If you discovered a new gene responsible for Alzheimer's you would get cited in a lot of medical journals, but devise a new and particularly useful computational method (i.e a new and particularly useful linear system solver or numerical integration scheme) and you can have an impact on nearly every scientific field.

You are of course right, but it is impossible to be a communist and not be at odds with the current establishment (your upper class overlords) of the US. It was genius to label socialism and communism as 'unamerican'. That way they could label all their political foes as traitors.

"The more accurate such advertising gets, the more value-per-print it can generate, and therefore the less overall advertising will be required to sustain the "free" services we use. One well-chosen ad is worth dozens of spammy ones."

That is just frighteningly naive. Surely you understand that more value-per-print does not mean less advertising, but simply more profit?

Great. So go live in an ideal world without those people so that you can implement a society without rules, where people just play nicely with each other.

The fact is; on every street in every town in every country there is at least one arse who will take full advantage of their freedom to fuck you over. You have a lovely sea view? The arse will build a massive garage blocking your view. Or opposite, you have a lovely old three hundred year old oak tree in your garden... when you come home one day that tree is lying across your lawn because the arse wanted a better view. Lots and lots of people care about nothing but themselves and their own. The only reason it is even remotely possible for us to live together in cities in relative peace is government and laws describing the limits to our freedom to fuck people over for our own benefit. Try going to cities where government and law enforcement has broken down.

There is very little point in an autonomous car in which you 'have to be on the alert' and 'be ready to take over in case of a possible accident'. You may as well be driving yourself. The point of an autonomous car is to take away the requirement you pay attention to the road to free you up to do other things, i.e. read a book, watch a film, have a nap, stare out at the lovely scenery in the distance, have a beer, none of which are possible if you are required to be able to take over if something goes wrong, you simply wouldn't be able to switch context quickly enough, so the car will have to deal with any emergency itself.

So assuming we're talking about the only type of automomous car which makes sense, no license should be required as no driving skill will have any impact.

If the app is built on top of GTK+ (I assume Qt is the same?), the app will support both and the backend will be selected at runtime.

I.e. GDK_BACKEND will be wayland by default, but if you log in via ssh and set X forwarding, it can be set to "X11". It should be completely seamless.

After reading this story and this older story (which has 5 backers and a nice 390 Euro beer kitty) I can't help thinking I want in on this action.

Do I need to invent a ridiculous company idea or is it enough to just ask for donations for my holiday fund?

The picture quality is excellent and puts the streaming alternatives to shame. But every time I play a film that I've bought legally from a reputable shop, they treat me like a dirty, stinking pirate. I get shown lots of warnings and there's lots of unskippable propaganda sequences, I've even seen unskippable ads. Even worse, the player shows an obnoxious "this operation is illegal" when I attempt to skip these things and this warning requires an extra click to get rid of. I love buying a real physical disc and watching proper quality video on my TV, it feels much more like a proper movie night, but they were testing my patience from day 1 and this patience has run out.

The lesson as I see it: don't treat your legitimate customers like criminals. The first thing pirates do is strip these obnoxious warnings.

This should be the first thing you tell your mother or Aunt Tilly [tm].

If you do the occasional shopping, email and Facebook usage you only really need to know one password; your email account. The others can be stored in your browser/app or reset if you ever forget. Having to do a password reset before doing your "once-a-year" ordering of photo-books is a minor inconvenience compared to having to remember loads of different passwords or worse; using the same password for all sites.

Teach Aunt Tilly [tm] the typical password-reset procedure and tell her that she doesn't have to remember these passwords, so there's no need for the password to be simple.Shopping sites really should move away from using passwords anyway. They can store a token in your browser and perform a reset using your email address if you're using a browser without the token. They can also do periodic resets of the token.

Just make sure that Aunt Tilly [tm] knows that there is one password that needs to be GOOD and she needs some way of remembering it; her email account. Having access to your email account would give criminals many great ways of screwing you over, since they can reset nearly all your passwords that way.

If she really can't remember a complicated password, then writing it down on a piece of paper in her house is much less likely to cause her trouble than using "mathilda" or "whiskers" as her password.

Meanwhile, in an alternate dimension (Norway):
Civilian 2014 Ford Fiesta 1.0L/80-hp $29,116.

I'll counter your anecdote with one of my own. I've seen dozens of iPhones in the hands of friends and co-workers. Only one of them ever had broken glass (the back panel) and that was in the hands of one of the biggest drunks I've ever known.

You simply only notice what you want to notice.

It may not produce many flying cars, but it may pay for a few rounds of drinks! And thankfully they use flexible funding, so they'll get their bar bill covered even if only four people have donated so far.

From the page:
"This campaign will receive all funds raised even if it does not reach its goal. Funding duration: March 31, 2014 - May 15, 2014 (11:59pm PT)."

I hear you, but I hope they just might care if someone grabs their credit card and bank details, or much worse; their PC gets turned into a file server for child porn and they have to defend themselves in both the proper courts and the courts of public opinion.

I know the overwhelming majority of posts here seem to be about this being a sad day for freedom of speech. But nobody has taken away Mr Eichs right to speak.
A large group of users (and donors) have, however, made it clear that they may want to excercise their right to use and donate to whatever they want, and Mr Eichs campaigning and donating to remove people's rights may impact on that decision.

Given that Mr Eich was the CEO and not some low-level employee, it is much harder to separate his personal beliefs from that of the organisation. Furthermore, a lot of donors may be uncomfortable with the idea that their donations may well go towards funding campaigns for anti-Gay legislation. Yes, that is always a possibility as employees of an organisation are allowed to do what they want with their salary, but nobody would be as well-enumerated and as public as Mr Eich.

I believe most of your arguments have been answered by other posters... except this one:

What is the difference between hiring a good 60 year old and good 25-year old? You will probably have the 60 year old for 4-5 years. The 25-year old will leave after 2-3 years for greener grass elsewhere. If you really want a steady hand who will stay for a long while, hire a 50-55-year old with grandchildren nearby and target extra incentives to make them stay longer. I'm not talking about throwing money at them, but rather things like 5 days extra holiday a year and the option of an unpaid sabbatical. 50+ year olds are likely to have seen it all and knows better than to jump ship whenever something fancy comes along. As long as they feel valued and well treated they are more likely to stick around.