If it's a small project (not aiming to go big or anything, and I'm specifically thinking about tinkering projects that are looking for under $10k total), then yes the money for the requisite software could be substantial relative to the project costs.

If it's anything bigger, then yes, they should have to do more. Even so, the cost of a CPA to audit and maintain their books could still make up a substantial portion of the costs for projects under $50k.

So as with anything, it needs to be graduated or may be Kickstarter provides some of those services - e.g they provide a Quickbooks account and a team of CPAs to review them and help the projects out unless the project certifies that it can do it on its own with a reference to their hired CPA (which companies would have no problem with) in exchange for a slightly smaller pinch from Kickstarter.

They should have called it Complete Internet Access. They should also clarify that there will be No Surveillance Allowed.

As for the name,

I can understand the "At some point, I'm going to stop trying to stay alive for the sake of staying alive" attitude.

I can't understand projecting a fixed age. He doesn't know what his health will be like at 75. If his health starts to rapidly decline at 70 or 65, he may want to change his health-care attitude earlier. If he's still in great shape at 75 he may try to stay alive as long as he's healthy or only suffering acute ailments.

As for me, I'm going to treat my body like an old car: Barring a sudden fatal or mentally-incapacitating calamity, I'll try to keep it running well enough to be "fully functional" until it gets to the point that "it's just not worth it" then I'll cut back on how much effort I spend staying alive. Whether that's 65, 75, 85, or some other age, $DIETY only knows.

The technology listed is not raid-proof, only raid-resistant.

It is still vulnerable to legal attack IF the governments in the countries where the servers are located are willing to use subpeonas or other means to "quietly" (i.e. without TPB finding out) determine what the next "downstream" server is until they have a full list, then do a coordinated takedown.

All it takes to stop this is to make sure that at least some key servers are in countries in which such court orders could not be legally issued.

The summary didn't say it, but I would think that after all that they have been through, TPB also has recent-enough "disconnected" backups of all of their key servers that they could bring it all back up within a matter of days if their servers were all seized at the same time. I would also think that they have a "shadow staff" who can take over in the event that the people currently running the show are arrested or ordered by a court to not participate in the project.

However, Silverlight is already out of support. It didn't even make 3 years of support. I think the big thing that did it in was also the same thing that MS tried to show it off with - the Olympics on-line broadcasting in the US. Too many restrictions and it didn't go anywhere. NBC left it behind shortly after; an there has been zero large deployments of it since (at least any where near that scale).

Exactly. Outside of keeping the states working together collaboratively, and providing national defense, there really isn't much that the Federal Government should be doing.

That is why the original Articles of Confederation were so weak - too weak to even enforce getting funding from the States; the US Constitution that replaced it was made stronger primarily to ensure the Federal Government was able to collect funding from the States and do a little more, but the intent of the Federal Government was still basically the same - to help smooth over relations between the States by managing the inter-state relationships, and provide a uniform defense for all States against foreign (not domestic) enemies. (Domestic enemies were left for the States to manage.)

Not quite. There are a number of reasons why one would build a binary that doesn't have any shared libraries:

• You want to control the dependencies of the software on the target system
• You want to have the installed software be minimally impacting the target system
• You are targetting a portion of the system that is loaded before the libraries are available
• and more...

Technically, any program under /bin and /sbin are suppose to be fully self-contained binaries - e.g. no external library dependencies; if they must, then those can only be under /lib, but it has to be a minimal set. That was deu to / being the only file system mounted for certain scenarios, e.g boot time before the other volumes are mounted, or in recovery mode when other volumes have not yet been mounted.

Further, any file that goes into an initrd image has the same set of requirements - in that case initrd is extracted to a RAM-based file system (f.e tempfs) so it's only what you put in.

This is yet another area that systemd is breaking - because they're pushing for everything to be /usr and removing /sbin, /bin, etc claiming those are "not useful any more". The devs need to get exposed to some real embedded development environments where the reality is that those things are still extremely useful.

But you don't have to have both. You can use more OR less and it just works ;-)

Nobody* requires you to back your phone up to the iCloud.

*Nobody that I can confirm that is. I can neither confirm nor deny that the FBI/NSA can require Apple or your phone/internet provider to install hidden code on your phone that backs everything up to iCloud.

... but I wouldn't be surprised if you start seeing requests for courts to order phone/internet providers and/or Apple to install trojans and/or man-in-the-middle-enabling SSL certificates on suspects' phones.

Then again, I wouldn't be surprised to find out 5 years from now in a leak or declassified-in-2019 document that this is already routine practice in 2014.