In case anyone else gets here wondering what to do next with their now enshitified WeMo devices:

https://github.com/pywemo/pywe...

I've put together a script that I'm planning to use as well which includes support for sunrise / sunset using astral [ https://github.com/esarjeant/p... ]. Feel free to use anything from this to make your own scripted controller...

So will it be acceptable if your college of choice now requires that you secure a job or post-graduate program before you can graduate there too? Imagine the awkward conversations you could have with the hiring manager; "So do you have a college degree?"... "Um, sortof"

Rather than a graduation requirement for high school, maybe high school seniors could use this kind of preparation to boost their grade. If you are able to secure work, vocational training or some other post-high school education then you are entitled to an additional 0.5 points added directly to your GPA.

I totally agree with this - we switched to Mobile Share Advantage and are saving $30 a month as we need to stay with AT&T until our phones are paid off. Much easier on our bill, we had rollover minutes but there were certainly months where we had to pay extra.

Bonus that we have tethering now, and I'm not worried about going over on data - it'll just get slow and I've got WiFi everywhere that I need fast access. Heck, I'm pretty sure they were doing this before on my "unlimited" access anyway so why now have some extra pocket change while I'm at it...

I'd say anything related to reading from a binary tree. This is used as part of a Huffman style decoding for MPEG/JPEG/ZIP/etc. Most media we consume today (DVD, MP3's, M4V's, HDTV, etc.) relies on this kind of logic.

The majority of US homes (75%) have an HDTV, DVD and one or more portable media devices. Most of these homes have at least 3 hrs of HDTV decoding per day, which given the current population might be 1.5 billion hours of decoding per day in the US. Factor in music and multiple TV's you might be closer to 3-5 billion hours per day.

It depends how you look at your PC. If it's an "appliance" (fridge, microwave, hot water heater, etc.) ask yourself when was the last time you made an impulse buy to replace one of those? We had to buy a new fridge a few years back when after 10+ years our old one stopped working - it was cheaper to replace it than try to fix it.

Of course, if you're a fridge enthusiast, you would take it apart and fix it yourself. Most people aren't.

Same thing with PC's - most people could care less, it's an appliance they use when they have to do certain things. As long as it doesn't stop working they'll just keep using it.

I haven't seen this site work yet - every request is either "we have a lot of visitors" or "we are down". I figured by the end of the week things would get better but evidently that's not the case.

Honestly, at this rate, they would be smart to put this off for a year. Iron out whatever glitches they've got and go live for required coverage starting in 2015.

I honestly don't even see where the news is here -- we have a national spy agency that is spying on people. That's why it exists. What did we think they would do?

This seems to have gotten buried in the press release, but Canonical has already done some demos in this regard. Basically, when you get into the office you dock your quad-core cell phone and get a full Ubuntu desktop.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzc0uMXGFBY

They have been shopping this with their Ubuntu for Android solution, but a full mobile OS might enable them to get a "superphone" to market faster. Too bad it's >1 year out...

Ditch X11 and start over. This should be something that is assumed to only run local and will have direct access to hardware. while compositing window managers take a step in this direction, jump in all the way.

While it is impressive that you can direct an application to use a remote display, even an underpowered PC can host a native GUI that runs locally and is accessed remotely via VNC or RDP.

Combine it with a standard UI widget toolkit that is constant and don't waver. Do not allow co-mingling of various widget technologies, the current state of X11 allows such a diverse assortment of UI toolkits (KDE / GTK / etc.) that you are destined to get apps that look and behave differently.

Users don't need to theme their desktop, it is usually more important to them that it looks and behaves the same on every computer it gets installed to. The last thing a user wants is to sit down in front of an app and find that it looks completely different.

Finally, build a killer visual IDE that is as easy to use as VB.NET and use this to construct all of the apps your new desktop. That should just about do it... It wouldn't hurt to OEM bundle it with a few large PC vendors.

What if you have a purse? It's a lot easier to get that into one of those than the current iPad tablet.

I think this is an excellent observation, while it really won't hurt MS to go after the mobile phone market since Windows Mobile wasn't going anywhere - they are about to plunge into a new battle where they are going to sacrifice one of their cash-cows (Windows/Office) to compete with iOS and Android.

They should focus on the enterprise market, and find ways to compete on iOS/Android without writing another tablet OS.

I can't blame them for trying, but I'm not sure how durable any of this is going to be. Copyright holders are going to claim infringement at every opportunity, but it's all going to be contingent on the ability for the ISP to map an IP address back to a customer.

I'm envisioning this process to be a little less reliable than one might think. What if by early afternoon you have been switched to an infringers IP address? Are you now guilty of infringement assuming the other user infringed earlier the same day? Even worse. What if the infringers figure out they can arp flood the network and spoof other IP's on the same network? Now anyone connected to the same physical switch could be considered an "infringer" by virtue of their IP getting hijacked for downloading.

Ultimately it conflicts with the ISP's other intent - which is to ensure your IP address changes enough that you cannot easily host anything from your home. I'm thinking it's going to take a few years to shake out, but soon enough we will all be paying an Internet media tax to cover the losses that media companies are experiencing from illegal downloads. The real solution is much easier -- make it possible for us to purchase the media in the first place.