This all networked car thing is a disaster waiting to happen. The basic idea that your car will make important decisions based on information sent by random strangers can only lead to a catastrophic failure.

What happens when someone sends a signal saying that there is a car stopped just in front of you in the highway? Your own car will stop suddenly, and you might get hurt in the process!

Of course, there will be some kind of authentication of the messages, but everycar has to be trusted by default for the system to be usefull. And we all know how easy it will be to extract the signing key from a given car and to spoof messages...

Apparently, the same bug was in the Linux kernel and has been fixed in 2006, with CVE-2006-0744. So they intially got it wrong, but fixed it before most other OS/hypervisors. It also seems that OpenBSD is not affected.

As far as I'm concerned, I don't give a shit about how much I can do with my phone if it draws too much power. If the battery can not last at least ten hours on idle, a phone is just useless.

A kind of anonymous money could be useful, but I'd rather use one that doesn't double as a pyramid scam.

It's easy to make a bitcoin-clone without this property, you just need to adjust the mining rate so that the early adopters don't get half of the total wealth to ever be available.

Just get a non-x86 machine (e.g. a Raspberry Pi), it will take some time before you can play any commercial games on it...

So after they do their time in the US they're going to be judged in each country where a machine was infected? That's fucking scary!

And if I have a website explaining people how to use TOR, and it turns out that explaining this is illegal in China or in North Korea, will I be extradited to those countries?

Flash support for Linux has always been pretty bad. Most people switched to a 64-bit distro years ago, but Adobe has only supported flash on 64-bits Linux for 6 months... Sure there was a beta version available some time before, but security holes where not fixed in a very timely manner for the beta, so it was mostly useless. In fact things are just going back to normal.

The threat we are currently worried about is not a modern army, it's a bunch of crazy terrorists. They don't need to control the propagation.

Note: I'm not saying that we should be worried about terrorists plots, I'm just saying that, as a society, we are.

That's one of the side effects of the anti-nuclear lobbying. We don't build new reactors, but we still need electricity, so we keep the old ones running longer than they're supposed to...

So it's like an expensive netbook, but you can only run programs approved by Apple?

What's the point?

Poverty is defined as a lack of money. Can I claim that money solves poverty?

How about 4kB? Note sure if it count as a computer, but I wear my watch everyday and it runs GPL code that I compile myself :-)

I think the main point of this is to show that using physical analogies for digital data does not make sense, and to mock the whole "copying is stealing" idea.

I also does a good job showing that the current copyright law are not ready for a digital age.

Well, yes. That's not the first time a company says the patent system is broken and they have to get bogus patents just to defend themselves.

How do you make a monopoly with Free Software? Google doesn't control Android, anybody can make their own version, and integrate it with their own services. If you're afraid they use Android to promote use of the other Google services, you can just make a version of Android that integrates with Microsoft's online offering.

Well, making a private use copy of a song or movie you buy used to be pretty simple in the analog days.

Then came Macrovision. And CSS. And AACS. And the DMCA.

If you want an example of a specific feature that was pushed onto users, HDCP is a good one. Initially it was implemented in monitors just in case your next OS would need it, and then it became mandatory in order to watch any HD content.

SecureBoot is exactly the same. TPM have been present in many computers in the last years, just in case some people would have a use for them. SecureBoot will make them mandatory if you want some shiny sticker. Soon enough it will be mandatory if you want to watch some media or play some games. Microsoft have been working on something similar for almost ten years.

There are some good reasons to use such a system, for security (it can prevent some kind of malware), or in order to access files in a way that the author can control (security sensible documents, or media and games). But there's also a bunch of bad reasons: maybe Microsoft have some patents and they plan to collect royalties, maybe they want to make money out of an App Store and prevent you from installing foreign applications, maybe they want to kill some competition...

In any case, there are two things that are quite wrong:

• 1. Most users will give away the control of their machine to Microsoft and Big Content. Even of I don't have to do the same that worries me.
• 2. I really don't like the idea of hardware manufacturers giving Microsoft a special access to my hardware, and I sure hope they will be mandated to give me the power to revoke that special access and give it to someone else.