Well, if you want Kickstarter to be your go-no go decision maker then you can't wait so long you're already pot committed, as they'd say at the poker table. If you're half finished and your Kickstarter fails, what do you do? Throw away all that work and start over on something else? Try to salvage it and publish something, even if it has lackluster appeal? Not to mention then you must go it alone, if you already know you can finish it alone do you really need Kickstarter? My impression is that Kickstarter works best when your "selling points" aren't your product but your reputation and history. I donated fairly big to the Musopen project because there was quite a bit of history to show that yes, they're serious about creating free music but lacked the funds to do it. I'd be very weary of people with just photoshop and powerpoint skills.

Well even if you got most people to agree this is a bad thing there's also the small problem of what line of action would ultimately make things better and not be horribly much worse in the meantime. It'd be an awful shame if it ended up being "meet the new boss, same as the old boss".as they too are corrupted by the establishment, now you have a third party whose politics you feel is nuts as well. Or perhaps I should say that the other way around, chances are they'd have to sell out to get to power otherwise they'd be fought tooth and nail every step of the way. There will be a massive gloom and doom campaign about all the horrors that would bring and people get scared. Even if what they have isn't fair the world isn't unicorns and rainbows and it could get a whole lot worse.

For example many of the people in the Arab spring, they topple a secular dictator in the hope of freedom and democracy and end up with extreme religious fundamentalists taking over the country. Granted, it probably wouldn't come to that but even if we take the Civil War that ended slavery and whatnot there's probably a whole lot of injured or dead soldiers and civilians, people who had lost someone or all their belongings or property who'd rather wish they'd let the Confederacy go. It's easy to point out the flaws in the old system. It's hard to make people believe in change. It's much harder still to make change. And no, I'm not trying to point out one politician in particular they all tend to backtrack on their promises once they get into office. What is going to make people believe you're actually going to be different?

I also think you have to consider Google's risk/reward here. They wanted to pass the test and most of all they did not want to get involved in any accidents, even one where the car was driving technically correct but "unhuman" as that would be used in no small about of FUD. They passed, they got their license to drive, they got the PR and the news that they couldn't drive a roundabout two years ago is nothing compared to the bad PR they'd get for crashing in a roundabout.

And the railroad thing was just policy, it can't be that much harder than crossing a priority road. Or maybe they just hadn't bothered to implement that logic, since almost all crossings in central areas have signals/gates. I just checked here in Norway and all public roads now have that, there are ~3100 unsecured crossings but all on private roads.

I think "a filesystem with ECC (like memory) and ACID (like a good database)" is as close as you come for an elevator pitch. I've had bits flip, whether it's in memory or on disk or in transit I'm not really sure but it happens. Like for example I create "known good" PARs for a 5GB video and later it fails CRC, If you use a hex editor compare tool it'll show a single bit difference. Backups are neat, but you really want control over bit rot - real bit rot - so you don't end up with slow corruption. ZFS pretty much makes sure that what you take backup of is good.

Intel has been very good at making efficient CPUs, but not systems. If you want to make a <5W SoC there's a whole lot of other skills you need than a 15-150W processor and Intel has clearly been on a steep learning curve there. Also they've been geared a lot towards efficient computing, while the chips that go into phones and tablets are far more about being efficient at idle and light load. Intel has been learning many new tricks to only power up what they need in the lowest possible power state for a short a time as possible. The improvements for a processor running at 100% load 24x7 has been far more moderate.

Good, because you're putting words in his mouth. I could do math with pen and paper, without computers and calculators and my answers would at least theoretically be just as correct but it wouldn't be cost-efficient at all. It's an apples and oranges comparison but Hubble cost:

Space Shuttle program cost:

The numbers we'd really like to know though is that out of those $2.5 billion to design and construct, how much would it cost to just make a new Hubble and launch it. Just the five servicing missions (confusingly named 1, 2, 3A, 3B, 4) alone at $450 million each - that's aggregate, not marginal cost though - would be $2.25 billion. It is certainly possible to argue that science would have progressed further without the Shuttle program, all things considered.

There are certain ways ACID compliance is important and certain ways it is not, in fact sometimes it's a hinderance. In particular the following:

One patient's records must be consistent only with itself, you don't need the whole patient table to be consistent. It's a problem because you do need to have cross-table consistency (patients, episodes, diagnosises, treatments, medications and so on) which can lead to locking issues while they're really millions of records living in parallel. Really I'd like to treat them as millions of microtables that happen to share the same structure but never cross lock.

Perhaps in a hospital you can do synchronization at a database level but for an exchange or common journal you have to assume records come in asynchroneously, your general physician might finish some paperwork while you're in emergency care at the same time as a lab result you've waited a week for comes in. The actual ordering they're applied in doesn't matter, there must be rules so (A,B,C), (C,A,B) and (B,C,A) all end up the same result. This means you can relax the hard synchronization of for example a bank account where it is essential that the transactions are applied in order and rejected if you're overdrawing your account, but that's hard in SQL.

That doesn't just apply to the ordering of writes but also querying. If two people at different hospitals tries to pull up your medical records it is important they're not corrupt but it's not essential that an update being distributed is presented to both or none. In fact, for essential robustness they should be able to continue working independently if the connection is broken and when the connection is restored the records are reconciled. That kind of shard and merge is generally a problem relational databases don't handle while the distributed synchronization is rather essential and implicit in NoSQL solutions.

There's still a >10:1 cost difference between 4TB HDDs and 1TB SSDs and SSD prices are not dropping that fast. Current SSDs are already on the bleeding edge of processing technology with 16nm MLC so there's fairly limited density increases and big durability issues ahead. I guess the wildcard is 3D NAND, but much like going multicore for CPUs it's a substitute. However, they are taking over all normal end user uses in cell phones and tables and laptops, it's just the big bulk storage left.

Unfortunately the whole market has leaped off the deep end on this one with "small" models bigger than the old flagships like for example the LG G2 Mini is 4.7", Sony Xperia Z3 Compact is 4.6" and the Samsung Galaxy S5 Mini and HTC One Mini 2 are both 4.5" - just as big as the new iPhone. I won't even comment on the 5" LG G3 Mini, as opposed to the full 5.5" version. In fact Apple is the only one who calls a <5" screen normal anymore. Obviously with a smaller screen and smaller phone you can't put the biggest, fastest and most features in it but I still find it disappointing that nobody takes the small sized phones seriously. I'm consider the Z3 Compact as it seems to be a decent compromise, but will wait until the reviews are out.

Good for you. Mine is all e-bank and I tend to like it that way. Same with most the e-tailers I shop at, the intersection with physical retailers is slim. How do you visit Gmail or Facebook? Speaking of which, people often have a different third party between them and whoever they're communicating with. You could always pretend it's not signed you know, what would you do? Send an email, asking them if that's their real certificate? Try to verify it through your "web of trust", which includes a bunch of dimwits who'll make the CAs look good? No, I wouldn't trust them for real end-to-end encryption but it's mostly good enough.

CAs takes the fradulent redirect threat down, but they could always just hack your computer and keylog everything, they could hack the bank, it could be an inside job, they could social engineer you into thinking this is a legitimate certificate update or they could social engineer the bank into thinking you've made a new certificate or whatever. It doesn't matter how many inches of steel the front door is if the rest is plywood and glass windows. Direct out of band secure exchange is of course technically the best, but also the most inconvenient. I guess you should also swap giant OTPs, wouldn't want to trust AES right?

Tax some (UK population) and give benefits to others (rest of the world) is not socialism, generally the rule is everybody pays and everybody gets. If the former doesn't hold, you can't expect the latter to hold either so I perfectly understand BBC Worldwide charging for their content.

Norway here, I just have to gloat a little, since our numbers just spiked (Norwegian) last quarter.

US population density: 32.43 pop./km^2
Norway population density: 15.6 pop./km^2
80,1% of households have fixed broadband
Mean speed: 23.1 Mbit/s
Median speed: 17.8 Mbit/s
No caps on fixed broadband

A few select areas already have gigabit, more are rolling out as new fiber nodes are ready while the old are mostly 100 Mbit/s. Actually one company has said they'll deliver 10 gigabit if anyone is willing to pay ($2300/month) but nobody's taken them up on that offer. If I won big in the lottery that'd be on my list though, lol.

6-7 years ago, that's like a Q6600 or so? Have you actually looked at benchmarks like Q6600 vs 4790K because current top of the line quad-cores are 3-4 times faster than that.

No, because of a couple things:
1) Single-threaded performance is still huge and often the bottleneck in interactive work - big multithreaded jobs just decide how long a coffee break you get.
2) Lots of cores means big die means big costs and poor yields meaning they aren't really interested in selling it at consumer prices.
3) Companies would no doubt try to use these as cheap servers or whatever and they don't want enterprise users buying anything but Xeon.
4) You can now get i7-5960x in an "enthusiast" system with 8 cores at least, though it'll cost you $1000. Or you can buy AMDs marketing and get an "8-core" FX processor...

I wish I could get around to ever documenting anything, usually I'm too busy making systems work in an accurate, succinct and understandable way. Technical writing can only unfuck so much of a convoluted mess and I definitively lack the patience and bullshit skills for public relations.

As I understand it Bukkit is a mod licensed under the GPL. The Minecraft server is proprietary. They don't share any code, so individually they're not derivates of anything. CraftBukkit combines the server code with the mod code. This is illegal both ways - the server license doesn't let you link to Bukkit, the Bukkit license doesn't let you link to the proprietary server. Mojang could have shut down CraftBukkit any time they wanted to. But so can any of the Bukkit developers, because it's not in compliance with the GPL either. In this case it looks like neither side has seen in their interest to shut this down - until now.

They're not using the DMCA against the server. They're not claiming they have any legal rights to the server. What they are doing is shutting down any mod or add-on that depends on illegal linking and saying the only way to make this legally compliant is if Minecraft decides to GPL their source code. If they don't all these derivates will remain illegal and the copyright will now be enforced. They're hoping that the Minecraft community has become so dependent on these illegal derivates that Mojave will cave and release the code. Yes, he is using the code for extortion by first writing the code knowing it would be used in violation of copyright and then using copyright law as leverage once it's popular. But this is all the legal kind, you can never be charged for threatening to enforce the law.