[Mari Yamaguchi][1]: > Now, 2 1/2 years later, experts fear it is about to reach the Pacific and greatly worsen what is fast becoming a new crisis at Fukushima: the inability to contain vast quantities of radioactive water. Let’s see: leaking tanks of radioactive water, contaminated ground water, and radioactive water spilling out of underground…

[Mr. Supersite on the announcement of Ballmer’s retirement][1]: > On a personal note, I’ll just add that Ballmer was one of the good guys. Though he was relentlessly mocked for his over-the-top public appearances in years past, Ballmer was also relentlessly pro-Microsoft and it’s very clear that the troubles of the past decade were at…

[Microsoft press release][1]: > Microsoft Corp. today announced that Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer has decided to retire as CEO within the next 12 months, upon the completion of a process to choose his successor. In the meantime, Ballmer will continue as CEO and will lead Microsoft through the next steps of its transformation to…

[The Economist][1]: > Creative people’s most important resource is their time—particularly big chunks of uninterrupted time—and their biggest enemies are those who try to nibble away at it with e-mails or meetings. Indeed, creative people may be at their most productive when, to the manager’s untutored eye, they appear to be doing nothing. This is…

[Wolf Richter reporting on a Die Zeit article][1]: > Now there is a new set of specifications out, creatively dubbed TPM 2.0. While TPM allowed users to opt in and out, TPM 2.0 is activated by default when the computer boots up. The user cannot turn it off. Microsoft decides what software can run on…

Last week App.net celebrated its one year anniversary. App.net, of course, started as a response to Twitter’s stupidity and hostility towards developers. Since App.net launched it has become so much more than just a Twitter clone — App.net is a platform. But the real problem with App.net is that it’s too difficult to explain to…

[Ryan Tate on the Internet.org project][1]: > The problem is that this isn’t enough for the company. It {Facebook} has to be solving “one of the greatest challenges of our generation,” with nary a mention of the big financial upside — and there is one, believe me, for Facebook. This is part of a broader…

[Jeff Jarvis writing about how American and UK media seem to largely be ignoring the NSA debate, while Germans are up in arms over it][1]: > In the NSA story, we are seeing both traits but, of course, we are mostly seeing the political side in open anger about American and British government attacks on…

[Benjamin Wittes writing about the Washington Post coverage of the NSA leaks][1]: > The Post, for its part, has managed, in my opinion at least, to completely mislead its readers as to the significance of these documents. The problem is not the paper’s facts. It is with the edifice it has built with those facts.…

[Gary Marcus writing about the failure of artificial intelligence][1]: > In Levesque’s view, the field of artificial intelligence has fallen into a trap of “serial silver bulletism,” always looking to the next big thing, whether it’s expert systems or Big Data, but never painstakingly analyzing all of the subtle and deep knowledge that ordinary human…

[Andrew Sullivan writing about][1] the [detainment of Glenn Greenwald’s spouse][2] (as a terrorist) as he passed through London: > In this respect, I can say this to David Cameron. Thank you for clearing the air on these matters of surveillance. You have now demonstrated beyond any reasonable doubt that these anti-terror provisions are capable of…

[Cassidy James, writing about the motivation behind Elementary OS][1]: > In April of 2011, a small group of high school and college kids released an Ubuntu 10.10 remaster that we called elementary OS “Jupiter”. And for us, it was huge. It was a demonstration of a desire to create a Linux-based OS that championed consistency…