The whole point of science is using a process that will lead to more reliable results. If we stay quiet about weaknesses of the process or how it's executed, what is left will be science in name but not actually valuable.

They switched from PPC to Intel when it became clear that Intel had better performance per Watt. They might switch again if ARM stays ahead of Intel in power efficiency now that ARM CPUs are getting powerful enough to run a desktop. The switch should be relatively painless since they support the ARM platform already and their legacy code has been through the PPC to x86 to x86-64 conversions, so unportable code got broken and replaced.

However, that doesn't mean that they're going to merge laptops and phones. While it is technically feasible, I haven't seen any convincing use cases.

If you count just the amount of information released, maybe. But the people in this administration are control freaks when it comes to deciding which information gets released, and they lash out when someone releases information against their wishes. Also transparency in itself is not enough: for example campaign contributions are public, but they are still a corrupting influence.

We put our interns (CS students) on proof-of-concept projects. This gives the intern some shiny new tech to play with and it minimizes the risk to the primary business. If the project goes well, you can see whether the concept is promising to develop further, plus you get advance warning on some of the implementation problems, such as bugs in new devices or tooling. It does require some effort to get the intern up to speed and help them across some roadblocks they will encounter, but if the intern is any good this will be less work than figuring out everything yourself.

Internships are also a useful way to find people to hire after they graduate. You get to observe their work closely, so you'll know whether they are the kind of person you'd want to have in your company or not. And the intern gets to know people at the company, making your company more attractive and accessible for them to apply for a job when they start looking for one.

I'm a big Python fan, but not so fond of SCons. I think this is mostly a documentation issue: there is a manual which explains things superficially and contains some examples, but what I really want is to have the underlying concepts explained thoroughly. When working on a build system, there are usually multiple ways you could implement something, but they are not equivalent in terms of reliability (robustness against transient failure or user error) and flexibility for future changes in requirements (new platforms with their own weirdness etc). With SCons I could get things to work, but I never really had the feeling I knew why this was the right way to do it.

(I'm sorry if this is a bit vague, but it's been several years and I don't remember all the details anymore.)

There isn't really a build system that I do like; most of the time I settle on plain GNU Make (for simple projects) or GNU Make with included Makefiles generated by Python scripts (for complex projects).

Android is rather resource hungry, but the Linux kernel is not the cause of that. I've run Linux on a handheld game console with 32MB RAM and it has enough memory left to run most applications we've thrown at it.

Some years ago I tried using KDE3 from a machine on the same floor, using Exceed and a win32 build of Xorg as the X servers. If I disabled rounded window corners and picked a theme without gradients, it was somewhat usable, but not as responsive as I'd like (this was my main dev box). I ended up switching to NX, which worked very well for me.

Which highly desirable features are you referring to?

In case you meant network transparency, X11 doesn't have that anymore either. Sure, you can run xterm remotely with decent performance, but as soon as you start using client-rendered fonts (the only way to get anti-aliasing), gradients or lots of images, performance of X11 becomes so slow that the networking can no longer be considered "transparent". Overall you'll probably get better performance from VNC than from X11.

To really cut down on waste, new phones should be shipped without a charger. A lot of people opt to get a new phone when their two-year contract ends, while a charger could easily last 10-20 years.

The key distribution system can be secured, since it resides on the server side and the server is in the hands of someone trusted by the rights owner. The key itself cannot be secured, since it is needed on the end user's machine to unlock the content. It could be hidden within the client, but that could be cracked. This comes down to the fundamental problem of DRM: you cannot both let the end user have the content for the purpose of playing it and not have the content for the purpose of copying it.

But looking at it from a security point of view is the wrong approach: there is no direct harm from unauthorized people accessing the content; these are not secret documents. The harm comes from too many people deciding not to pay for it. The solution therefore is in influencing the decision to pay for the content.

The duplication equipment would be an additional expense and isolating and duplicating the marker DNA an additional skill set required for counterfeiting, so it is a deterrent even if it can be circumvented.

There is not enough information out there yet to say. I think a lot will depend on how well the client is written and how easy the payment procedure is.

Another question is whether they will insist on people using their client or open up the format for inclusion in third party media players etc.

I don't think these bundles would be very popular on The Pirate Bay, but they could be distributed via the artist's own site or via a store/portal/search engine that only contains these bundles etc. Studies have shown that a lot of the big media consumers both pay and pirate. Of course there are people who will never pay for anything, but there are also a lot of people who will pay in the right circumstances.

A lot of people don't realize how much effort it takes to create something of decent quality, because they've never tried it themselves. As for opposing the megacorps, that sounds like an excuse to me. If you're really serious about undermining the power of the MPAA/RIAA, don't pirate their stuff, but buy from indies instead.

I have no idea whether it will be successful. It does have some advantages: The peer-to-peer nature of BitTorrent means artists without a big budget can get their works distributed without having to pay for a lot of bandwidth. And if the unlocking works as I expect - buying a decryption key from a server - the reward for buying the content is immediately available, since the files are already on your harddisk.

True, but is that really a problem? DRM has, as far as I know, never been successful in preventing pirate versions from being posted. The goal should be that artists get paid, not to have zero piracy. Having an additional way to distribute content which includes payments to the artist will help, if it is convenient enough.

Looking at the logo on their home page, I think it's pronounced "bee hive".

The "evil bit" is from the mentioned RFC 3514.