The first time you get a name collision and the spy gets his/her real name assigned randomly, expect sparks to fly

I'm going to try using "007" or, in case they insist on words, "Bond, James Bond" next time I'm in that silly place :p

It's not the core instruction set that's the problem with booting alternate OSes .. as long as you stick to the base archtecture you'll be fine. It's the lack of standardization when it comes to boot firmware and device configuration that's the problem. The server ARM initiative at least is standardizing on UEFI and ACPI .. hate them or love them, making ARM hardware more similar to Intel Architecture hardware will likely make it easier to support both.

The reality is probably somewhere in between, so if this is indeed the work of government-sponsored hackers, expect an improved Chinese clone the same way the J-31 looks to be a better performing clone of the F-35.

"all links are backlinks" is what drove me off WordPress. Too many spam links to prune.

Is there a reason for adopting a different license from core PostgreSQL ? Seems like it makes the information flow a one-way street (from SQL into XL but not vice versa). Looks like an interesting project! Throw in EnterpriseDB-level Oracle compatibility and there's a captive market out there

A one-off investment in Codeweavers' Crossover Office (the commercial offering by the company that does the core development of Wine) is much more cost-effective, time and money wise, than spending the effort on Windows. Don't get me wrong, I have Windows on my laptops (you don't get nice laptops without pre-installed OSes where I live), so I'm not objecting to the purchase price. But the Windows update experience is shoddy - I've been bitten with broken updates for .NET that are never registered as being done, and other annoyances like that.

It's a broad alliance that includes many manufacturers - I don't see it as a racket myself. And of course the customer still has to take his/her old computer to a recycling center if they want it recycled - there's no magic involved. The point is that adhering to the standards makes recycling easier, and Apple's recent moves, starting with the battery and now having the non-detachable Retina display on the 15" MBP, are regressive in terms of recycleability.

The financial industry cut a deal and got a partial reform that only fixed the situation for them. No, really, I'm not joking! [arstechnica]

The social login is not new -- they've used it for location verification for a long time, if you suddenly log in from, say, another town within the same day. My pet peeve is that some profile pictures don't contain actual faces, and some tagged pictures are tagged incorrectly -- so sometimes there's no way to correctly ID a person. You are allowed a few misses, but it calls for (a) Facebook to perform facial recognition to make sure the pictures they show at least show recognizable faces, and (b) for us to prune friends list to keep only those contacts whose profile pictures we recognize (either because it's their actual face, or because one knows them well enough to recognize silly non-facial logos)

Darwin code is under APSL, not BSD. It is incompatible with the GPL.

women are in fact just as shallow as men: they always choose the taller men, and excuse character shortcomings if the guy is tall

That's interesting, actually. In most US presidential elections, the taller candidate wins. Now, if we break the votes down by the voter's gender, do female voters prefer the taller candidate more, or are both genders equally biased in preferring the taller candidate?

If anything the reasons a woman has a baby has nothing to do with her looks and everything to do with her sense of well being, security along with cultural beliefs.

Everything else being equal, a better-looking woman has more chance of securing a more prosperous male, and therefore has a better sense of well being and end up having more kids, no?

The Haskell School of Expression by Paul Hudak actually is surprisingly multimedia-oriented. The only problem is its price.