The movie seemed to have a remarkable attention to technical detail in that scene. I don't know if Zuckerberg uses Linux, but in the movie he is depicted as using KDE. Not only that, but it looked to me like they got the version of KDE about right for the time.

If you have to buffer on Netflix with any frequency, it's you, not them. They have by far the fastest and most reliable streaming I've seen. Much better than Youtube (HD), Hulu, or ABC's own website. Keep in mind you really need at least a 3 Mbps connection, but I had 3Mbit DSL from ATT for years with great streaming.

The assumption, as best I can tell, is the same that drives carriers to charge $20/mo tethering fees for using smartphone data plans with a laptop. Basically, they don't expect you to use very much of your monthly plan.

The ipad+mifi deal from Verizon is another good example. If you want just a mifi (for, say, a laptop or an existing ipad), you pay $260 + $40/mo (contract) for 250MB or $60/mo for 5GB. If you buy it with an ipad, you pay only $130 for the mifi device and get the option to buy month-to-month $20 for 1GB, $30 for 3 GB or $50 for 5 GB. With the right usage pattern it wouldn't take long for the ipad to pay for itself.

Frankly, dedicated computer links (via USB or wireless) tend to have pretty lousy rates. Why? Because the carriers know these tend to be business customers (who have their companies pay for it) and they also tend to use more of their service than many smartphone users.

That said, provided they have the coverage you want, there are good alternatives to the standard ATT/Verizon choices. Virgin Mobile sells a mifi for $200 from Walmart with a $20/mo prepaid 1GB plan (if you buy direct from VM, it's cheaper but you only have the choice between $10/100MB or $40/unlimited). It uses Sprint's network (actually, Sprint bought Virgin Mobile USA last year).

I think you mean patent, not copyright.

Correction: it is not trivial for unmaintained, closed source software. Upgrading maintained, open source software is a breeze, as any Debian user can attest.

Having had a single Debian install for 8 years, I can attest that it works remarkably well, but it is not always a breeze. And over the course of 5+ years, there are major revisions to software like Apache which require new configuration. The backported security fixes in RHEL allow users to keep a very consistent system for a very long time.

You trust the server hardware after 6 years?

Rotating out hardware is essential, virtualization makes this far less of a chore.

It's certainly not always the administrator's choice about whether hardware gets replaced. Besides, there's a long history of UNIX hardware being around forever (well over a decade, sometimes two).

On a personal note, I just retired my 12 year old P166 desktop which was functioning as a router/firewall. It had been running the same install of Debian, suitably upgraded, for 8 years. The only components I had to replace in those dozen years were the CPU and PS fans.

RHEL provides a 7 year lifecycle, which is unmatched by the other major distributions I know about (even Debian). This is crucial for the enterprise; I know of a number of systems which are still running RHEL3 after 6-7 years. Upgrading production computers is not a trivial process, and 2-3 year lifecycles just don't cut it in some situations.

My impression was that Baen books is primarily science fiction. I've drifted from that genre over the years, but I'm a fan of many of the "classics" (Dune, Foundation series, the Ender series, etc).

Perhaps the best recommendation would be a great book by an author with many other books available. That way if I like the first I know where to go next for similar fare. The real issue is that I really hate starting a book and not liking it; I want to finish it and it just nags at me when I don't. Fortunately that is very rare and tends to happen with poorly written non-fiction.

Baen Books has been posting e-books, several formats available, for several years now.

As someone completely unfamiliar with their authors and catalog, can readers of Baen books provide some recommendations? Anything available as an ebook (free or otherwise) would be of interest to me.

This is one advantage of the larger stores - it is usually straightforward to find the bestsellers within any given genre. For those of us new to a genre (or new to the modern works in a genre), this can be a helpful starting point. So many books, so little time.

My income tax is almost triple what my federal income tax is.

Huh? The maximum income tax bracket in WI is 7.75%, with most income falling in the 6-7% range. Federal tax brackets are much higher (15-20% easily).

It's true that some states allow fewer deductions than federal taxes, but if you truly pay 3x income taxes to state as federal you have some very odd tax returns (with very low federal taxes, I imagine).

And what do you get for your taxes? As a former resident of WI, I would say that on average the public school systems are much better (especially those areas where property taxes are high), the state university system is excellent with far lower in-state tuition than its peers, and the roads are MUCH better than Michigan (though that's not saying a whole lot).

A very simple, offline wiki is well-suited to recording all sorts of information.

Since all I need is text with tags and the occasional equation in LaTeX, I found that Tiddlywiki works great. It's an amazing self contained wiki using only HTML and Javascript. The main idea is to be able to very quickly develop lists, outlines, etc. in a browser I have open anyway.

This sort of crap has the potential to make photographer's lives really annoying. And this comes just as more and more people are active amateur photographers.

The lighting on the Eiffel Tower is copyrighted? Museums claim rights over photographic reproductions of century-old paintings? Where do we draw the line?

On the one hand, we have the physical equivalent of contracts: agreements made as a requirement for entrance; this allows zoos, museums, etc. to restrict the use of commercial photography. But photos taken from public streets? From the air?

The fact that these institutions go after commercial users isn't much comfort; the line between non-commercial amateur and commercial-but-still-amateur photography. Have ads up on a blog? Submit your photo to a local art show? Sell your photo to a stock photo site? It's easy for an amateur to make a little cash from the best of their photos.

Almost half of you voted for never.

"Never" is also the option closest to "more than 200 years", which is how I answered. I think that the abundant energy supply is one of the larger problems humanity faces over the next two centuries, and we'll be fortunate to be able to replace fossil fuels in that time for our current usage types.

So yeah, I expected many, many cool things to happen before flying cars. For example, it wouldn't surprise me if some of the people born now actually live the next 200 years.

My phone is an unlocked Nokia e63, purchased for a little over $100 early this year. Technically I suppose it's a smartphone in the sense that it has a qwerty keyboard, web browser, mail, mp3 player, etc.

It's a great little cheap phone which lets me use wifi for internet access while using a really cheap prepaid plan for the minutes/texts I use. That said, it is blindingly obvious that it lacks the polish of modern iphones and Android phones.

The good thing is it does actually multitask - I can download podcasts while checking mail, etc. But it doesn't really do anything all that well. The mail client is okay but was a total pain to set up for each account; the web browser is pretty bad (Opera is available too), but the screen size makes it painful to do anything but enter the login forms from free wifi connections. It doesn't support all the common types of WPA2 enterprise encryption for the wifi, unfortunately. Worse, the mp3 player would have eliminated my need for a separate player except that the sound chip in it has a terrible signal to noise ratio. The phone basically suffers from being designed to "check all the feature boxes" while doing nothing particularly well.

In the end, it's hard to ask too much of a phone with an MSRP of $212. But anyone in the market should know that these cheaper Symbian devices are smartphones only in the sense of being somewhat-capable of doing smartphone things, not necessarily capable of doing any of them well.

Although there may not be enough 64 bit linux users who have jumped through all the hoops needed to get flash working, since its 64 bit support is so lame. Every cloud a silver lining.

I think a lot of us use the 32 bit plugin either with the wrapper or with a 32 bit browser. I certainly switched away from the 64 bit plugin after that last vulnerability. I also use NoScript to enable it only on demand, but I'm not 100% sure it blocks it before anything is sent to the plugin.

That said, most of the new Linux users I know use it on their netbooks, running Atom processors which don't support 64 bit instructions anyway.