Electricity is nowhere near clean, most is produced by burning fossil fuels. There is no current technology to cleanly produce the amount of energy we are consuming. When there are fusion reactors all over the place, we can reconsider the issue. Till then we can put up with a little inconvenience to avoid frying the planet.

This does not solve the problem of pollution when millions of individual cars are manufactured and operated. Nor the impact on environment when habitable land is consumed by sprawling suburbs rather than compact cities. With sensible urban planning, buses and subways can solve the same problem much better.

Self-driving cars can make incremental improvements to safety and pollution levels, but are just delaying the changes achievable with older technology in wide use in many places in the world.

Just because Khan academy is not the answer, does not mean that status quo of college education is the answer going forward. The rest of economy has become dramatically more efficient in the last 20 years. If colleges make no effort to embrace globalization and modern IT, there is no hope for them to be affordable to someone who works in a regular job.

It's ridiculous to pay for a sprawling campus, football team and full room and board just to be one of 40 students to hear a lecture from a second grade local professor. Wouldn't you rather watch the life lecture of the world's best professor over a video conference, with full ability to ask questions, book one on one time and get help from TAs?

As for becoming a "well rounded person", there are lots of ways to do this that do not cost a lot of money or even get you paid. Travel the world or volunteer for a homeless shelter. Heck, rent a house with a dozen of other dudes and recreate the experience of a college fraternity if that's what suits you.

We can not have people getting treated with inexpensive ingredients from their kitchens. That would be so uncivilized! Lucky thing we stopped red rice yeast for lowering cholesterol. Phew!

When it comes to offerings from Oracle or Microsoft, you in fact want to go with an older, more proven solution that is still supported for long time. But with open source, this will get you burned because all the developers got bored and went to work on something else. With newer projects, there will be bugs but also people fixing them, often quickly and for free. As far as comparison between the two, it comes to scale. If you are lucky enough to create a popular consumer product, at some point costs of proprietary vendor support will become prohibitive compared to in-house development. Also, you may find yourself in direct competition with your supplier and not want to give them all this money even if they are willing to support you. For internal business apps, the equation is often the opposite and you would rather pay for someone than do software development which is not your core competency.

...after what happened to Mozilla CEO. I wholeheartedly support same sex marriage and plural marriage. I especially support alternative lifestyles entered by choice rather than because you were "born this way", because this country is about freedom of choice. I personally enjoy my choices and would hate to deny this to others. If an adult gay man wants to try conversion therapy to marry a woman he is not attracted to, it's no more our business than a woman who marries a rich guy she is not attracted to.

What I can not support is this notion that the only way you can be free is if nobody else is free. Brendan Eich was bullied out of his job just because he, as a private citizen, made a legal donation to a political campaign that most CA residents supported at the time. This is as reprehensible is a female CEO getting sacked because she had an abortion, and yet not a single gay rights organization came out against this. So despite donating money to oppose Prop 8, I will never again financially support these causes. I just can not be sure than my contributions will be used to promote equality rather than discrimination.

So I see how folks in Indiana would feel they need the law to make sure all personal beliefs are equally respected, not only most politically correct ones of the day. If I run a family IT shop and a bunch of Republicans show up wanting help with their campaign website, I don't want to serve them. How can I deny the same freedoms to a florist next door who doesn't want to participate in a same sex wedding?

Huh? FoundationDB was closed source. The company published some supporting open source projects on github. Those are surely mirrored and will be reuploaded by others. If a truly open source database like cassandra was taken down by primary contributor, others would just take over.

Exclusive is a salesperson spending an hour just with you, patiently helping you to choose just the right style. Like... Macy's, when buying a watch of comparable price! Apple can not sell jewelry for nuts, they should have partnered with stores that have experience with making customers feel exclusive.

If you bought a Mac laptop, you are primarily interested in OSX, but may want to run a few of your old Windows applications and games which are not ported to Mac, or that you don't want to re-purchase. To that end, XP is the current sweet spot. After a good disk cleanup, you can manage the OS and a few apps in a 10GB partition. Windows 7 is a strain with 40GB before installing anything of significance. This is a big hit on SSD laptops with 128 or 256GB of storage. Plus, these old apps/games do not run well with current OS and DirectX versions anyway. One would think Apple will be targeting users who must run windows for a couple of apps before ones that are actually enthusiastic about the prospect and want latest versions and huge bootcamp partitions.

If the code has a useful function and exposes it with an interface that is no more complex than absolutely necessary, it doesn't matter how ugly it is inside. It will be used and, in time, there will be resources to clean it up. UNIX system calls, libraries and command line tools are a good example. There is not much in common between original code and various modern implementations, but code written on top of these over decades still works and both developers and users are able to leverage their experience.

Also, even the best written code will have bugs. With simple interface, it's at least feasible to write good tests and find some.

You are not going to type a sentence every time your screen locks after 10 minutes of inactivity. The solution is really 2 factor authentication with a decent conventional 8 character password. Maybe even 3 factor - something you are (fingerprint), something you have (bluetooth-enabled phone in the pocket) and something you know (simple pin).

1. Print out some 25mph speed signs
2. Post on a freeway
3. ???
4. LOL!

Get ready for a 12 inch plastic Windows tablet with TouchWiz shell, 3 Web browsers, 2 app stores, 50 unremovable pre-installed apps and 1.2gb free space in base model. Great move by Microsoft to let OEMs add value that users can not unwisely remove!

Oh well, maybe its good for streaming video from a dozen sources preapproved by Apple. You Plex hack is out of reach of an average consumer and requires an always on machine as a server. Don't you want other things that came out since then? If you had to keep only one box, would you choose Apple TV?