Add to that, about 10-20% of the population get motion sick using the kind of VR in Oculus Rift (myself included - I can use it for 2-5 minutes, depending on the mode). It's ludicrous to imagine building a school that would exclude 20% of the potential pupils on some random criterion. You might as well make schools that didn't let in gingers...

Apple already ships 64-bit ARM chips and a lot of other vendors are racing to do so. The Android manufacturers that I've spoken want 64-bit for the same reason that they want 8-core: It's a marketing checkbox and they don't want to be shipping a 32-bit handset when their competitor is marketing 64-bit as a must-have feature. ART is in the top 10 worst-written pieces of code I've had to deal with and is full of casts from pointers to int32_t (not even a typedef, let alone intptr_t), but it should get a 64-bit port soon.

64-bit is here for a while. A lot of modern '64-bit' CPUs only support 40-bit physical addresses, so are limited to 'only' 128GB of RAM. Most support 48-bit virtual addresses (the top bit is sign extended, so all 1 or all 0 depending on whether you've got a kernel or userspace address), limiting you to 'only' 32TB of virtual addresses. If RAM sizes continue to double once every year, then it takes another year to use each bit. We currently have some machines with 256GB of RAM, so are using 41 bits. 64 bits will last another 23 years. RAM increases have slowed a bit recently though. 10 years ago, you always wanted as much RAM as possible because you were probably swapping whatever you were doing. Now, most computers are happy with 2GB for programs and the rest for buffer cache. As SSDs get faster, there's less need for caching, but there might be more need for address space as people want to be able to memory map all the files that they access...

Huh? It's in the Google Play Market and is no harder to install than any other app. Once it's installed, the first time you click on a link from another app you're asked to choose the app that will handle links. I fall into the geek category (and so installed it from F-Droid, not Google Play), but found it trivial to switch to Firefox on the mobile. I mostly did because Chrome has spectacularly bad cookie management and I'd been trying to find a browser that did it better. Early Firefox ports were as bad, but now it's quite nice and with the Self Destructing Cookies add-on does exactly what I want.

The mobile is actually the only place I use Firefox...

I recall reading some years ago that there are two kinds of atheists:

• Those that disbelieve all religions.
• Those that disbelieve all except one religion.

For some reason, people in the second category describe themselves as 'religious'. And yet you'll be hard-pressed to find, for example, a Christian who requires the same standards of evidence for the non-existence of the Norse, Egyptian, Greek or Hindu gods as he requires that an atheist from the first category provides for the non-existence of the Abrahamic god.

Well, yes, they do. Just look at the popularity of various autocratic authoritarian political parties, from the US Republicans down to the Golden Dawn in Greece.

Certainly, in well-functioning democracies they do not form enough of a majority to actually overthrow the rule of law on its own, but the fact that they can poll up to 40% of the populace easily demonstrates that there is a streak of authoritarian followers in every population.

Christopher Hitchens in short: "Be an egocentric asshole". Which he certainly proved to be; whatever his faults, the man was at least consistent in his values.

How about 'tablet'? Coming through Heathrow security, I get told to take laptops, iPads, and Kindles out of my bag. I guess any brand of laptop has to come out, but tablets and ebook readers only do if they're made by Apple or Amazon...

No, I'd rather that copyright on music and video be contingent on distribution in a form that does not lock customers into a particular platform.

As I already pointed out, Bruno was not burned for his scientific views, but his religious ones. And as it turns out, so was d'Ascoli.

The church, both the Catholic and the various Protestant ones, has done enough damage without needing to invent more. So far I haven't seen proof of scientists being burned for their scientific views. You'll have to do better than this.

Examples? With the phrasing he uses? Hitler.

You realize of course that there was a time about 500 years back, when scientists were actually burned at the stake for having the wrong theory?

Got any examples? The closest thing I can think of is Galileo, and he got in hot water more for playing politics the wrong way, not for his scientific insights per se. And all he got was house arrest in a luxurious villa.

And no, don't mention Giordano Bruno. He was not burned for adhering to Copernicanism, but for his religious views.

Talking about open-source businesses is missing the point entirely. Most businesses that are successful as a result of open source (or Free Software, for the RMS-style folks) or that contribute significantly to open source are not 'open-source businesses' any more than companies that use Windows and Office are 'closed-source businesses. The difference is that one category of businesses realises that writing software is expensive and copying software is trivial, so spends its investment on the software parts of its infrastructure paying people to write software (typically customising and improving existing projects), whereas the other pays someone for copies of software and hopes that that will give them an incentive to produce software that's more like they want.

I mostly agree, but I must say that the writing is uneven enough that the show does not get a complete pass from me. There are too many episodes that just go for the lazy stereotype joke for that.

On the other hand, the episodes that take the characters seriously often have some fine comedy moments.

So, flawed? Yes. Nerd blackface? Not quite, even though it treads dangerously close to that line too often.

Not really. The kind of situations where Windows 3.x let you try to continue, Windows NT just handles transparently. In Windows 3.x, with cooperative multitasking, a single application can refuse to relinquish the CPU. If this happens, you have three choices (outlined by the dialog box):

• Just wait and see if it eventually recovers.
• Kill that application and hope that it isn't holding any handles that other processes need to be able to do useful work.
• Restart the entire computer.

In a system with protected memory and preemptive multitasking, an application that refuses to relinquish the CPU will just have its priority downgraded and the only thing that you'll notice is the CPU getting warm. Eventually, you may choose to kill the program, but it never affects system stability.

It means that there's a high probability that something has damaged some kernel data structures. If you continue, there's a good chance that this corruption will spread to the buffer cache and you'll end up writing invalid data to disk. If you kill the system, the corruption is limited to the RAM.