The main reason for a six month release cycle is to provide drivers for new hardware.

Since hardware drivers are integrated with the kernel and window system, supporting new drivers requires upgrading the core system.

If aren't upgrading your hardware constantly, there's no reason to update beyond the latest LTS. If you're buying this week's Nvidia card or a laptop with a new wireless card, then you'll want to use the latest Ubuntu release to get support for it.

Bullshit.

First, radioactive materials aren't that dangerous. You don't want to be near them, but it's only moderately worse than any other common industrial waste. Second, people can read signs even after revolutions. If you put "severe radiation, stay out" on a concrete building, it'll be fine.

Mining uranium is one of the dirtiest parts of the process. The idea that we should mine out all the easily accessible Uranium is just as foolish as to drill all the oil or mine all the coal.

With breeder reactors, either designs like the LFTR or more established designs like SFRs, we don't need to mine significant amounts of additional fissionables for a century. And with the SFRs there's not much left to develop - we can just deploy the existing designs more widely.

As Level 3 already pointed out, requesting traffic settlement is absurd when your customers don't even have symmetric connections. It's just gaming the system, and when people game the system the system changes.

All of them, if we're serious about this democracy game we claim to be playing.

If you're going to say that the government owns the roads, then the government is separate from and rules over the people. We have a word for that, it's called Feudalism.

KDE 4.0 was bad, so lots of people switched to Gnome 2.

KDE 4.3 was decent, and Gnome 3 was awful, so lots of people switched to KDE.

Gnome 3.10 and KDE 4.13 are both fine. If they both keep working on polish and extension support for a while rather than trying to reinvent themselves again then everything will be peachy.

Sure. So we've upgraded from the system crashing to one write failing.

This is actually really interesting technical problem that the Tor and Debian people have spent some time working on. In practice, with most compilers today, if you compile a program twice you get different binaries. There are a variety of reasons for this, from embedded time stamps to non-deterministic shared library reference ordering to embedding the host name of the build machine.

Here's the Debian project's wiki page on the problem that goes into much more detail:
https://wiki.debian.org/ReproducibleBuilds

Manual doesn't bother me in the same way. If I'm shifting gears, that's fine - the car does exactly what I expect it to do.

The thing that annoys me is shift pauses in automatic. The only thing I told it to do was go faster, and it takes a break do do something else. On some cars, this can be like a 1.5 second pause.

The Matrix is discontinued.

A 4-door Yaris will probably come in at $16.5k new. It'll give you 15.6 cu ft of cargo space and burn a gallon of gas to go 30/36 miles.

A Prius will come in around $25.8 new. It'll give you 21.6 cu ft of cargo space and burn a gallon of gas to go 51/48 miles, while having a much more comfortable interior.

A better comparison would be the Prius C, which will cost about $20.1k new. With that you've got 17.1 cu ft of cargo space and go 53/46 on a gallon of gas.

Toyota doesn't actually sell a car cheaper than the Prius C with more cargo space.

I've got a 2002 Prius which still runs great. It's still using the factory battery pack, which isn't showing any signs of needing replacement.

Admittedly, they're expensive. I recently got a 2013 Prius C as a second car, and the reasonable alternative would have been a Honda Fit for about two thirds of the price. But after driving a car with a no-shift transmission there's no way I'm going back to the stuttery shifts of an automatic. When I hit the gas, I want the car to go - not start going and then pause to think about what gear it should be in.

The biggest change happened in late 1800's / early 1900's when refined sugar and bleached flour became widely available. There are a bunch of interesting studies when native groups who ate traditional diets transitioned to high refined carb diets. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/cont...

It turns out that you can have this problem even with a RAID. I'm running RAID-1 with 3 disks for my long term storage, and I need to move it from ext4 to btrfs at some point to avoid the failure case where it selects a bitrotted copy to read from. It would be nice if the RAID layer were smart enough to use the matching two of three, but that would make reads slower...

Btrfs (at least) can store multiple copies on one disk and use a checksum to identify the good copy to read. Obviously more disks is better, but...

Why even have "providers"?

Just give me an IPv4 address and a /64 of IPv6 addresses and charge me a reasonable price for the link and bandwidth. Maybe have an upcharge for 5 static IPv4's and a /48 of IPv6's. Charge local providers for datacenter space and advertising space in the "how do I get email, streaming television, and VoIP phone service" brochure.