At present, at least, Google's policy is not to sue over patents, except defensively. This could always change, but I seriously doubt it will while Larry Page is in charge.

Not in quantity.

Actually, studies comparing areas with rent control to areas without, controlling for other factors, indicate that rent controls cause lower housing supplies and higher rents. The market actually does a pretty good job -- certainly far better than planning commissions achieve.

By looking at the source.

You missed his point completely. The point was that many production systems weren't running the new version. Of the 2/3 of web servers that use OpenSSL, it's likely that only half were running a newer OpenSSL. So it's not "every SSL session was (potentially) compromised", it's "about a third of SSL sessions were (potentially) compromised".

That's bad. Really, really bad. But it's not as bad as if OpenSSL really were a monoculture.

Indeed. Sorry I was a little unclear; I mixed two things together there. One is the global equalization, which is going to cause some pain in the wealthy world. Another is the concentration of wealth within nations, particularly (but not only) the wealthy nations. The latter is something that has happened during each technological revolution and the resulting creation of new industries. The captains and leaders of those new industries get insanely wealthy, then over time competitive market forces push margins down and the benefit of the new productivity gets spread to the people.

Both of these things are going on at once, of course.

I don't think that argument went away, it just changed. The core of the concern about silver was that the proposed bimetallic standard overvalued it, meaning that 50% of the value of silver coins would be fiat, not market, value. The issue only "went away" because we opted (for better or worse) to go 100% fiat. So we eliminated the debate by making the problem anti-silverites were declaiming (if it is a problem) infinitely worse.

If you can go back over the output of thousands of creative writers and cherrypick the predictions that vaguely resemble what we have today, of course you can find lots of matches. However, you will find even more failures. Even the successes you mention aren't really all that close... for example the "Star Trek tablet": yes, Star Trek portrayed tablet devices with electronic display screens which accepted stylus input, but look at how different -- and inferior! -- those are to what we have.

As far as I can tell in Star Trek the tablets were used only as a slightly-improved version of the clipboard. The yeoman would bring one over to the captain for him to look at and sign off on some forms, for example. Why? Why not just display the information on the captain's own tablet? And why are the tablets only used for display and entry of text? Why does Spock have to walk over to his station to pull up readings on the unknown being's energy emissions, rather than just flicking it onto his tablet, or the captain's? Our tablets are general-purpose display and input devices -- with audio and video I/O -- and powerful network-connected computers in their own right. They're also full of sensors: GPS, magnetic compass, barometric altimeter, gyro, accelerometer, camera, not to mention all of the radios. They look more like the Star Trek tricorder rather than the tablet.

Really, the only thing Star Trek tablets have in common with today's tablet computers is the form factor... and even that isn't all that similar, since they were over an inch thick and had much smaller screens relative to their area. Further, the form factor is an extremely obvious one, since clipboards have been around since the late 19th century, and people have likely been using something similar to tally on for millennia.

I don't think we'll see displays above ~1000 DPI. Yes, manufacturers will have to find something to convince people to buy new devices, but there are limits beyond which it just doesn't make sense. Marketing will push us some distance past those limits, but the farther past them you go, the harder it gets to sell the idea that it matters when it clearly doesn't.

Which was a pretty reasonable projection, given that the cities were all ankle deep in horse manure in the mid 19th century. It was a huge problem. It's a great example, though, of how the apparently-insurmountable problems that we face in the near future are often not just addressed by new technology, but completely obsoleted, made irrelevant because the underlying solutions to other problems change. In the 19th century the problem appeared to be how to collect and transport kilotons of manure daily. But the real problem was how to provide transportation without horses.

Our current problem set includes the pollution generated by the solution to the horse manure problem. Perhaps the solution is how to make cars that collect, rather than emit, all their pollution, or to make cars that merely emit substantially less, or to make electric or hydrogen-powered cars that don't emit anything (moving the emissions, perhaps), to reduce the amount of travel we do (e.g. telecommuting), or perhaps something entirely different which none of us can even envision (FYI, my prognostication is that it'll bit of each of the above, but I'm probably wrong).

Google Maps shows Crimea as part of Russia to users from Russia, and part of Ukraine to the rest of the world.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/04/12/302337754/google-maps-displays-crimean-border-differently-in-russia-u-s

This is nothing new. As the article above mentions the name of the Arabian Gulf also changes depending on where you are, and mentions that there are many more cases. I believe Taiwan may be another. This approach is clearly a compromise, and like all compromises, makes no one really happy.

LOL, only to internal customers =)

Yes, I've heard of Xen, and I've even run it in production, both Xenserver and Oracle VM flavors, and both sucked horribly. Back when VMWare tried the v.Tax I contemplated switching to KVM using RHEV but Redhat took almost 30 days to even get me access to a RHEV download by which time VMWare had backed off on their pricing.

As to the crack about redundancy and scalability, I've got a better uptime metric than any cloud provider, zero unplanned downtime in the last 5 years (vmotion + svmotion makes replacing both hosts and storage a breeze) thanks to redundant generators, UPS, chillers, and internet connections.

AWS is expensive, I can provide the equivalent of an m3.large reserved instance to my users for 1/4th the cost over 3 years, if you ammatorize my infrastructure over 5 years (which is what we've actually been doing) then it's almost 1/7th as much. The only places where AWS makes sense is if you're a quickly growing startup, have a VERY bursty workload, or you're so small that you can't justify 3 hosts for a VMWare Essentials bundle.

It's not a rumor, they showed a start menu + live tiles demo at BUILD this year.