blvr

If you think that's analogous to what happened in Palestine you need a history lesson.

I don't know what you mean by 'the colonisation thing'. What are you talking about specifically?

Zionism is the idea that Jews need a Jewish nation to take Jewish refugees fleeing persecution. History has basically proved that to be true.

What it's not:

1. The idea that Jews are in any way superior. All races have equal rights under Israeli law (although secular Jews have some obligations that other groups don't, i.e. mandatory military service) and Israel has a significant Arab population.

2. Religion-based. Early Zionists were all secular socialists. Religious Jews got on board later when they started to see Israel as a sign from God but the traditional position (and the reason why many Ultra-Orthodox Jews still don't support Israel) is that Jews weren't allowed a nation until the Messiah comes.

Israel isn't perfect (obviously) but your comments are completely disproportionate. You need to tone down the hate.

There is another option as well as the two you list, which is to remove items off your list as you can't/don't want to do them. Since I never have any more than half a dozen items on any of my three calendar/todo lists I never feel particularly oppressed. But I know that if I didn't have those lists there I'd be forgetting stuff all the time and letting people down - and I know because I never used to use a todo list.

Like all things, you can go to far with todo lists. Todo today lists have never worked for me. But I'd be lost without a list of appointments and minor/forgettable actions (filed according to the context in which they need to be done).

Would people be going on about how boring they were if Steve Jobs were around? I doubt it.

The biggest problem Apple faces right now is that people expect them to lose their magic now that Steve Jobs is gone. Then as they watch Apple confirmation bias sets in and articles like this are written.

Apple is pretty well equipped to continue leading the tech sector, but this perception people have is going to be a major problem.

According to Wikipedia, just 'deaf'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deaf-mute

I'll resist the urge to rant about political correctness.

Although if someone took Android and modified the application framework, windowing system, etc. to be a traditional WIMP desktop OS, I think that would definitely interest me.

    f.lux    | Windows, OS X, iOS (jailbreak needed) | http://stereopsis.com/flux/
    Redshift | Linux, Windows (experimental)         | http://jonls.dk/redshift/
    Lux      | Android                               | https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vito.lux

>>> In fact, I think that many religions, and this especially goes for more severe, "by the book" versions of Christianity, actually make people much less content with themselves, but they carry on spreading themselves in spite of (or because of) this anyway.

Just curious what your exposure to Christianity is?

Reason being is that I've gone from a secular background to belonging to a very devout church and in my experience Christians are much happier. Sexual self-denial isn't a problem and it seems that if anything it leads to happiness, considering the amount of personal problems indulging every sexual desire causes.

>>> Perhaps it is the case that (most) humans need to work in order to be happy. What does this mean when we arrive at a level of technological sophistication that makes work unnecessary?

If we do ;-)

Or pro-Israel-ists?

Actually when this was first made (a few months ago) it was just an experiment to see how Metro styles and concepts could be applied to the desktop. Back then the Win8 builds were still all using Aero and there was no hint of a new style, so in retrospect it got quite a few things right.

Proper PCs will continue to use Windows 8 for x86, which will still have Active Directory, etc.

http://min.us/m4bajqk5V

It looks sort of like a hybrid of Whistler and Aero styles. It's nice enough (though I've always liked the Whistler style) but not exactly a massive improvement over Aero.

>>> Harris has relatively little to say beyond describing the Aero as having the "appearance of highly rendered glass, light sources, reflections, and other graphically complex textures." But he does add this: "This style of simulating faux-realistic materials...looks dated and cheesy now, but at the time, it was very much en vogue."<<<

To be honest I didn't think Aero had dated all that badly. Is this just a way of framing Apple software (which is known for that stuff) as dated and cheesy? Or is he making a valid point here?

The interface is attractive enough and doesn't have any glaring usability issues.

Performance (on my Nexus S w/ 2G connection) could improve but isn't so bad that it causes frustration.

And it's available for free and without ads.

I get the style sheet bug up to a few times a week, but it's no big deal. Just pull the page down to refresh and it's fixed.

Maybe my standards are low but I suspect 95% + of people are the same, so why would Fb bother doing it any differently?

- Shapes for user interface widgets (windows, buttons, text fields, etc.) for desktop and mobile

- A way to easily share my diagrams via a url (could be as easy as generating a url in the form of http://www.diagram.ly/?diagram=[hash of the xml])

- Direct uploading of exported images to a image sharing website (e.g. imgur). Although you might be able to generate a little revenue by hosting them yourself and serving them up alongside an ad?

In the beginning they might not have to use much code at all.

When they've advanced a bit they might just use code copy-pasted from the Web.

At the intermediate stage maybe they need something a little more advanced, so they go to a website where you can buy pre-written programs.

Then maybe they rise to a level where they can afford to pay someone to write some custom code for them, so they do so and improve their operations by x%.

But all that depends on how the rest of the game works. At the moment all we know is that the game involves space ships and assemblers.