Well, sort of. Clause 7 could be interpreted as a patent license, in that if you knowingly distribute code that violates your patents then you are violating the license if you don't also include a patent grant. In v3 it's more explicit precisely because it was ambiguous in v2. It's up to the court to decide whether this ambiguous license is a license.

In the book, Pris and Rachel are the same model and identical. Rachel seduces Deckard so that he will have an emotional reaction to Pris, which will slow him down. In the film, she seduces him because the film wanted some implication of sex at that point.

In the book, there's a lot of ambiguity about whether Decard is human, but only in his mind. There's also another bounty hunter who fails the empathy test when asked about androids, but passes it when asked about humans. The 'electric sheep' line from the title is a reference to the fact that, after almost destroying themselves in a nuclear war, humans are expected to keep pets to demonstrate their empathy and it's been engrained in the survivors as the most important character trait, yet the manipulate their emotions with mood organs and via shared religious experiences. Most of the subtext was lost in the movie (fortunately, so was the weird subplot about the police precinct populated entirely by androids, who believed that they were humans hunting androids).

The problem is that they don't differentiate categories well. Having bought some kind of computer thing means that I might be interested in buying some kind of computer thing again, but having bought one hard drive probably doesn't mean that I want another very similar (but not identical) one soon. In books, it's very different - if I've bought one novel then I probably want to buy another very similar (but not identical) one next time I shop. The same is true for a lot of things on Amazon - DVDs, CDs, and even clothes - and so the algorithm works pretty well overall, it just fails laughably in some cases (ah, you've bought a USB flash drive, do you want to buy a different USB flash drive with the same capacity?).

Even without direct enumeration, it's still relatively easy to find. The object / embed tags can be nested for fallback and the resource is only requested if you have that plugin installed. You can provide a load of 1px objects with different nesting and just check in the server which cookies show up in the requests.

It's easy to prevent. The browser should only expose a whitelisted set of system fonts to the web, which would then tell you nothing that wasn't in the user agent string to start with. With the widespread support for Web Open Font Format, it's easy for designers to provide additional fonts if they want to use them. I don't want something random on the web to be rendered in, for example, the Quake font, just because I happen to have it installed - it's almost certainly not what the developers intended, and if it is then they should use a .woff file.

Add to that, it's relatively easy to wrap your images in a noscript tag referencing a JPG version, so for the cost of storing two versions of the image on the server, you get to save money on bandwidth for anyone whose client can support it and not degrade the user experience for people who can't.

These prototyping boards are fairly expensive (around $40), but the system is amazing - web-based IDE and the device appears as a USB mass storage device that you can just drop the code onto. They're easy to drop into a breadboard and connect other stuff to. ARM's pushing them for the kinds of people who wouldn't normally do embedded development, but I'd love to see them in schools. They have similar I/O capabilities to the BBC Micros that we used in the '80s and '90s, but are small enough that you can put the controller in the computer. I don't know how much the microcontroller itself is in bulk, but I'm really impressed with the prototyping system and I'd love to see them in schools.

No, you made general statements about open source. You said Linux, but you then mentioned a bunch of projects that are part of the wider open source ecosystem. With regard to FreeBSD on the desktop, the FreeBSD Foundation funded much of the work to bring GPU support up to parity with Linux and iX Systems sells machines preinstalled with PC-BSD (FreeBSD plus some other stuff aimed at desktops) and pays most of their developers.

And that's where you go right back to your original false equivalence. The devs who are doing that are not doing it for free. They are paid. This is true for Linux, FreeBSD, or any other moderately large open source project. And they're paid because the people paying them benefit from the project being taken from hobbyist quality to professional quality.

That's not even a new phenomenon. The original NFS is a good example: Sun hired ex-UCB people to work on BSD because they needed a decent OS to sell workstations. They released NFS as open source because they could sell more servers if everyone's clients used their protocol. No one was working for free.

The clever people use C when C is the right tool for the job and use something else when it isn't. The rest use C, Python, or whatever else their favourite language is, irrespective of whether it's the right tool.

You're conflating the language and the implementation. LLVM does lots of optimisations for bitfield manipulation and has various patterns in the back ends for using them and intrinsics so that you can help the compiler out. If you're seeing some missed optimisation opportunities, then please file bug reports.

The mbed development environment for the ARM Cortex M series uses C++, but you need to stick to a fairly limited subset of C++ to fit within the requirements, at which point you're basically using C with an annoying type system and some nice syntactic sugar for constructing vtables.

Rust is a reasonable replacement for a lot of the things that C is good at. Go is a good replacement for a lot of the things that C is bad at but is used for anyway.

You seem to be conflating open source with non-profit community-developed. I can't speak for Linux, but in the FreeBSD world a significant fraction of the developers are working on bits of the project in exchange for money, because it's cheaper for their employers to improve FreeBSD than it is for them to develop something bespoke.

The guys at Netflix, for example, have a workload that involves sending 1MB chunks of data as fast as they can over the network. When they started, I think they could saturate a 10Gb/s ethernet link, but not two. Now, I don't know the exact numbers, but I think they're saturating one 40GB/s link and starting to look at how much of a bottleneck their storage is.

The folks at Juniper have been working on turning some of the data types that the kernel exposes for network stack internals into opaque types so that they can have drivers for their stuff that are stable over lots of kernel revisions.

A few people, including some people from iX Systems, have been improving the QA infrastructure so that soon on each commit we'll be able to automatically build the system, boot it in a VM and run regression tests. After that, it will step up to net booting some real machines and running performance regression tests (and booting some platforms like ARM and MIPS and running regression tests there).

Lots of core infrastructure projects like this are done because the people who make money from the software existing need them to exist. Sure, they wouldn't be done for a toy project run by hobbyists that no one is using in production, but no big open source project fits that description (it's very hard to become big if you do).