Maybe China had something to do with it? I'm too lazy to search for it now, but I remember reading a story about the Chinese government banning upgrades to Windows 8 for their ageing XP machines.

"Stallman has announced that it should be called gnubitcoin."

While ESR countered it should be called gunbitcoin.

This is like locking the door after the cow has bolted the barn. If there's something nasty about you that got out into the internets, the better solution would be to have Google downgrade the search results. Or maybe just mark it the way Google flags malware or hide it behind some sort of "Safe Search"-like filter.

The way I see it, Google's compliance gives it less of a right to object to a government, such as China, pushing for Google to censor its results in the name of something supposedly more important, social stability because those nasty dissidents are harming the reputation of the Party bosses, who we all know are models of virtue until purged and officially denounced.

The problem is the inefficient distribution of homes, work and entertainment places, a concept best conveyed by the term "suburbia". Sure, it's nice and probably healthier to live far from the smoke stacks and whatnot of urban existence, but if we want to make the least environmental impact we'd all be living in 1000-storey super skyscrapers or manmade mountains, venturing beyond the city limits only for the occasional sightseeing tour or safari.

"From day one I've said that WIkipedia is a fools' encyc. With the ability for any jerk to edit, it is inevitable that this happens. The worst articles involve persons, beliefs and governments."

It's precisely because any jerk can edit it that Wikipedia works. Wikipedia works for the same reason that DNA works, through an evolutionary system of error correction. You might point to a "freak" of nature as proof that DNA is nothing but fools' code, while simply shrugging at all the normal looking creatures around.

Wikipedia articles invariably get corrected over time, unless they're too trivial or unimportant for anybody but the editor that "created" the article. For evey hater, there's a fanboy editor that will correct or wrong the wrong to make it right.

"This isn't something serious, just nationalism and/or cronyism. A real domestic processor project? It wouldn't be "dozens of millions of dollars" it would be tens of billions. Intel spent $10 billion on R&D... in 2013 alone. TSMC, who's just a fab not a designer, spent $1.4 billion in 2013."

I won't dispute your figures, but I do find them on the high side.

First, the budget for such a project doesn't need to be spent in one-go. The project can be developed in stages with the money spent being increased as each milestone is reached.

Second, the CPU's don't need to be bleeding-edge. The article already stated that an existing design will be (re)used, so the budget for research is going to be drastically reduced. Consequently, Russia can simply import the parts for a fab that's one or even two generation behind the latest process, again resulting in signifcant cost savings.

"That has been one of the reasons US dollars have maintained any value at all. With so much of the US production and even many services going overseas, we simply aren't producing anything here. At least not the way we once did and still can."

Military and agricultural exports, nothwithstanding the controversy surrounding GMOs, are still strong.

Don't ascribe to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. Or maybe a variant thereof. Who knows, maybe people have become so used to social media, that secrecy becomes an afterthought. Maybe the person in charge thought email is just the pre-Facebook version of posting a status update?

Suggestion for three-letter agency recruiters: screen for applicants who aren't Facebook/Twitter/Instagram addicts.

" But then again, we still have lots of companies trying to send (outsource) tech to China... China who has a long history of taking the tech and spinning it off on their own. Hoy myopic can they be?"

I don't mind China (or Russia) taking the tech. I don't mind when they don't give back. A minor example: the many Android variants running on cheap tablets that can't be upgraded because the source code for their non-standard hardware isn't available. (Technically you can upgrade such tablets but you'd lose a lot of the functions that make it useful, like wifi/bluetooth, maybe even the touch screen, so that you basially wind up with a keyboardless mini PC.)

"but it's "value" is completely generated by the human mind"

All value is all in the mind. A juicy BigMac can be way more valuable than gold or diamonds to a starving man. Now if there's anything that's naturally valuable it's the biological necessities like oxygen (free for almost everybody except those with severe breathing problems), water, food, and possibly sex to person (man?) of breeding age. Everything else is an acquired taste.

+1 on this one. Mozilla should not commit the same mistake as the OLPC project in restricting sales to selected Third World regions. It should sell the phone wherever there are buyers, if not at your local telco or Walmart, then online. More sales in the West means more phones falling into the hands of geeky bums with the potential and time to tinker/mod the phone into something just a wee bit cooler than the default factory-shipped OS. Will the phone have more juice than the Raspberry Pi? Maybe it could sell to the maker crowd.