I thought egcs was one example of a non-GNU fork becoming so much better that the official gcc was abandoned and the egcs version adopted as the official gcc.

Ad block is only a minor annoyance at the moment. When it reaches critical mass, sites will find ways to block the adblock users.

It's hard enough for human to keep attentive on the road when they are fully in control of the car. Can you imagine humans having to take over when something has failed. By the time the human being realises that their car has failed and they are required to take over, they will have crashed already.

"Human taking over" is a really really bad failure mode in a self driving car. It's way worse than the computer trying to take appropriate action to prevent accidents and loss of life.

They make the mistake of thinking that you can get to self driving cars with a lot of miniscule improvements on current technology such as automatic braking and cruise control. A self driving car is an entirely new paradigm, much like the horseless carriage was a completely different paradigm. If you want to make a self driving car, then the working assumption should be that it has one mode - self driving. Actually, imagine the car without a steering wheel, no accelerator pedals or brakes. Imagine the car going round town with no driver in it. If the failure mode of your imagined self-driving car requires a driver to take over, then you have failed to create a viable self driving car.

Warrant canaries are about providing information that is useful The government can make the canaries useless by effectively forcing companies to not publish one indefinitely. yes, people will take note when they disappear, but that will be the last you hear of them. And that is all that matters.

The TLAs have two options, either gag companies (which would be messy), or DOS them by sending them warrants every day.

Warrant canaries sound clever, but they are easily defeated. Remember, the only thing a company can say is that is hasn't received a warrant. If it receives one every day, then they effectively can never publish a canary. The TLAs can effectively DOS the warrant canaries in their current form.

I would suggest there is a much cleaner way for the TLAs to make warrant canaries ineffective. Send a warrant to every company that publishes a canary. In a short space of time, no company of any note will have a canary, and the whole point of issuing a canary is defeated.

It took Blackberry until 2013 before they had a decent competitor for the iPhone. It didn't take 6 years to develop that phone. It took incompetence to conspire to fail to launch a decent phone for that long while everyone was eating their lunch.

A lot of the bits that made the iPhone so good were free. The web browser was essentially free (Webkit). Why did it take that long for the likes of Blackberry to get decent browsers?

And besides, if your business is making phones and staying ahead of your competitors, how is it that Apple, a company with zero experience making phones or even touchscreen devices, was able to get out ahead of the likes of Nokia and effectively cause their demise?

If the cost of renunciation is too big for you to contemplate it, then by definition having a US citizenship is worth more than the rather low cost of renunciation. If $2000 is all that is keeping you from renouncing the citizenship, then you are obviously not that much worse off for having to pay taxes on your earnings abroad.

The USA is one country that does go out of its way to protect its citizens abroad, probably to the point of pissing off a lot of other countries, and that costs money. If you would rather not have that, then renounce.

Besides, I am sure there are arrangements to ensure that you don't pay more tax than you would if you were living and working in America e.g. due to the use of tax credits.

So Government should make all taxes undodgeable!

I would have to add that AMD management has also been asleep at the wheel. They are in the tech business. They ought to have tried to outflank Intel, rather than to take them head on.

For example, they should have jumped onto the Android phone bandwagon and just made a phone. They have a decent brand, and I am sure I would have bought their phone. They needed something that will give them good margins, and CPUs ain't it. Apple showed the world how to beat an 800 pound gorilla. Don't take them head on. Go left field.

Apple made outrageous margins on phone to the extent that they are now way more profitable than Microsoft. Honestly, even though I thought Apple would do well, I never saw that coming.

AMD cannot compete with Intel head on. No one can. You need God money to get anywhere close.

No, no one wants an init system. No one ever built a computer to run an init system. It's incidental to what people need computers to do. The only question worth asking is whether systemD is useful or not.

I can believe that an init system may not need IP forwarding and routing, but I can also believe it would be useful to build those services into the init system to.

It's nowhere as cut and dried as many try to make it out to be.

How exactly do dealers prevent manufacturers from setting prices? How do they force BMW and Mercedes from demanding a specific wholesale price. And if a wholesale price is high enough for BMW to not care who sells their car (as long as they take responsibility for service/maintenance) why should they care.

Tesla doesn't want to be in a showroom where the dealer is trying to sell other cars. It would be too easy for a dealer to push people towards other cars if they believe Teslas are a hard sell. Their success does not depend on selling Teslas. It depends on selling lots of cars, and they don't necessarily care which ones they sell. Unless, of course, Tesla gives them very large inducements to sell their cars.

Basically, they want to run a protection racket - give us large commissions/discounted wholesale prices, or your lovely electric cars won't sell.

Actually, there are safe solutions. Geologically secure sites where we can stored nuclear waste and not worry about it getting into ground water or leaking into the environment exist. It is well within our capability to safely dispose of nuclear waste. The only problem is political, and the irrational fear of anything nuclear.

Sony Pictures is an American company that happens to be owned by a Japanese conglomerate. Sony bought out an American company.

Put it this way, no one considers Chrysler an Italian company. Neither is Sony Pictures.

I can just about agree that there are some distasteful things in the email exchanges, but the bit about Jennifer Lawrence being paid less than Christian Bale or Bradley Cooper is not such a big deal to me. Having watched the movie, it was rather obvious that the main protagonists in the movie were Bradley Cooper and Christian Bale's character. Jennifer Lawrence had a comparably smaller part in the movie. She was still getting paid a damn lot for it though.