and your email address is out there for the harvesting, no way to get it back.

Unfortunately my personal email address goes back to 1993, essentially before spam, and is in tons of archives (usenet especially) so that's that.

Sure, I could create a new personal email address, but there is a certain pride in having the same email address for nearly 20 years.

The current result (7%) is higher than noise or pranks would indicate, so there are a lot of you out there apparently using no spam filter. How do you do that? Between my two primary email addresses I get 1 spam email every 5 minutes, which outweighs valid email 10:1. (These email addresses are reasonably closely guarded, but have existed for a total of 27 years, so they're out there somewhere.) My life's too short to spend that much time shoveling shit.

So how do you do it? Do you simply not use email? Is your email address brand new? Do you only use burner accounts? Do you get a thrill from reading or deleting trolling spam? Do you simply not know you have a spam filter?

DRM. I love to keep installs as simple as possible. Every program should be able to be run on removable media. But back when I had a little less control over the software I develop, clients were horrified by such an idea. They wanted applications locked to a specific machine, permanently, if possible. If they would have known the lingo they would have asked for rootkits and BIOS viruses to keep their app from running anywhere it wasn't supposed to. (They would have gone with hardware dongles, but they were far too cheep for that.)

And to do that (Without hardware dongles) you have to get stupid. Insinuate files into places they're not supposed to be and generally just dick with a person's computer in a way that would make them unhappy if it wasn't hidden by a shiny graphic on the installer's splash screen.

You can understand why I don't do that work anymore, but I guarantee that someone does.

An alternate analogy with a completely different answer:

If you're being physically attacked, is it legal for you to use physical force to defend yourself?

(Or should you only be allowed to use purely defensive measures and call the cops, who will do nothing.)

Except if the MPAA gets wind of this they'll close you down and slap you with a lawsuit. It's pretty explicitly prohibited in the draconian license the make you watch infront of every film.

I think they have two options:
1) Go for the old people market. Stock movies and TV shows from the 50's - 70's that old people like, advertise to them. Work up delivery deals with local care facilities.

2) The other option would be focusing on foreign films and TV. They are rarely available for streaming in the US. I'd also get a few region-free DVD players and rent them out. I know several DVD rental places that make good money by doing this for local immigrant communities.

Engineering, as it's practiced in other fields, is applying existing models (often created by scientists) to make something new or modify something old. Bridge building applies a lot of science but doesn't do any science.

Scientists postulate new theorems, perform and evaluate studies, publish papers on those studies.

The vast majority of CS grads go into jobs where they use existing languages, algorithms, APIs and libraries to create something new or modify something old. Thus Engineers, not scientists. How many CS grads have even submitted papers to peer review?

Yes, there are the CS people doing actual science, performing studies, creating the new stuff for all the future SE's to use, but they're the vast minority. If you want to see more than 2 in the same room go to SIGGRAPH.