Movies would become copyable! You'd be able to go right over to Google, type "avatar torrent", and get millions of hits pointing you at places where you could download Avatar without paying its producers a dime!

So what if the studios have to make it harder for those of us who are willing to pay them? Surely not getting as much of our money is a small price to pay, as long as they're successfully preventing nightmarish copyright infringement such as I described above. Why, the only conceivable excuse for giving up on DRM would be if, for some strange reason, it doesn't actually work.

stop trying to improve on what you have.

It's so cute when Luddites publish their half-baked philosophy on the internet. And they don't even notice the irony!

He estimates that sending an Apollo-sized capsule to the nearest star would take as much energy as is produced on Earth in a year.

5 days, he says, but without assuming inefficiency, so let's call it a millenium to be conservative.

That's as much energy as is produced by our star in half of a millisecond.

By the time our heirs are crowded enough here that seeding civilization around other stars looks sensible, sending those seeds will also look easy.

But by that time TFA is no more relevant than Stross' calculations. The first starfarers will think it's cute that we expected them to want to all climb back down a deep gravity well after they get there. As if we were fish futurists, imagining how useful lungs and legs would be for getting to another pond where we would dispose of them again.

You're conflating two very different ways to screw up a series.

A: If you extend it so far that you have to pad it out with boring subplots and unlikeable characters, then that's not so bad - just fast forward through the tedious stuff and enjoy the exceptions. Babylon 5 Season 5 was no worse than Season 1 in that regard; in both cases you can pretty much skip the non-Londo-and-G'Kar stuff and you're still good.

B: If you extend the story in such a way that it changes the background or themes from the first story for the worse, then that's much more awful. Starting with a Neo who says "I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people a world you don't want them to see." and inexplicably transitioning to "I'm mopey." doesn't just make a bad second movie, it makes the first movie worse. Following Newt's rescue in Aliens with her pointless death in the Alien3 backstory turns Ripley from a hero into a tragic farce. And following up "They Have A Plan" with "But The Writers Can't Think Of A Good One" was just sad. Here the best way to go really is to just pretend that the sequel/prequel stories didn't exist.

I can't imagine they accept any piece of trash "hello world" app just because it was submitted.

Your failure of imagination is more complete than that. Ubuntu's (or your own distro's) repository doesn't even have to accept your app for your app to benefit from Ubuntu's repository management! Users can also add whatever third-party repositories they want, giving them easy access to, dependency checking for, and updates of software that hasn't been accepted into their core distribution.

This functionality exists in practically every Linux package manager, because if you're designing a software update tool to benefit your users rather than to benefit your company, it's plainly obvious that you don't want to lock them out of updating even non-company-approved software.

We could always replace the removed lunar mass with something that Earth has a surplus of. I suggest using people who can't do back-of-the-napkin arithmetic.

If think screwing over and locking out third parties is evil, then Apple already became an evil company for what it did to other OSX-compatible hardware vendors. At least with the App Store they just ban some of their competition and take some of the receipts.

And if you don't think screwing over and locking out third parties is evil, then what's with all the skepticism about Apple trying to make even more of their software ecosystem fractionally as locked down as their hardware ecosystem? Answer for me: why shouldn't they?

They know that, even if they do so, you'll still be an apologist for them afterwards.

Answer: you don't know, and you provably can't know. For every program and every set of tests that doesn't exhaust all possible inputs, there exist other programs which pass that suite of tests but which behave completely differently on an input you didn't test.

This is true even if the suite of tests is as thorough as "call a function telling the program to output its own binary and its own source code", and even if the input you didn't test is as untestable as a write-in vote for "Dick Ishbackdoor 0x9A5F".

To get around this problem you have to step outside the system entirely. For paper ballots, that means you have multiple little old lady volunteers at every precinct watching the vote counts. For electronic ballots, that means you have multiple PhDs at every machine disassembling it for electron microscopy.

Apparently the Internet needs a "Let Me Scroll To The Bottom Of The Page For You" service as well. See the talk page for additional primary sources.

Legislation could make it a felony to access the information in an unauthorized way or to proliferate it to anyone.

Well, if that's all we need, why not just have everybody email me their votes? Legislation could make it a felony for me to miscount or reveal the votes, and make it a felony for anyone to email me more times than they're allowed to vote.

Laymen won't trust crypto, but they shouldn't trust plans that would make elections easier to subvert.

I hear the same comments about China I heard about Japan in the 70s and early 80s: they just copy, they don't innovate, and have a mediocre directed economy. And then they ate our lunch.

And then lunch got cut short, and they started getting a bit hungry. Don't feel bad about not being up to date with current events, though; even Wikipedia still hasn't updated its title to Lost Decades.

But China and Japan can take their time catching up; we're trying a mediocre directed economy ourselves, now...

Can be found here. Shame about that heckler with the hammer.

they were all scaled down.

We went from "Can the executive branch wiretap US citizens without a warrant?" (regarding which Obama broke his promise and voted for amnesty instead of filibustering it, by the way) to "Can the executive branch assassinate US citizens without a trial?". This is only "scaling down" in the sense that a bullet is smaller than a phone.

So these guys figured out how to second-guess somebody's trading algorithm. How in hell is that a crime?

Because politicians don't understand economics but they feel free to make laws about it anyway? If someone offers to sell A for price B, and someone else agrees to pay B for A, they are not "manipulating" the market, they are defining it. And if one of those someones is making their offers and agreements via a brain-dead algorithm that is making the market unstable while practically giving their money away to more prudent investors, then the way you make the market stable again isn't by hauling the winners into court, it's by not giving the losers their money back.

A bit of mathematics is a good start. There are certainly lots of mathematically-oriented free software projects out there that could use an extra hand.

A bit of programming is a problem. If you're new to templates and inheritance then by trying to do any design work you risk doing as much harm as good. Trying to contribute to Boost without being a C++ expert may not be a good idea.

But a bit of eagerness to contribute is a very good thing. The trouble with open source in general is that people focus on the fun work first and the necessary support work second and then leave the grunt work for third or for never. You should have no trouble finding projects that don't have a big enough test suite (or finding projects that don't have any test suite, for that matter), and unit tests and regression tests are something you can create that will teach you libraries that you can use in your own research apps, expose you to others' good code, give you a chance to practice writing your own good code, but still not leave you responsible for creating tricky designs or performance-critical implementations yourself yet.

If you want to contribute to a mathematical open source C++ project which has helpful people on the mailing lists and on Slashdot, my biased suggestion is libMesh. There are lots of other good suggestions here, though; my unbiased advice would be to think ahead to your possible dissertation research topics and pick something that is likely to be useful for them. Doing intellectually stimulating things for fun is great (otherwise you wouldn't want to be a grad student), but it's also good to keep an eye out for when "fun" and "personally useful" can overlap.