The problem is people can make 3rd party servers for the purpose of supporting an older game or giving better performance, removing the requirements for a subscription to a consoles online service etc. But they can also do it so that all the burnt copies of the game will still work without cracking (or at least making it so your cracked version isn't detected eventually). Game developers argue everyone is doing the work for the second reason and presto 3rd party servers look illegal.

Natalie Portman makes the prequels watchable. What scifi needs is more tight white tops and pants.

Not sure. There is weirdness in particle physics where you are able to break the rules as long as the duration is short enough that you never could measure it. Sometimes those "broken rules" states are simplify calculations. If you pumped in enough energy I'd guess you could get a big bang. Another option would be that the expansion of the edge of the high energy region combined with the reduction of the speed of light in this new material would be such that you stop increasing the energy density of the center of your target.

At high enough energies particles are spontaneously created. They in turn will obey Pauli Exclusion (at least if they have spin I think). So enough photons and you make matter that will prevent you from making more particles ie pumping more energy into the space.

They'll come preloaded with heartrate monitors. When you die the drones will come for you like Valkeries.

Monocultures are a nature of the need for interop between orgs. Standards form because it is easy to confirm it will work, easy to find employees/volunteers that can use it, it solves a problem well and the opportunity cost of looking at alternatives likely will be more than any incremental improvement they offer etc. I agree FOSS is fantastic for turn around of fixes and being able to confirm the quality of the fix. Closed source can solve the problem but you might never now.

I think this calls for more monoculture: only build what is differentiated everything else should be common well understood and maintained components.

It will be come like the cable company on top of the cable company. Endless bundling of $8 a month ESPN with a dozen Swedish language Teletubby rerun stations. Shows exclusively on one platform or the other. All delivered via a regional monopoly cable layer who got bribed by the highest bidder for bandwidth. Your home internet service: low priority QoS (I wonder if that will be added to the user agreement (no servers, no kiddy porn and oh by the way your bits it the lowest priority: we'll send them ... if we aren't busy))

I like that solution. It seems though if you are too unproductive at work you will find yourself out of job and with no money for your hobby. There is a reason why they call it vocation not vacation.

I'm 34. I find it hard to get excited about the latest technology. Maybe that is my shortcoming maybe that is experience. Not being excited/dropping everything for the latest fad is a matter of knowing what is possible with existing technology and having been around for more than one cycle of: parallelism, single threaded performance, macro vs micro kernel etc etc. I'm not perfect but a lot of the attrition in tech can be attributed IMO to allowing HR to craft openings to use the latest acronyms rather than expecting experience/higher level thinking that they are fully unqualified to evaluate.

Actually ask for a specific thing rather than everything that someone has ever done online? What if they miss something.

How quaint.

Good points on mixed use. I work in Toronto and commute about 1.5 hours each way (Toronto apparently beat LA recently for worst commute time). I train/bus/walk it but with one bedroom condos going for 3-500k versus 2000sqft houses on 50' lots in the burbs it just doesn't make a lot of sense to live in the city (unless you desperately want the urban life which I don't: you can't realistically afford to raise a family in the city unless both parents are working professionals). NYC might also have been forced to be more reasonable because of its island nature. If you were stuck taking a fairy and then hiring a horse every day to get to work you'd quickly learn that if you stay on the island things get much simpler. Sadly Toronto has a lot of land around it so the "Greater Toronto Area" spans an area about 70km (45mi) in all directions outside of the borders of the city proper and silly immigration policies that allow ~40% of immigrants (not to single them out just for being immigrants but for being the source of population growth in Canada) to all move to this one city creating an endless pushing out of suburbs further and further away.

I'm not sure of a good solution to the problem. A random idea: charge people/corporations a fee per commuter mile. It would either force suburbanites to move closer to work/change jobs or push employers to move to less densely populated areas where mixed use is more prevalent, or even better which I'd like: make companies have to consider if having people commute into work to do a job they could easily do from home makes sense. I saw a Ted talk last year that claimed that cities were actually more environmental though because people generally do get around on public transit/walking more, live in smaller spaces etc. I'm not sure that it took into account that say roughly 30% of a cities population had to drive into it in the morning from much further away. Perhaps if the typical city was mixed use you would loose a lot of the efficiencies as you'd have a larger proportion of families requiring larger living spaces/schools/parks.

NYC isn't the biggest in North America though: that honor goes to Mexico city (both urban and metro areas are larger (about 200k and 2M difference respectively), then NYC, LA, Toronto.

I don't think it is just the design of cities that is different. Cars (Germany may be the biggest european exception) are much more of a status/sex symbol than in europe. There is a reason why people talk about their experience in the back of the car as a teenager: those that don't drive their dates around don't get laid. If you bike in a lot of cities it has to be a cause. Oh you must be very enviromental, or you must be frugal/cheap etc. It can never be "just because", or God forbid: I actually prefer living within a 20 min bike ride of work rather than owning a car and driving an hour each way from the 'burbs.

not if you can possibly get accepted and pay for it but if you can actually hack it. The "bottom quartile" lose their money. They have 0-100k in debt and don't have the marks/career prospects to payback or at least justify the cost of the loan. They are also down 3-4 years where they could have been earning money and could now be in a situation that now that they know that they should have done trade school they no longer have the money or time to do so.

I think we as a society need to realize that some people just simply have the makings of a really good janitor but a piss poor engineer. Lets not push everyone into going to college otherwise they and their parents get labelled a failure.

Not to mention not just barter trade but delays in timing are resolved. You can't keep fresh corn to pay your heating bill in January for example. Having a non-perishable store of value is very convenient.