Currently we are covering the Earth with greenhouses because (drumroll) they provide a better (yes, I said it) environment for plants than nature does.

In 400,000 years, one can imagine most of the Earth covered by greenhouses.

Think about that for a moment.

So of course any space colonization will be based on greenhouses and not on terraforming or any other such nonsense.

If what you write were true, it would have happened a very long time ago.

But it didn't. Why?

Because a language is basically like a uniform that marks "us" vs. "them". It creates group cohesion and community.

To be exact any non-English language, because English is spoken by anybody anyway, therefore does not give any identity.

English-speakers everywhere (be it a native US or a cosmopolitan European or Chinese) are having very few children and are living in a destructive "pop culture" that is not very conducive for large families.

Non-English-speakers on the other hand are isolated from "pop culture" a lot better, therefore can have more stable and larger families - and are growing in all countries.

That trend can be seen everywhere. Traditional English speakers will be a minority in all the major English-speaking nations (US, UK, Australia). Maybe they can hold out and maintain a majority in New Zealand.

A good example are the Amish: Just 200 Swiss/Germans came to America and they did NOT assimilate. 200 years later they are 250,000 and still doubling every generation. That is only possible because they are isolated from the majority culture - and their ancient German dialect is one of the things that helps them do that: If the children don't understand Lady Gaga, they won't be influenced by her.

And that is the reason why no language replaced all the others: When the dominant culture/language becomes decadent, people have no other choice than to push other cultures/languages in order to survive.

True enough, but of course, that's not what happens, so... Effectively -- of course they can and do switch roles when memory is shared -- one is monitoring your ethernet, several are kicking in and out of httpd threads and/or processes, and so on for hundreds of OS tasks, and if you're like me, more than a few users tasks as well. For every task within a process that isn't hidebound by disk (and there are already a lot of them) having an additional available core is a very worthy thing.

Yeah, that's the theory.

In real life, my 6-core, 32 GB-RAM box swaps even the tiniest process to disk (which is of course SSD) so that even opening the KDE-menu takes ages after some time.

I think programmers are just too lazy to really use the hardware (which exists already today). For example the smart thing to do would be to make sure that the user interface is never swapped to disk. That would reduce available RAM only slightly but would dramatically improve performance.

But of course nobody does it because 1) their mind was closed by academia which preaches inefficient but supposedly programmer-friendly things like OO, scripting, one-size-fits-all frameworks etc. and 2) because everybody is hoping to squash every problem with faster hardware.

So it won't happen.

In 20 years, we will run huge machines that will slow down everything by running as much as possible on Python and Javascript because that's what is hip and performance be damned. (Isn't the Windows 8 framework - user interface based on CSS and Javascript already?)
Performance will probably suffer because instead of having fonts on disk (how 20th-century is that?) our computers will load fonts from Google about 10 times per hour.

No. I live in a small country (less than 10 Mio pop.) and we have only a rudimentary espionage agency that only seems to exists as an excuse (they never did anything notable - ever).

And you know what? No false flag terror attacks, no privacy invasions, no nothing.

If "It's not rocket science" then how are the security services getting back to the end users over generations of networking products?

Not by "breaking" VPN.

They compromised the hardware (got it while it was shipped) or tried dictionary attacks. The former will only work when they already read your snail-mail and the latter will only work when you use weak passwords.

They don't have some magic pixie dust that can hack into everything.

Exactly.

Non-technical journalists who have no idea write these scare-articles because they have to turn everything into some alarmist nonsense.

So in other words if somebody takes a bathroom break, his desk may be taken by somebody coming in and he has to look for a new desk (probably from somebody else who is in the restroom)?

Basically the article assumes that everything the PHP team puts out is "insecure" and that Linux distributors have some magic pixie dust that makes it "secure".

Both assumptions are wrong:

- First, the latest version of PHP will fix all known security vulnerabilities and will be as secure as those patched by Linux distributors.
- Second, just because a distribution "supports" a PHP version does not make it any more secure.

Pure clickbait.

Everybody, including the people who wrote the summary are treating patents as if they were perpetual - but they are not.

AFAIK the really good patents (about the FAT-filesystem) are expiring 2015. There are still some shady non-essential FAT-patents that expire IIRC until 2017, but those are easily worked around, have tons of prior art, are about non-essential features and/or are laughably frivolous.

So of course a patent-portfolio purchased in 2011 may be worth a lot less today. It may be even worthless, depending on what patents have expired. Basically the worth of a patent portfolio can be calculated by how much money could be milked so far (by royalties or monopoly pricing) from it multiplied by the time still left until expiration. So most patent portfolios will lose value over time (although there may be rare exceptions when some revolutionary products come out - but that did not happen since 2011).

People, do you remember the gif-pdf patent outrcry? It's ancient history now - and all these patents will be history in just a few years because most of them were filed in the 1990s.

That is the result of progressive education and a lowering of all standards for inclusivity.

BGP at "tiny" is even better than WebP at "small" - pretty impressive.

GIF is still superior for many use-cases, like small pictures with just a handful of colors. And it's not just a small difference, PNG takes several times the space than GIF in that area. (Yes, there are also use-cases where PNG is better - but PNG is not a replacement for GIF everywhere)

Exactly. And because a Javascript implementation is available it works right now on every browser.

I agree with you about MP3/Ogg - but the Javascript decoder (used for example in http://bellard.org/bpg/gallery...) could make all the difference.

Basically it means that the server admin can reap the benefits (bandwidth) while the user has to handle the legacy conversion (Javascript runs on the user's machine). Therefore there is practically no downside for those who decide what is on a webpage.

And once this format is even just semi-widespread, browsers will start to support it too - and then it's a standard.

Exactly. It is the nearest and therefore most accessible large Kuiper belt objects. Sure there are others and bigger ones, but they are somewhat more distant.