40GB is going to be the start of the future. With every new generation of consoles so far the size of the game data increases *a lot* because the new generation of console hardware is capable of handling that and competition with other game titles required that the hardware gets pushed to the limit. Get used to it!

And the show is more about the hidden costs of that "business" and the related lifestyle...

Randomness in sensor data surely exists. Take a recording with your computer's microphone or line-in port with maximum amplification and take the least significant bit of each sample. Unless you manage to get a recording where each and every sample is clipped (most won't be, even if you have clipping), the result is very random and absolutely not predictable.

Actually, it is quite true. Slowness in Java can come from many things (inefficient algorithms, inefficient memory usage, overloading the GC with too many claimable objects on the heap, ...), but the code that JITs generate for Java can be very good and fast. At least Sun's/Oracle's JVM really can claim a good performance. I've benchmarked it repeatedly by porting Java code to C++ and running it on the same problem. And I've been surprised. If there's a big performance difference somewhere it's most likely because your own code is doing something wrong and there's often a way to fix it. Of all the things annoying or broken in Java, raw execution speed isn't.

Well, neither gtk nor qt use any drawing primitives within X. They have their own, quite complex internal rendering backends for that and just push the resulting images to the X server in many cases. The reality is a bit more complex than that because they can draw things entirely in software, use OpenGL acceleration, fall back onto the X server for some things where it is useful and so on. But essentially, when you run a gtk and a Qt application at the same time, you're already running that kind of duplication. So with a lightweight display server you get at least the third independent implementation out of your RAM.

Given that the front of those cars is already loaded with sensors for loads of other stuff (braking assistants, etc.) it shouldn't be hard to try to actually figure out the shape of the road ahead...

He is the head of the state. Similar separations of offices exist in other countries. The Weimar constitution did give the President a lot of powers, for instance, to declare a state of emergency and to take any emergency measures he deems necessary. This was a loophole that was exploited by Hitler.

The successor of the that constitution removed almost all remaining powers from the President. This is a mostly representative role these days with very little freedom for making decisions. Most of his tasks (appointing the Chancellor and Ministers, signing laws etc.) are strictly mandated by the constitution. The only exception I know is that he may call the "Bundesverfassungsgericht" (special court ruling on matters related to the constitution) before signing a law if there are serious doubts about the law being in accordance with the constitution.

No, its the head of the executive branch similar to the US President or UK Prime Minister. Chancellor is just a German name for that position.

Same here, strangely enough. Looks like a measure to avoid load caused by foreigners that got curious from all the bad reporting that this website got.

The film opens with a recruitment commercial which is a bit over the top and then shows a small ad like piece of clear propaganda about the new planetary defenses. This should make you suspicious of the tone of the film right there. And as the film goes on, these inserts become more and more ludicrous.

The bugs are not defeated in the film. The ending narration states that the war effort is ongoing with more success than ever. So nothing really has changed. It even stands to reason that the whole Brain Bug hunt is pure propaganda to boost morale and nothing that is actually expected to have a positive impact. Remember, when you watch Starship Troopers you are actually watching a propaganda program that is running a story about some recruits and their story in the service. So you cannot take take anything in the movie quite at face value. Would you like to know more?

I honestly wonder what the systemd developers were thinking when they turned it into a feature-creep laden mountain of mostly annoying features which slowly takes over the system from you. The way it seems to force itself into other things in the system (e.g. by way of systemd-specific modifications in daemons and such) just should have set off a lot of software engineering alarm bells. Why didn't that happen?

Would you like to explain in what way Ardour is lacking? I admit that I have not experience in this matter, but I'm curious. I always notice how OSS graphics tools lack behind commercial offerings and I'm trying to get a better understanding of how this happens. Now I wonder if something similar is going on with audio software.

I have tried SCons and cmake as replacements for Makefiles and I'm pretty happy with cmake. Both tools are better than make in that they have more insight in what you're trying to accomplish and end up doing the right thing in many cases. You certainly don't have to spell out every command explicitly like you have to do with Makefiles.

SCons gives you a lot of programmer's freedom by handing you a whole Python interpreter to work with. That can be cool in some situations, the downside for me is that you have to come up with all the code that configures the build by yourself. The big plus with SCons is that it knows what to do with about any kind of file that can be compiled without having to tell it how to invoke the corresponding compiler.

cmake on the other hand brings a lot of tools that let you spell out the configuration of the build in terms of user-set variables in a very straight-forward manner and it also has. It doesn't run the build, but can generate build scripts or project definition for a lot of environments and IDEs. I find it to be very easy to write cmake scripts that compile moderately complex builds with lots of dependencies on multiple platforms, where each user has his/her dependencies layout it in a different fashion from everyone else.

I'm sorry to say it that way but you are wrong. Google has documentation and sample on writing Android activities without any Java code involved. Take a look at samples/native-activity in the NDK. That's a single C file plus the XML file you need to describe your app. No Java code to go inbetween and make JNI calls.