I hate to be obvious, but in the U.S. at least, all "recent" music is subject to copyright protection unless the creator specifically places it into public domain (or it is so under law, like works of U.S. gov't employees). To distribute any such music at all you need a license.

And to think that my friend was using a 2009 macbook with 2GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD until a few months ago. Now it has 4GB of RAM, and while doing development work (Eclipse and another copy of JVM running) and having two accounts logged in, both with Safari open, the swap sits unused, and there's a few pageouts but not too many (a couple thousand per hour)... And this is on Mavericks, which has higher resource needs compared to Snow Leopard.

My kid uses a MBP of similar vintage with 8GB of RAM. It works great even though I'm can't seem to bother to replace the mechanical hard drive with an SSD. On Mavericks you essentially either need an SSD or lots of RAM to cache the underperforming hard drive. Mavericks seems to access the hard drive in such a way that makes mechanical drives seem very sluggish. Minecraft, multiple instances of youtube, etc. -- all work great.

It concerns me somewhat that it didn't make you stop, think, re-read and understand. Because I surely did and I find it unthinkable that others wouldn't. Scary, even.

My worry has been that kids in grade schools waste a lot of time doing menial arithmetic while they could have been - gasp - actually learning more advanced math instead. Like, you know, shit that one can use later in college. I really wish I didn't need to do all that long division/multiplication etc. - it was really pointless. I used to believe that it was good. I now know better. The whole reason for menial arithmetic was the Victorian-era-called-need for civil servants - back when nobody had a spreadsheet application to run the numbers back then. A civil servant doing manual math these days in a 1st world country would be probably reprimanded for wasting his or her time.

It's probably good enough to do software development on. I can't see it being any slower, CPU-wise, than a Core II duo 5 year old MBP, never mind that it has 2 more cores. It seems like it could be a very good deal - hook up to an external monitor and BT keyboard/mouse and it should be a screamer. It's astonishing how good consumer-grade hardware is these days.

I don't think that those issues have eluded anyone. It's much simpler than that: nobody looked in that mess of code. A lot, and I mean, a lot of core gnu code is sorely due for an overhaul. Heck, I wish they rewrote a lot of it using modern C++ (perahps without iostreams, though). It'd become a much smaller, more manageable code base. Properly done C-to-C++ ports should shed at least 50% of the code outright, possibly much more.

There is no such thing as a reactionless drive. Without reaction you're not changing your trajectory. Like, um, duh. Sure, if you think it's efficient to convert energy into momentum and you've got oodles of energy, you can emit very energetic photons, but the mass is conserved: no matter what your energy source, you craft is losing exactly the same mass as the E/c^2 of the emitted photons. Even a car battery loses the E/c^2 of the energy you take out of it. It's just rather hard to measure :) Of course the photons you emit can carry lots of momentum, linearly proportional to their energy, and you lose the mass proportional to said momentum.

Launch three identical, reasonably sized chemically propulsed spacecrafts into 300km orbits in KSP. Launch them into orbital planes spaced 120 degrees apart. Your goal: dock all three together. Use mechjeb and dpai if you wish. It'll dispel any such myths in one evening.

That's precisely the mental model mistake that everyone makes. If all you've got is reaction mass and relatively low Isp thrusters, the requisite orbital momentum changes make any sort of extended maneouvering impossible. If your opponent is in an orbit perpendicular to yours, good luck. It'll be trivial for them to avoid you forever until you rotate your orbital plane. With chemical engines without on-orbit refueling, you can pull that trick off once or twice and that's it. And if you have multiple opponents and they happen to understand that they should have launched in multiple orbital planes, they'll be pretty much invulnerable to any sort of conventional (chemical) propulsion pursuit by a single craft.

Call me silly, but does Vimeo actually, you know, reliably work?. Every other time I get across a Vimeo link, there's something wrong either with the link itself, or the web player, etc. I don't know what Youtube does right that Vimeo doesn't, but for me, the bad UX just doesn't justify using Vimeo. And this has nothing to do with anything that Google has any influence over, BTW, I'm using neither Chrome nor Chromium, and I'm not following google search result links either.

They are - the updates, at least. The factory image is compressed and stored in a read-only partition. Deleting anything from it is equivalent to making your own "rom" (as that's what the system partition constitutes, in a large part).

Hangouts is a conferencing tool. It's most definitely not something that was designed for teens. It's a Google alternative to Skype. It's also not true that the crapware always runs. Sure, it's part of the factory image, but it never needs any additional space, and it's stored compressed on that image. Simply uninstall any updates to it and disable it. Done and gone.

You can disable pretty much all Google services and they won't occupy any RAM (System Memory) when you do so. I thought that was like Android 101. Just because those apps are stored on the Flash doesn't mean they have to be running. You also don't need to update them if you don't use them - go to Settings, Apps, go through all Google apps that you don't use and [Uninstall Updates] followed by [Disable] on each one of them. You need to disable automatic app updates as well, otherwise the apps will get updated and will occupy the Internal Memory (FLASH).

The thing is: Android makes crapware rather unintrusive, as far as I can tell. On said $100 tablet. If Windows crapware was so unintrusive, I doubt I'd care much about it. Yeah, I've got Nook, Google+, a couple others. Big deal. Those apps don't have to be updated, they can be disabled, and they won't consume any resources other than being present in the factory image that's on the device anyway.

I think that the requirement to ship recent Android versions was long time coming and is sorely needed. The other applications aren't that much of a drain, I don't think, other than taking up some of the "native" storage. Low end devices (say a $100 tablet) that often only have 1G of built-in storage will be thus strained more. Yet storage prices keep falling, so I don't see it as that much of a problem. Cost-wise, soldered-on flash is anyway cheaper than a microSD card that has to have extra packaging and a separate controller chip.