The property that makes cash convenient in real life is the same one that make it anonymous: it's decentralized. Why should the situation be any different online (excepting technology lag and first-to-market effects)?

They're a CDN that serves 30% of all Internet traffic. They get whatever they want, because if they don't, the internet starts sucking.

Sure, but what's the case law on the application of consumer-rights to free stuff?

I didn't know it had a name, but I thought this thirteen-month thing with extra days crammed on at the beginning or end was the system that basically anyone came up with the first time they tried to design a calendar that made sense.

Yes, 3, sorry 'bout that. In PHP you are guaranteed arithmetic results when using arithmetic operators. String concatenation is a distinct operator :)

Even JavaScript isn't as bad as that, there are only a few minor areas where implementation-specific issues pop up, like the awful CSS rule stuff, input codes, and some other stuff, with PHP, it is EVERYWHERE.

Cute. In JavaScript: "5"-2 = 0 and "5"+2 = "52". Even PHP isn't *that* nut.

You're missing the point. Saying that a kernel is or isn't successful because it's distributed with a different userland than usual is (a) just wrong, and (b) a completely different sort of claim than that a particular software distribution is or isn't successful because various components have been integrated elsewhere.

Analogy doesn't quite work because Linux IS a kernel (the Linux userland is usually GNU, but you could put something else on top, like Android without a problem). The FreeBSD components in Darwin/iOS/OS X are userland, not kernel (which is Mach/XNU).

Go read just about any current textbook on microeconomics. Then get back to me.

Did you bother looking it up?

A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) intended to serve real-time application requests. It must be able to process data as it comes in, typically without buffering delays. Processing time requirements (including any OS delay) are measured in tenths of seconds or shorter. A key characteristic of an RTOS is the level of its consistency concerning the amount of time it takes to accept and complete an application's task; the variability is jitter.[1] A hard real-time operating system has less jitter than a soft real-time operating system. The chief design goal is not high throughput, but rather a guarantee of a soft or hard performance category. An RTOS that can usually or generally meet a deadline is a soft real-time OS, but if it can meet a deadline deterministically it is a hard real-time OS.[2] An RTOS has an advanced algorithm for scheduling. Scheduler flexibility enables a wider, computer-system orchestration of process priorities, but a real-time OS is more frequently dedicated to a narrow set of applications. Key factors in a real-time OS are minimal interrupt latency and minimal thread switching latency; a real-time OS is valued more for how quickly or how predictably it can respond than for the amount of work it can perform in a given period of time.[3]