Considering all the nice things I've heard about American ISPs, you already seem more buttfucked than the goatse guy. But I guess from now on you'll pay extra for lube.

That sounds familiar...

Mass production killed the repair business, unless it's really expensive they just come cheaper off the assembly line than having a repairman with the skills, parts and tools fix them one item at the time. I don't think I could find a seamstress or cobbler anymore if I wanted to repair my clothes or shoes, at least I'd have to search far and wide. I'm sure a tailor would do it for way too much money but it wouldn't be cost efficient. Same goes for my furniture, if anything breaks it's almost certainly easier and cheaper to replace than repair. Small electronics repair has died entirely, cars and houses are still expensive enough to repair but not much else. Particularly if you're not really sure if it's properly fixed or the repaired part is weaker than the original and taking into account that the item is worn and likely to break again sooner than a new one.

Not that it's just repairs, in many areas you're so outpaced that being self-sufficient is more expensive than at the store. Like for example my dad and I used to chop firewood, but now we buy it and if you add up the raw material cost (owning a forest patch), the production costs (chain saw, blade, chain, fuel, oil, protection gear, cleaver, transport) and a modest self cost for your time (getting there, felling, cutting into pieces, transporting to the road, cleaving, getting it home, stacking for drying) it's still cheaper to work, pay taxes and buy firewood from a company that drives around with big forest machines and creates more firewood in an hour than we can manage in a week. Customization is really more interesting and worth a premium, but it's rarely combined with the urgency of needing it from my own printer. Or if it's that urgent, I probably can't wait for the printer.

Our one example hasn't really been around for very long though, all estimates of the Sun's life cycle indicates Earth should remain habitable for another billion years or more. Where were we even a thousand years ago? It doesn't matter if the technology isn't ready until 3014, it's still a blink of an eye on the time scales we're talking here. And there's already semi-realistic craft designs like Project Orion that'll take hundreds of years to reach the next star, not tens of thousands. Unless the world goes for WW3 and a new stone age, it seems plausible that the technology will be available in a thousand years.

Well that's the price for being ahead of the curve, recently I was sending a file to a friend and his 40 Mbit download was the limiting factor not my 100 Mbit upload. But it's been this way since we had modems, only now it's a thousand times faster. So what? When I'm on gigabit then 100 Mbit will be normal, 10 Mbit slooow and 1 Mbit stone age. Besides, it will probably mostly be burst transmissions. During "The Gathering", a huge LAN party with 6000 participants - obvious all at their computers most the time - they saw up to 14 Gbps of traffic total with 30 Gbit capacity, in 2012 they had 200 Gbit just for show but it was never close to being used even when they tried to get everyone to do a stress test. Of course people are there for all sorts of nerdy events not just to leech off that pipe, but still.

If you take the people there to be above average interested and above average active compared to the average person on an average day, it's still only about 2.3 Mbit/person. Imagine you had a gigabit line, bought a 20GB game on Steam? Okay it's done in less than 3 minutes but then you're probably going to play it for hours. Download a BluRay? That's 7 minutes but probably 1:30-2:00 hours run time. And that's only when you have actual leisure time, if you're asleep or at work or school or doing housework or hobbies those hours are already filled. I already download everything I want, gigabit would only enable me to do it faster getting back to idle.

No doubt Theo will do a solo run as usual, then bitch about all those ungrateful companies using it and giving nothing in return just like with OpenSSH. Meanwhile, this looks like a genuine attempt at starting a "Linux-style" project with lots of corporate support like the Linux kernel that all seem to have a stake in users trusting their computers for shopping and banking and cloud services and whatnot. Of course Theo can make his heroic and sacrificial stand, but this looks more like collaborative open source in progress "You know these low level libraries we all depend on? Well they're not really getting the attention they should have, none of us alone are going to do all the grunt work but if we pool our resources..." It can of course be fluff and PR but really it doesn't seem like a big seller to their end users, there's more potential for PR blunders if big bugs slip past them.

Are they going to hit the ground running? No. But I think you underestimate the potential here if they really choose to take... well, not ownership but stewardship over key libraries and provide the level of development, patching, review, testing, auditing etc. they lack today. Of course they will need skilled people, but those companies certainly have the capability to provide that if they want to. It's not like Theo is the only coder who knows his stuff around and he's still only one person with so many hours in a day and who'd better not get hit by a bus. And it still remains to be seen how clean the code Theo writes is in someone else's eyes, I usually think my code is perfectly clear until I ask others to look at it...

The flip side of that is the old adage "divide and conquer", the OSS community is almost self-defeating at times. Long before the mouse trap is the kind of smooth experience users want the core developers have moved to their new and even more grand mouse trap refactoring/redesign/remake that'll fix all the fundamental issues they discovered in the last design. Not that it's really different from proprietary software, at work it's exactly the same I'd love to get rid of the old and in with the new because even though it's not entirely done yet it's so much better than the old. The difference is at work I can't just drop working on our existing software and with our current user base, what pays the bills is what they get done not what I feel like doing. With OSS the train is leaving the station quite often, either you're on it or you're on your own.

And by on your own, I mean good luck finding a backport of any modern software to run on a distro 5+ years old or figuring out all the dependencies yourself. Just upgrade, it's free as in beer and in speech... but not as in time. Almost every 6 month cycle when I was on Ubuntu there was something I wanted and a bunch of unwelcome changes that tagged along. With Windows 7 I feel pretty confident that I can install any 2014 application on my 2009 OS, it'll work and it'll involve just that application. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's somebody out there who wants the new version but as long as it's not broken for me, don't fix it. I just wanted a new app, not a new distro.

Well, I can't speak for the failure rate but my iPhone 4 is now 3.5 years old and during Easter I used it a lot, even after a day of heavy use I still had 20% battery left. Today it's at 67% after a 2 hours of GPS tracking. For daily use it's still fine and I'm guessing will be fine for years to come. For weekends and vacations away from a charger I'm considering getting a battery pack - compared to the original 1420 mAh battery you can get a 7000-10000 mAh external charger for cheap. You put it in your backpack or luggage, plug it in where you sleep at night even if that's a remote cabin or a tent in the wilds. Or for that matter just turn off the "smart", if I kill data traffic it'll last very long as a dumb phone as I've done that abroad due to cost. Basically as long as the battery works it's not really a problem.

Astroturfing Microsoft on websites, duh...

Well the cops did get a tip of one reckless maneuver that allegedly forced the tipper off the road. They tailed the truck for five minutes, saw no traffic violations or poor driving to collaborate the story. Then they pulled the truck over instead of being on their way. I'd agree with the dissenters, there's no reasonable suspicion of an ongoing crime - that is, drunk driving - and they pulled him over on a fishing expedition. One incident, observed by nobody but an anonymous tipper who may or may not have called it in just to be mean - I mean it's quite impressive to get a full license plate down while you're really being run off the road so some generous exaggeration may have happened. She didn't even accuse them of driving drunk, that's the court's argument that maybe they were while completely ignoring that the officers saw no sign of it.

Or maybe you just have a pack rat obsession with owning things while the rest of us as just looking to get some entertainment. I "buy" a non-transferrable license to a DRM-locked online-tied sandbox, even a DVD which also has DRM is more liberal as I can sell, lend, play anywhere without anyone's approval or activation but even that one I can't back up or format shift legally as I expect to do with my own property. None of that is an absolute necessity though, what matters if if the value (utility, desire) exceeds the costs (money, inconvenience) and if I am confident that I'll get my money's worth from it before Steam goes under and the service disappears in a puff of smoke I come out ahead. If I desperately want to play it 10+ years down the line I suspect it will be available somehow on GOG (legally), TPB (not so legally) or whatever so it's not a "now or never" situation.

Yes, I get pretty pissed when you abuse DRM to deliver use control like unskippable commercials and region locks, crap that acts more like malware (hello StarForce) and such things but ultimately I am looking to get entertained, it's in the same class as Netflix (subscription), Spotify (subscription) not about having my documents and data trapped in proprietary products with lock-in. Realistically if Steam said all games are now a 5 year lease it'd probably not change my habits at all. If they start acting like asses I always have the option to say here are the letters F and U, I'll be sourcing my entertainment elsewhere from now on. It's not like there's a shortage or anything, particularly since it won't cost me a moral fiber to download games I used to have on Steam off TPB should that ever become necessary.

Well, if we do an experiment on gravity we determine it only in a point location at a given time, the rest is extrapolation/intrapolation that gravity remains constant between locations and across time. Take two sections of forest, build greenhouses around them and pump more CO2 into one and you have a pretty good scientific experiment. Yes, putting the pieces correctly together is complicated but as long as you accept that things obey the laws of physics and chemistry and don't magically become different at a macro scale you can build bigger and bigger pieces of the puzzle from small blocks. There's no "irreducable complexity" here as the relgious like to trot out when they don't like the science.

To quote AMD (pdf) in their 2014 Q1 earnings, a couple days ago:

In short, they're transforming away from their "traditional" business and of the PC market graphics revenue is going to be significant. AMDs x86 CPUs/APUs are going to be a small part of their business, there's a reason Intel is aiming all the big guns at ARM because AMD has already in their strategy decided to get out of the head-to-head competition with Intel. If you don't believe that, read the above lines again. They couldn't compete with Intel when they bet everything on one horse, now they're riding five others as well? That's a slow exit strategy, milking the CPU/APU revenue to execute their transformation. The FX line is probably already dead, Kaveri/Beema/Mullins will keep AMD present in the consumer market a while longer but the revenue is funneled into all those other key areas.

False dichotomy, it's not one or the other.

Time and material contracts basically means renting consultants by the hour, short of outright criminal behavior there's no promised time frames, deliverables or guarantees of functionality or quality. The upside is the lack of formalism, I've developed many reports on a T&M basis and basically if you want a filter here and a total there and to add one more column and add a traffic light here and a drill down there just say it and I'll keep working on it until you're happy. Heck, I've taken "requirements" from a single yellow post-it note, as long as the client is happy and the invoices get paid it's a win-win for everyone compared to bids and change orders.

The problem begins if you need anything other than yes-men because basically you're going to lead these people and point them to tasks that need doing and make sure it all comes together to a working solution. Consider it a bit like building a house where every contractor assumes that the rest of the work to bring it up to code will be done by somebody else, you tell the plumber to put a pipe here, the electrician a wire there and the carpenter to board up that wall and they do it, but they don't take any responsibility on whether it's done to code or the overall result. My guess is that Oracle have their asses well covered legally, but often they have to play the scapegoat when the client has been incompetent. Usually they don't want to throw eggs in the face of the manager who hired them, unless it becomes an even bigger PR problem not to.