I just don't understand why a LACK of options is a good thing.

Logically that makes sense. However the irrational human does not deal well with choice. Studies show that more choices leads to greater unhappiness. The additional options make room for additional regret.

With that said, I would say we are pretty lucky with our current marketplace in both mobile and desktop computers. The primary choice is operating system, of which the choices are few. If you select iOS/OS X you can be confident in knowing your choices end there. If you are more adventurous, you can select Android/Linux/Windows and go on to have a multitude of additional options to work with. It's the best of both worlds, accommodating people with all kinds of personalities.

He was referring to the kernel.

I don't know of any farmers spraying with drones yet, but some farms already using them for crop surveying too. http://www.oneearthfarms.net/operations/

The driver. It is the one that made the wrong choice. Its sentence will be served by forcing it to mine for bitcoins on behalf of the victim until the sentence has been carried out.

Why do applications need access to all of the user's data?

CouchDB, yes. It took a lot of its design ideas from Lotus Notes.

NoSQL databases in general, however, follow all different kinds of paradigms and designs. You can't make any blanket statements about them because they all were born out of the need to solve completely different problems.

For a pendant, he is not even right. If you read the marketing materials, Apple makes it very clear that it is iPod touch, and that iPod Touch (capital T) should never be used to refer to the device.

It is not about appreciation, the problem is that science doesn't scale. You spend four or more years becoming an expert, but then that information is trapped inside your head, sitting there valueless. You can apply that knowledge for a given entity for a nominal fee, but you can't reasonably apply that knowledge for a million entities simultaneously. To get there, you need to manage a million scientists/engineers yourself, at which point you will be too busy to do any science-based work.

I apparently wasn't smart enough to be accepted into college in the first place. So, I too went off to industry. Now I get to play lead on some pretty amazing projects and am paid quite well to do it.

Why do you want to do that? They're never going to be in that environment.

They're never going to be in an environment where they can't look up the solution to fizzbuzz either.

I imagine the next step is to replace the players with robots. Who wants to watch quirky humans swing strikeouts when a robot can hit a home run every single time?

The root of each TLD is centralized.

Yes, but there's nothing stopping us as a collective from changing who controls those roots. If we want to give com to Joe Bob, it is just a matter of having everyone update their DNS server settings.

I found a nice car on the street. Looks like a never seen before Ferrari. Want to buy it? I'll take $5,000.

Build the distributed replacement for DNS.

So... DNS? DNS is already distributed. You are, however, faced with the age old problem of how to convince everyone else to switch. A few takedowns by Verisign isn't going to do anything.

IANAL but it seems the penalty for selling stolen goods should be proportional to the value of those goods.

How do you determine the worth of the goods? It was worth $5,000 to a press agency. To Apple, it could have been worth millions of dollars to keep it under wraps. To me, maybe a few hundred dollars; I was able to buy the exact same thing about a month later for no more than that.