Read the blog post, it is actually very reasonable. Better to have a standardised, secure, removable and optionally installed DRM than a mysterious black-box software by a random company.

Problem 1)
Open-source desktop applications have is that the feedback loop takes forever. It is difficult to edit a GUI or modify a behaviour immediately. One has to find the (current) code base, compile, make sure one has the right libraries (which may be different to the system versions) and make a local installation.

I would like to see a program/framework/DE/whatever where you can, while you are in an interface, click "edit code" and modify the program on the fly. Sugar/OLPC began implemeonting such functionality for their Python programs. This would drastically speed up make scratching your itches much easier, as well as redistributing your modifications.

All progress comes from having fast feedback loops. Make it easy for users to play around (and exchange modifications).

Problem 2)
Another change I would like to see in Desktop Applications is that one does not have to program any UI logic (creating widgets, connecting events) at all, it just seems to be redundant. Why do we design a UI by writing *text* in 2015?
It should be possible to auto-generate a UI from the type of objects one wants to modify, from the constraints of the best practices in UI design, perhaps with a workflow definition. It's useless to have all this freedom when we always want it the same way (text boxes for text input, checkboxes for booleans, list for lists, buttons for actions) anyways. Why hasn't a library come along that does that. At least glade lets one draw UIs, producing a XML file that can then be loaded and populated by events. More work on making programming UIs trivial please.

Problem 3)
Deployment. It's ridiculous. Today we can easily install python/ruby libraries from git repos, but not programs that will run in user-space?
In fact, perhaps the whole packaging of Linux systems should be different. What if every user was running in a virtual environment where they can install any software they want, with the other users being isolated from those changes. In the days of Docker and KVM that should be quite possible.

I believe at that point the poster child was OpenSSL/SSH, not a kernel.

Why not send short push-to-talk audio messages, walkie-talkie style. Why are we insisting on text?

If all goes through, what will it mean?
If I understood correctly, it allows you to pre-warp some space ahead in your journey, so that you can begin your journey later. For example, to go to Alpha Centauri A, where light takes a few years, you may start the warp drive, wait for a year, then jump into the ship and travel there (taking 1 year less time).

It will not save you anything going to new places you did not plot a course to.

I am also not sure about the speed limits that warp drive imposes. Possibly beyond light speed if it squeezes space enough? (By light speed I mean compared to flat space).

Tell that to the Pioneer 10 spacecraft!

> Once that is done, the value of stingray devices will be moot.

Indeed one can bet that the stingray technology is obsolete and the next surveillance gadgets are ready for use.
 

Right, which is why I added the second sentence. My point is that it could've been phrased in a manner that avoids implying Moscow is a trap, e.g. "unable to return home." I'm sure there are schools of propaganda training that are more subtle and don't pooh-pooh that sort of structuring, but at the very least it implies some restraint on the parts of the authors away from being a proverbial anti-US slant.

I'd really love to see some examples—I've been watching demo competitions for years and I can't recall any efforts that really focused on authentic portrayal of humans.

Yes, I'm very aware that demoscene groups form (often very excellent) game companies, but I don't think any of those endeavours have resulted in products with anything like the quality shown in the video.

And! And: it says Snowden is "trapped" in Moscow, which is not very agitprop-friendly. Workable, but not exactly jingoism.

What does that really matter? Almost by definition, a demoscene prod involves clever choices in what to make and display on screen in order to achieve an effect. I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.) The achievement of this video isn't diminished by the achievements of the scene, nor vice-versa.

Multiple IPs was one solution, but the other was much simpler.

The real address of the computer was its MAC, the prefix simply said how to get there. In the event of a failover, the client's computer would be notified the old prefix was now transitory and a new prefix was to be used for new connections.

At the last common router, the router would simply swap the transitory prefix for the new prefix. The packet would then go by the new path.

The server would multi-home for all prefixes it was assigned.

At both ends, the stack would handle all the detail, the applications never needed to know a thing. That's why nobody cared much about remembering IP addresses, because those weren't important except to the stack. You remembered the name and the address took care of itself.

One of the benefits was that this worked when switching ISPs. If you changed your provider, you could do so with no loss of connections and no loss of packets.

But the same was true of clients, as well. You could start a telnet session at home, move to a cyber cafe and finish up in a pub, all without breaking the connection, even if all three locations had different ISPs.

This would be great for students or staff at a university. And for the university. You don't need the network to be flat, you can remain on your Internet video session as your laptop leaps from access point to access point.

You make it sound like the temperature of the (empty) region averages down the background, making it colder. But something way more awesome actually happens: Photons enter one side of the Void (empty region) at an early time and travel through it. During that time, the Void expands. To escape the Void, the photon then has to lose more energy than it received when it entered. It is the slow light speed relative to these enormous scale, evolving structures that causes this effect!