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It's interesting to see that the focus in this video is on showing as much information on the screen at the single time, a sort of "swing of the pendulum" that has now gone the other way with mobile UIs such as iOS, Android and (to a lesser extent) Windows 8.

Good to know there's a place where RMS can get apps for his phone.

Here's to the hope that an android counterpart is not far behind.

On the one hand, lawsuits are bad and innovation is good. On the other hand, I'm happy to see Google defend its ecosystem against Apple's square-with-rounded-corner lawsuits.

I doubt it. If Mayer wanted to play second fiddle to Page, she'd have stayed at Google.

I don't really see any universe in which Windows 8 is a minor update.

If there's any company I won't be sad to see hit with an Apple lawsuit, it's Xiaomi. The MIUI ROM is great, but it copies the iPhone Look&Feel to an absurd degree. I get that MIUI is all about "usability" and "beauty", but WinPhone has proven usability and beauty can be achieved without blatantly copying Apple.

Not impressed. This sort of technique only works if you have good fine motor control. If, like many software engineers, you have terrible drawing skills, well... good fucking luck.

"Mainstream" is often content that is polished enough, well done enough, and original enough that it can stand on its own without referring to fringe cultural appeal. "Alternative" content often relies on the fact that its fans like its particular style of "alternativeness" to compensate for the fact that its execution is lacking.

Gah, not every product on the planet needs to be open source.

Assuming you save all of the $4752 a year, which is dubious, that's barely enough to send you to a low-tier university or community college. Mind you, that's better than nothing, but if you think the opportunities open to students who go to lower-tier universities are the same as those available to students who were able to afford top-tier universities' egregious tuition, then you've got another thing coming.

In short, it's a cycle: Those who can't afford to go to a good college have less career opportunities open to them, ensuring they have a hard time sending their children to a good college.

The solution, of course, is a wide and far-reaching scholarship program that lets students not worry about their socio-economic status when applying to colleges, but that's "socialism".

Apple always denies they will make things -- until they do.

And companies that have millions of developers making money off their APIs (and, in one way or another, paying some dividend back to the API creators) indeed do tend to keep their APIs fairly backwards-compatible, with some notable exceptions.

I dunno. Shadow physics had much more visual and gameplay polish when demoed, but Perspective has a simple idea that, without any additional gameplay mechanics, makes for many interesting puzzle mechanics. To me, at least, that is very impressive.

They showed off a working physical prototype at the press conference.

Are you sure you're not thinking of the BUILD tablet, running the Developer Preview (roughly akin to an alpha)? Unless I'm mistaken, the Surface is a Microsoft Hardware product, distributed by Microsoft under the Microsoft brand.

Oh come on. That is possibly the most absurd criticism I've ever heard. They "don't get it" because their marketing team used a design rendering instead of a photograph? Clearly, a product shouldn't be judged on features, user experience, price, reliability, performance, or potential for changing the market. It should be judged on whether the little glossy pictures on the website were photos that were 'shopped until they might as well be faked or CGI renderings that are pretty much good enough to be real.

All learning is by immersion. The best way to start learning flirting is to observe couples on dates, and note their body language. You don't need to be close enough to hear their voices, since body language will be your important leader. If you can hear them speak, even better. You can also make it into a social outing by bringing along a friend and making running commentary on the date (this will help you exchange notes and speed the learning process, and it will also make learning fun and thus increase retention). Note that these things (esp #2) are both fairly socially unacceptable, so be aware of that and try to be somewhat discreet.

Once you do that, go out and use the body language you've learned to indicate flirting and assess other's reactions. Test, adjust, repeat. The hardest part is that you'll need to find a group of people whose opinion you don't care about until you're vaguely OK at it. I suggest parties, not bars or clubs, because they are the most conducive to the wide range of flirting you'll tend to want to master.

As someone with borderline autism, I find this sort of guide extremely helpful, because things that may be obvious to you take me immense amounts of time to learn and internalize. Normally I find myself having large amounts of "rules" governing me that turn out to be incorrectly identified from social conduct or incorrectly inferred from the on-the-surface descriptions of things. Hell, even the concept of flirting is something I've just barely started grasping in my 20s.

I know I'm a bit of an outlier, but it's sometimes good to be reminded that yes, you can try to flirt in this or that situation, or that X or Y are a good sign of flirting.

EDIT: Of course, this is mostly still good as a reminder, introduction, or to shatter misconceptions. The only way to really learn flirting, I've found, is the same as one would learn any other culture: by immersion. As someone whose approach to such things is less intuitive, immersion may be followed by analysis to extract explicit lessons from my experiences.

That's not burtally honest. It's just plain juvenile.

It's less a matter of security and more a matter of consistency. MS's/Apple's rules are geared towards ensuring apps don't affect battery consumption too wildly while in the background. Android has no such restriction, and any app you have installed can decrease your battery life significantly even if you do not open it.

The advantage of this, of course, is platform flexibility. The disadvantage is inconsistent app behavior (battery is drained by background apps).

It's possible glasses use paper (or any other large-enough white surface) as an info projection area, "inserting" information from the glasses directly into real life. This could be a more comfortable user interface for data-heavy interaction than trying to do gestures in the air (think of the paper as a quasi-touchscreen, except that the "touch" is interpreted visually).

I know when I write TODOs, it's usually because my solution isn't clean or misses an irrelevant edge case that may become relevant if requirements change.

This vaguely reminds me of Microsoft's CHESS testing tool: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/chess/. An interesting research project that (IMO) didn't get its proper day in the limelight.

...because the Windows UI doesn't fit tablet use cases.

Interesting take on fun and relaxation: Try going to a party and drinking non-alcoholic beer. It tastes kind of meh, but overall delivers the same experience. One surprising result of that is that drinking non-alcoholic beer (which has the same alcohol content as some brands of orange juice) tends to loosen you up a fair bit, because it has all the trappings and promises of an alcoholic beer. Turns out the actual alcohol is incidental to those effects.

I know a lot of people who go out to bars, drink, and spend the entire night shouting about how drunk they are and how drunk they were all those other times they went drinking. I don't get it. I've never been a heavy partier, but my craziest, weirdest, most memory-making times have all been stone sober.

> Journalists will love it.

This is probably the most important point. Boycotts of SOPA-supporting companies, as many have pointed out, do very little to stop the bill from passing. What they do succeed in doing is making sure opposition to the bill stays high in the news cycle and enters public consciousness.

Agreed. Having used VBA in Access back in the day, I can attest that JS would be a godsend.

You're forgetting bootstrapping costs. Sure, an industrial machine may be cheaper in the long term, but he'd have to raise $500k to buy one. In addition, buying an industrial machine lacks the immaterial benefit of bringing manufacturing and engineering jobs and expertise to India.

In addition, it's important to note that this is merely a first revision. It's safe to assume, I think, that future revisions would improve upon the design and, due to the agility of manufacturing (how many industrial machines are manufactured per year?), it should be easier to prototype models that improve efficiency, cost and quality. I'd even go as far as to say that if this catches on it will eventually come close to matching the efficiency of an industrial machine for a fraction of the current cost.