Do you have a reference for the phoning home stuff? I am using Plex on the Mac and like it very much. However, if there were serious problems like unwantedly transmitting data, I'd really like to know.

There is a difference between being concerned for software quality and humiliating someone in front of colleagues. If my boss would punish a workmate (or me) like that, I would be looking for a different job rather quickly if this behaviour wouldn't change rather quickly.

Well then: who volunteers to draw the cable from L4 to L5?

Opening a letter is very easy to do, and yet it is forbidden by law (at least here in Europe) without a warrant. The ability that you /can/ open or read something does not imply that you should be allowed to do that.

And yet, after some months, the Raspberry Pi foundation moved manufacturing to the UK -- for the same retail price! (http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/1925). So why shouldn't Apple be able to do the same thing? Granted, the RP Foundation isn't out to make a huge profit, but still, Apple should be able to source its components and products a little bit more ethically.

Nah, more like "True", "False" and "CowboyNeal".

Wish I had modpoints right now. The Netherlands really have it figured out. I live in Germany, right across the border. And while we do have some nice bicycle paths, it's not comparable to what my neighbors have that live 15 minutes by bike over the border.

The first computer our family had was a 286 12MHz running DOS 3.3 and Windows 2.11. Then came some 486SX, which I upgraded to have a double speed CD-ROM. Here in Germany dial up and downloads were very expensive, so the CD-ROM became my means to get my first Linux distribution. It was a magazine cover CD-ROM containing a DOS-bootable archive with Linux (something around Linux 1.0ish, I forgot), running the UMSDOS file system, ca. 20 MBytes. That was 1994. I played around with it for some time, until I bought my first Slackware, then my first SuSE distribution. So far this was still a hobby. I started to get paid for this as a student in 12th grade, by administering a small ISDN dial up router/server, which also hosted a Hylafax server, a Squid proxy (serving ~10 people over 64kbit ISDN), and an Email-Server. I had not enough clue about TCP/IP at that time, and I had to learn a lot the hard way.

Then I started my studies (computer science) in 1999. By 2000 I had removed Windows from my machine completely, only installing it a bit later in VMWare, for using it once in a blue moon. I wrote all my papers under Linux, did all my programming homework on it etc etc. After I graduated, I became a grad-student and did my research and all the work at the institute also under Linux (now Debian). At home I switched to Ubuntu after a few years more with OpenSuSE. Then, I got to know OS X, and switched to that for my desktop at the lab / work, and having the Debian PC be the number cruncher. Shortly before leaving university, I bought a Mac for home as well, since keeping up my Linux box was too much work at that point. Now I work for a company that makes behavioral finance software, and again I work under Debian, feeling at ease. At home, I still use and love my Mac, using MacPorts for all the good Unixy stuff, and having an OpenWRT router for toying (sometimes) and soon, hopefully, also a Raspberry Pi.

So, this year marks my 18th anniversary using Linux, and I still like it. I know that whenever I have to do CS / coding / computer work, I will always want some kind of UNIX-like system. Be it Linux, OS X, BSD or some other OS with a bash. :)

After looking at the article, I would say this project is rather to get our attention to the garbage patch problem. Their solution, while maybe infeasible and ecologically unsound, is intriguing at the same time. Point is, there needs to be done something about the great garbage patch, and while the proposed idea might not be the solution, it is at least an idea that deals with the problem. Now let's throw in some more, and solve this thing!

Frodo was Indian? I think I've read the wrong book...

Yes, ECB is unmaintained as of now. Very, very sad that this happened. I think CEDE + ECB (+ GNU global or clang) makes Emacs an awesome C/C++ development environment.

And the Web is 90% porn (ok, maybe exaggerated) and Email traffic is 30-90% Spam (http://www.mailarmory.com/resources/stats/). But still we use both. Maybe 90% of torrents are currently illegal, but it does not mean that the service should be blocked or banned. Otherwise I would say: Bye bye to Email and Web as well. (At least Porn and illegal torrents serve a certain purpose, Spam on the other hand...)

The hydrogen is a fuel that can be stored (with problems, as mentioned above). There are solar reactors that do what you propose, but this special reactor would be able to generate energy for later usage. Even if our hydrogen storage mechanisms are not perfect yet, this helps to solve one part of the problem.

An 8088 is still a 16 bit machine. It has 16 bit registers and supports arithmetic operations on 16 bit values. Just the data bus is 8 bit and hence pushing those 16 bit values around the system takes more time...

Sounds like a rather good plan. I am currently reading the Heechee trilogy by Frederik Pohl. The spaceships there never enter an atmosphere, except for the landing pods. Those are rather small. This sounds like a good idea for me. Even in Star Trek we have the idea of big space ships and small shuttle crafts -- ok, those are reusable, but I think the idea here could be: Use a small Soyuz type spacecraft and rocket to get into LEO. Then dock to your re-usable non-reentry spaceship that takes you to Mars / asteroids / whatever. With Mars the problem would of course be, to get a small-ish Soyuz-like rocket to the ground. I guess here you would want some Apollo style lander, but with a heat shield.