Or maybe the voting public has now decided to bring to the ballot booth their online attitude of frivolity above all. Maybe voters who in the past simply stayed away, convinced that Candidate X is gong to be the runaway winner, now voted for somebody other than Candidate X?

Google's marketing 'Droids might still be debating whether to call the next release a healthier (than Nougat at least) Oatmeal Cookie or attempt another Kitkat stunt with the maker of a certain cream-filled sandwich cookie, but I expect Android O+ to be the most Predictable release name evar, Android Peanut Butter. I'd be mildly surprised if it was the mutant variety, Peanut Butter & Jelly, but I doubt it, since it will have an unwanted echo with Android Jellybean (4.1/4.2). Any other name (Pumpkin or Peach Pie, anyone?) is going to result in a Twitter storm of protest. Of course, Google might want to delay the inevitable and call the next release by the same code name.

Ubuntu didn't adopt Gnome 3, at least not the user-facing "hateful" parts of it. Ubuntu had this desktop environment called Unity. This also applies to systemd, which few users will even notice they have installed. So, no, you can't blame Gnome and Lennart for the hate, assuming there's even such a targeted conspiracy to "get" Ubuntu similar to well-documented efforts to subvert the opensource movement in general. I suspect this is all in Shuttleworth's mind, confusing a numerical majority into a Slashdot herd or hive mind.

I'm neither for nor against the concept of the private ownership of portable weapons, but I think this is further proof that the question of relatively easy access to such devices has become irrelevant, at least, in cases where a determined would-be killer, whether ideologically motivated or just plain nuts, is involved. Military-style weapons such as bombs and rapid-fire guns have been used, as well as more cumbersome tools as hand guns and knives, and even implements that you won't normally think of as weapons, such as trucks and, yes, cookware (Boston marathon bombing).

The debate over guns is another matter, but in a discussion about terrorism and other forms of mass murder, it only clouds the issue. We are really better off discussing whether we should ban globalized social media, where individuals from different cultures are exposed to a dangerous fusion of ideas.

What I mean about such dangerous ideas is that some ideas, while relatively harmless on their own might produce dangerous consequences when combined. Conservative Islam, uprooted from its roots, could produce an inner conflict in a potential terrorist who sees "immoral" women wearing miniskirts and men drinking and doing drugs in broad daylight, actions that would be improper at worst to a culturally acclimatized member of a liberal society. Now if such ideas are restricted to the region of their origin, where such ideas are deemed conventional rather than radical, then maybe we can reduce incidents of ideological schizophrenia that lead to the random acts of violence that we call terrorism.

The Gnome 3 designers aren't entirely to blame for the mess. Experimentation is a good part of innovation, or we'd be stuck using the teletype terminal. The problem is the speed with which the experiment was mainlined or adopted by the major distributions as the one and only true path to desktop nirvana. If they had allowed, say, a five-year phase-in period where features are added gradually then maybe users will get used to the new supposedly touch-friendly interface. Also a "classic" interface should have been available from day one even if it wasn't the default.

A good example of how this could be done is the evolution of the Google home page. Without Googling for screenshots, who can actually tell the difference between the Google home page now and then?

There are opensource video editors, if that's what you mean by the trade name Adobe Premiere. Simply saying open source equivalent of [proprietary software] makes it difficult, if not impossible, to answer your question since if you're looking for the precise feature set or look-and-feel then obviously anything that's not Adobe Premiere is going to be not equivalent. Same thing for SolidWorks. What is SolidWorks, some sort of design software or a particular piece of software named SolidWorks that works exactly like SolidWorks?

Ever heard of the thing called space walk? Now that would be way cooler. Imagine walking faster than superman flying faster than a speeding bullet. Of course, relative to the capsule, you'd just be taking a stroll in the hall outside your jail cell but, still, this could be a major selling point to the lucky space traveler.

Your point would have been valid if Wernher von Braun invented space tourism half a century ago while the world still looked up to astronauts as heroes made of the right stuff. But now in the social media age, everything gets blown out of proportion. The airplane industry has the advantage because banning all flights after a terrorist incident would have serious consequences for the world economy. At most flights get suspended for a day while the concerned government agencies perform their usual security theater. On the other hand, banning human space flight would make only a few multimillionaires cry while some committee finishes its report.

This has a huge downside too. A web app lives and dies on the whim of the developer, which can go bankrupt or be DDoS'd out of existence overnight, while a program installed on your desktop can last as long as the hardware can be upgraded or replaced, which in the case of the most common desktop architecture can span well over a generation.

Now I realize that practically all apps and programs are in part locally installed, if not permanently then in some disk cache. But the incentive for a developer to package an app so that it can run only after it phones home is much, much greater. After all, how many people run an web browser offline?

So, yes, this is going to be a game changer. If this takes off, expect future versions of your favorite proprietary office suite or graphics editing program to behave more like YouTube videos than traditional desktop software. Remember that there's practically no difference between downloading and streaming a YouTube or Netfilx video but these companies still put up technical barriers to prevent users from viewing videos offline.

That's only part of the reason. Trump got elected because his political program could fit into a series of tweets, Build a wall, Ban Muslim immigration, More taxes for companies that manufacture abroad. His opponents lost because their responses were more nuanced, requiring sentences or even whole paragraphs to clarify. Under the rules of politics today, if you can't tweet it, then it's not a good solution to the problem at hand.

Ultimately the only good solution, if it's possible, is self-production. Give everybody the capability to produce everything they need. Yes, I'm talking about replicators. Anything short of that is just first aid for a dying patient. People would basically become islands or tribes onto themselves, trading only luxury goods they can do without, much like the beginnings of European trade with the aboriginal Americans, minus the exploitation and addiction that came later.

Who knows, with telepresence you might be able to outsource your driving to India. Main problem is the latency. So we might need some obstruction avoidance AI to take care of the occasional stray child, drunk or deer, while the remote human operator takes charge of the overall direction of the trip, e.g. what to do if there's a pile-up, or a landslide or some other landmark-altering incident.

You need to have your bottle close by. Drink up.

Rhetorical questions: But why live in San Francisco? What is so special about San Francisco?

The only reason I see for living in San Francisco is because it allows you to live close to the place where you need to be to do the thing you need to do to live a decent human existence. In short, your job. Why do we have to presume that even with UBI, people will still choose to join the rat race of living in a crowded city. I see more people moving back to their home towns, or homesteading, buying plots of land somewhere cheaper, becoming gentleman or lady farmers or neighborhood artisans or shopkeepers, working for life's luxuries rather than the necessities already provided by their UBI.

Given the above scenario, instead of rising, real estate prices will fall and even out across the country, as San Francisco will be no more attractive than any other town or city within the same latitude (maybe except for the golden sunset but there are VR goggles for that). This, of course, presumes that the UBI is implemented right and is not just a souped food stamp program.

Whoops, bad advice. While it prevents the addition of new sites to the browser history, incognito mode doesn't erase the record of sites already visit. So it's better simply to create a new profile from scratch and then delete that profile. Now I think incognito mode is really a brain damaged idea, because it raises false expectations of privacy.