I'd be more concerned about TTL...

I think it's silly to measure the rate of technological progress by its impact on humans. The universe doesn't exist to entertain humans. Whatever science discovers about it, it's all progress. Some discoveries have a big impact on our lives, most do not.

Why would the rate of progress have slowed down? We have more scientists and better tools than 50 years ago. Doesn't make sense.

It's good for the economy to produce stuff that people have to replace regularly. We should produce crap that breaks every few months. That would really boost consumerism and spin up the economy. But what we really need are cheap and simple replacement societies. When a world police like the US bombs another country and takes their resources, they can just slap in a modern, cheap and simple solution. Benefit for all.

Here's an interesting interview of the inventor:
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/thespiritualenvoy/2009/03/12/The-Spiritual-Envoy-Eva-Ravenwood-and-Scott-Brusaw-of-Solar-Roadways

It is legal because companies want to make money with them. Welcome to the insanity of the monetary system.

I've been around since Linux 2.0.32.

Yeah, reality is a bitch.

Higgs boson is the particle of the gaps.

What if the browser doesn't cache the html, but some parsed and validated memory dump of the document? Then you'd be comparing the cache systems too. Maybe it'd be better to load from localhost without caches.

http://code.google.com/p/qtd/

Programming in D is nice, but the situation is a bit annoying.

1. Tango vs Phobos. Phobos is the official standard library, but it seems most use Tango. Phobos is also pretty low level compared to Tango.
2. The reference compiler dmd is 32bit only, gdc is outdated and abandoned, and ldc is still alpha status and has missing features. Ldc is quite promising though.
3. D2 is maybe the biggest issue. It has very useful features, such as partial C++ compatibility, but D2 is a moving target and practically no library supports it. It's also unknown when or if ever D2 will become stable. I haven't seen much discussion about it in the newsgroup either.