The iPhone got in on this somehow without all that; while Motorola, Samsung, HTC, and so forth kept their hold. Nokia went another way; Blackberry has been up and down. The manufacturers who didn't pounce on Android dropped out of the running.

It seems open-source software didn't displace those manufacturers who took advantage of the market change. What makes you think all this new technology will displace GM?

It's a bit simpler than that.

There are all kinds of strategies and techniques geniuses use--the same way a woodworker uses a rotary router upon wood--to achieve maximum utility from their brain. It is a simple tool requiring skill to produce results, as you apply skill with e.g. Krita to draw a digital painting: one tool, hundreds of technical procedures to produce complex results.

One of the most primary strategies used by the greatest geniuses--not simply experts who excel in a single field of interest, but geniuses who excel at anything they attempt on a dare--is to instill motivation. They examine a problem requiring effort, understand its implications, and find a reason for interest: something they already want, or a new thing they suddenly realize a desire for, is more readily achieved by this new effort. In this way, every task, every study, every problem becomes engrossing; the individual has an unfettered desire to pursue this thing which is lain before him, and so fails to recognize the effort he puts forth, and so puts forth much effort without resistance, and so excels.

You observe simply that some things require excessive effort to gain an end not sufficiently interesting; were that end more interesting, it would be more pursued. Likewise, the closer that effort is to something interesting--if an aspect of the effort itself is discovered interesting, or if each step of progression directly translates to a useful step of progression in something else interesting--the more strongly it is pursued. Simply put: if upon completion of X you can improve Y, completing X becomes interesting because of Y; if by way of progressing toward completion of X you improve Y, X becomes interesting because it is essentially Y as well.

You observe, of course, that turning the second situation into the first is a good control for humans: if doing 10% of X grants you 10% of Y, and you do not want people interested in Y to perform X, then you must adjust the system surrounding X, Y, or both such that completing X grants Y, or such that X has less impact on Y, so as to require more effort for returns and less returns for effort.

They wouldn't. They'd outsource that part, and keep their necessary engineers. They'd pay Apple or Google or Tesla to build their fancy displays, their self-navigation systems, and their electric battery management systems, in the same way Subaru pays Porsche to build engines and Cadillac pays Mercedes-Benz to build their suspension systems. The investment for any of these companies to build the systems of the others would be large, save Tesla who would just ensure their continuous survival by becoming the battery supplier for everyone.

It is malicious prosecution. They're setting settlement lower than cost, meaning they're not confident they can win a high-cost lawsuit. If they ever initiate prosecution, it's straight malicious prosecution; holding the threat and strategically avoiding prosecution is coercion and legal racketeering, possibly criminal directly under the RICO act, supported by pattern behavior which indicates that they believe their activities constitute malicious prosecution.

In other words: they're generating circumstantial evidence enough to demonstrate malicious intent and abuse of the legal system in court. A good prosecuting lawyer can raise a lawsuit here and argue, legally, that these people are intentionally avoiding entanglement in an actual lawsuit, and so believe themselves to be pursuing a criminal action, and are avoiding that action but using the threat as leverage for racketeering--they are attempting to extort a broad base of victims for money through illegal abuse of the courts.

They're all working with the same faculties, you know; geniuses aren't endowed with better brains.

I have a large and fairly complex plan that puts a permanent end to all homelessness and hunger in the United States, costing less than our current welfare system, softening the blow of economic downturns and high unemployment, and even satisfying the problems of social security old-age pensions. It's a simple set of core actions with piles and piles of justification and analysis attached, rather than a network of fragile and uncertain bits of legislation built in a delicate web of questionable certainty. The beauty of it is that it's quick, easy, and durable; it solves all sorts of social problems through very minor action, through action which cannot fail because failure would come by spite which would only open the door for others to come profit by pushing success: this system will make some people extremely rich, and they will become rich by taking action to house and feed the poor, and yet the well of money they draw from for this is strictly and absolutely limited so as to not create a dangerous drain on our economy.

Do you think I was able to do such a thing because I was born with a much more capable brain than yours? Do you think it came with the package, a special upgrade you did not receive? Would you determine I'm some sort of in-born economic genius with a brain anatomy functionally superior to yours, genetics which you are denied, above and beyond the collective ability of all other humans on this planet? I have none of that; you have the same facilities I do, simply not put to the same use.

Your observation is quite right, but incomplete: there is no "smart kid" in the class; you only have one with some interest, and you will foster geniuses by creating interest in them. There are mental techniques to turn humans into intellectual gods, yes, and you can instill them within every single human child who enters your classroom, if only you can push the right button to make that child interested in learning. With those tools, then, you can repeat the same: grant them an interest in history, in mathematics, in languages, in technology, and they will become experts in those subjects in short order.

Do note that "uneconomic" means costs to someone increase. When that someone is taxpayers, money comes out of people's and business's hands; when that someone is the operator, they raise prices. In the first cases, people have less money with which to eat and commute, and businesses have less money with which to hire people, and so some people fall to poverty where they become mentally ill and diseased; in the second case, some people can't or refuse to afford the service, reducing its usefulness, slowing economy, and causing a similar effect on a larger or smaller scale--larger if it affects commerce at a high comparative advantage, smaller if it only affects people's ability to commute to work and the employer just fires them and hires more local people.

Economic consequences trickle down to real consequences measured in human suffering and death. Every economic action is measured by its offset: it causes damage amounting to 1500 people dying of poverty, but creates stimulus amounting to 2000 people rising out of poverty, and thus gives a bonus of 500 people rising out of poverty--the first 1500 may be sheltered, or they may be exchanged (person A falls to poverty so persons B and C can rise out of poverty). When given the equivalent option, I tend to favor sheltering; when given no equivalent option, I am completely unmoved by exchange (given the option of 50 million starving adults who are starving now or 0.1 million starving children who would starve if we saved those adults, I'll throw the children into the streets). I solidly oppose actions which increase human suffering in total, because it's uneconomic.

That switch controls a throttle system that manages air intake in gas trains, fuel intake in diesel trains, and electricity regulation to the motors in electric rail. If the air or fuel intake sticks open, you get runaway acceleration; if an electrical component shorts or a solid state power MOSFET starts bleeding current, you get excess power to the motors. In that case, your switch might not work, unless it's engineered to cut off some other system--in race cars, the kill switch powers down the fuel pump by disconnecting the battery, because the throttle may stick open and cutting fuel pump cuts fuel going to engine in any and all cases.

Knee-jerk reaction. "It flipped over! You should have X! Do it! Do it now!" Next week: "The automated system didn't work, and caused the train to accelerate out of control and flip over! What irresponsible ass turned this on without proper testing?!"

It's simpler than that: the author purports to see a black swan that will blindside the industry and cause a major turn-over; but you can't see black swans, and so this is not a blind risk. The auto industry is probably sitting on contingency plans to partner with various manufacturers at the tipping point, waiting back to avoid the major investment, knowing that it's a lot of start-up risk to start manufacturing cars. This is a controlled and managed risk, not the kind of industry-disrupting black swan that rises out of nowhere and leaves everyone confused about wtf just happened.

Two megabytes. Four, really, when using a single 4MB huge page to allocate the entire kernel in one go. A few bytes to maintain each task's information, each cached disk page, each handle held by an application.

Linux uses so little memory you can run it on a microcontroller with a megabyte of RAM. When you build up all the services needed to supply network management, graphical systems, user log-on, audio mixing, and so forth, you get maybe 100MB. When you then run a Web browser and go to a few open tabs, you need a gigabyte or three.

My applications eat all of that; if I were to use a different OS, I'd still have Thunderbird on top of it eating gigabytes of RAM, and Chrome or Firefox eating gigabytes of RAM. Linux eats 2MB of my RAM, and the rest of the hundreds of MB it eats are for managing all of the shit applications need--the kernel is keeping small bits of data around, a few hundred bytes to describe each task or thread, a few dozen bytes to describe cached disk pages, and so forth. Any OS will need to do all that, and the application will be the same.

I have like 24GB on my computer and it runs a VM consuming some 2GB of RAM. I had 16GB, but was always 900-1400MB into swap. At times, my computer would hang for 20 minutes, until Linux kicked in the OOM killer; it would swap like fuck in the interim. Modern web browsers are kind of asinine; run Chrome and let Flash play a video on a news site or YouTube or whatnot, and you'll find that the Flash Player Plug-In thread runs in 200MB of RAM, and then 600, and then over a gigabyte eventually; meanwhile something like Facebook can eat 300-500MB on its own. Firefox somehow consumes several gigabytes. Often my e-mail client is bigger than the fucking VM.

I wonder what use they're thinking at all. Minix 3 is a step forward: were we to port Linux interfaces for udev, kevents, and such onto Minix, we could drop a Linux userland onto it wholesale, with systemd and all, and benefit from a core operating system which lends itself to drastic rearchitecting.

Consider that running Minix as an OS-level virtualizer--OpenVZ, LXC--is a trivial task, one which requires only providing a different network server and different security features (e.g. users and groups, and their flow through the file system driver and such), largely doable on the existing code base. You could even run Xen on top of Minix with a minor tweak.

Consider that Minix is a collection of services which may be extended by adding other services. It is interfaces and features, not tightly-bonded kernel code. The shape and form of the OS can be changed without commitment: to add services to handle Linux services is not to change Minix, for you may simply not use those services; you could instead add services to make Minix pretend to be OpenBSD. You could replace its threading model or scheduler by swapping out a service, providing a system that uses the advanced features of DragonflyBSD.

There, again, we see a step forward: DragonflyBSD, with its non-locking semaphores, its highly-efficient threading model, its ability to freeze an application and thaw it after a reboot, to checkpoint running applications--a feature Minix does not possess, but could simply by adding a new kernel service--and even to move applications between machines. Extending some of these things would be to bring the features of OpenMOSIX: check pointing and running an application on a different boot cycle or different machine brings the magic of scheduling applications across a cluster of machines acting as one.

Why, then, do we persist in creating these tinker toys, instead of extending, cannibalizing, or imitating those things which show real progress? Why has Minix not embraced the great strides forward made by Linux and integrated its interfaces so as to integrate its user space in distribution? Why has Linux not subsumed the threading model of Dragonfly BSD? Why has someone chosen to create an OS to no purpose, rather than to create a unified system carrying and integrating the lessons from all prior systems?

The problem with this thinking is memory is not cheap. Memory has grown, and program memory usage has grown linearly with memory, or greater. The problem is when you run two programs at once: the combined working set is bigger than RAM, and has grown linearly as well. Where you may have had 32MB of RAM and 48MB swapping on and off disk, now you have 16GB of RAM and you're swapping around 10GB of data; but swapping is not now 500 times faster, and so the bloat has slowed the machine.

The growth of the working set means the growth of memory controller latency, the need for RAS and CAS selects on different rows requiring precharges taking up 200 FSB cycles on CPUs which now have multipliers of 10 or 15 instead of 1.5 or 2. Random memory access may now have delays of 3000 cycles, causing an instruction requiring 4 cycles to execute to now take 750 times as long; your typical CAS selection may in fact require 7, 10, even 21 cycles now, multiplied by 10 or 15, so as to take 300 cycles of stall. Modern CPUs are made and broken by their CPU cache efficiency and their predictive execution, and multi-tasking flushes those caches and destroys performance.

Computers have grown to manage immense spans of cheap resources, yet they have not increased their capability to manage resources nearly as fast as they have increased those resources.

One of the greatest space fiction writers to ever live: L. Ron Hubbard. He was a master of telling people shit he just made up.