Apart from the joy of eccentricity I don't see any real advantage in only one copy of the game existing, as opposed to multiple copies each residing on its own USB stick. You'd have the same effect of a world passing from person to person, maintaining all the modifications made by previous players. Each copy would be unique. More people would get to participate.

You are in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Bing uses Hadoop? Wow, that's kind of funny. Reminds me of when Hotmail ran on Apache, which it still might be doing for all I know.

Any law is automatically an incentive for people not to admit breaking it. That's no rationale against making laws. The reason for any business regulation is that there's a tendency for business owners not to be altruistic unless there are tangible consequence hanging over their heads.

I sure hope you're not lumping local TV news into the category of "professional journalism." Local news is like a high school version of "real" news -- for example, the ubiquitous "Live Report!" in which a reporter goes out to a location where nothing is happening at the moment, and narrates a tape about something that happened earlier in the day. What a joke.

Pick almost any free-time activity people used to do before the Internet, and I'll bet they're doing less of it today, because free time is a finite resource. New alternatives always compete with older ones.

True dat. Using javascript for backend coding would be like going back to classic ASP and VbScript.

I agree, and I don't see how Microsoft can "kill" .Net. As the article points out, Microsoft tends to abandon platforms it isn't interested in, but so what? .Net works fine, doesn't really need anything more done to it, and has a huge development community using it and documenting how to use it better. Seems like it can survive on its own without any further input from MS.

"We may be slow but we're not stupid," is an interesting remark, considering that public stupidity is the major weapon in the battle of Greedy Bastards vs. Everybody Else. The small number of people who can't stand to live in the world unless they own it have been actively cultivating mass stupidity for years. Their arsenal includes kneejerk emotional responses, supersitious fear of science and academia, leadership cultism, and other ignorance-based aspects of human psychology. It's like a giant football team with a handful of quarterbacks standing safely behind millions of big dumb linemen who are willing to charge out and get their knees broken for the cause.
If we're going to save ourselves from disaster we had better start using the public's stupidity for the public good. Stop offering up facts and reason and switch to trite, mindless slogans and overblown imagery. People will respond much more to a scary picture of a boogeyman than to a reasonable explanation that there is no boogeyman. Instead of trying to explain climate change, draw a cartoon of a family and their dog huddled on the roof of a floating house. The American public has been conditioned to believe fear and stupidity, so I say give them fear and stupidity.
"But that makes you just as bad." No it doesn't. Using other people's stupidity to save them from disaster is much better than using it to screw them over.

The article mentions a 1994 law that removed works from the public domain, but doesn't name the law. I've been searching online but can find nothing about a copyright law change in the U.S. in 1994. How is this not a well-known thing? I would like to read about it and what was the rationale behind it. Retroactively removing material from the public domain, as was done en masse in the Bono Act, strikes me as the most sinister type of copyright legislation.

Let's assume full deceleration at the target star has been achieved ... By that time, near-Earth telescopes would be sufficiently advanced to verify and inform the Icarus computers ...

... that the pre-warp technology museum on Starbase 235 is prepared to receive it in docking bay 19.

This might be a brief golden age of Netflix, like the brief golden age of Napster, but I hope not. I couldn't care less that the TV shows and movies I'm watching are a couple years old. There's more than enough material to fill up the time I have for television, and it's blissfully commercial-free. A couple months ago I cut off my cable service because I wasn't watching it anymore. I dread the day when Hastings decides he needs to insert commercials into programs to pay for new ventures that don't make as much profit. The idea of original Netflix programming makes me think scarily back to MTV's first game shows. But I like Hastings' philosophy of staying niche instead of trying to conquer the world. Please, Reed, you're rich enough already and your service totally RULES! Keep thinking niche and don't ruin a good thing.

Sadly, you've summed up my view of American politics perfectly. The past half century has been an amazing example of what happens when common sense is drowned out by advertising. The Right is skipping gleefully to the slaughter, sucking Rush Limbaugh's dick and chanting "USA! USA!" while the Left sits on its ass waiting for some imaginary savior to swoop in and make everything better. The top 1% who own the country's debt are probably planning how they'll stay on top in a China-dominated world.

Pro tip: Don't cross the streams!!

An animation with voltages racing around the chip as it executes?

Where's my light-cycle?? I must save my User from the MCP!!