Wrong. We've produced "...machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of..." a worm: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...

Perhaps. IEEE Spectrum credits Maruska, as do several other histories of the subject.

http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...

Maruska seems to have made the first working violet LED. Some people claim that it doesn't qualify as a blue LED, but as far as I know there's no agreed-upon hard distinction between violet and blue. Maruska developed the right materials and process to make it, even if RCA pulled the plug before he had solved all of the problems necessary for commercialization.

$49 only gets you the Edison module, which is useless by itself. You also need a base board of some kind. The Edison module with the Arduino-compatible base board shown in the photos will set you back $99. Still a pretty good price. 3x more expensive than a Raspberry Pi, but it is a lot more capable.

I'd get more excited about a 64-bit ARM embedded board, but those aren't available yet, other than a $6000 development board from ARM.

Not all of the code on GitHub is open source, but the majority is -- handy, when that means an account is free as in beer, too.

I'm not privy to any details of GitHub's finances or business model, but most likely it's a good thing that there are non-open-source projects using GitHub, because that's probably what's paying for the free open source use. I've recommended to several clients developing proprietary software the use of GitHub rather than running their own in-house repositories, because the interface is easier for them to use and they don't need as much in-house expertise to manage things. Because Git is distributed, they could of course do both, or easily transition away from GitHub later, and that's a selling point.

"Somehow" is that you're hallucinating. VMS didn't run on any HP hardware until 2002. Prior to that it only ran on DEC and Compaq hardware.

nearly 30% of Americans either aren't digitally literate or don't trust the Internet

For that to be true, over 70% of Americans must be BOTH digitally literate AND trust the Internet, which is impossible since anyone who trusts the Internet is not digitally literate.

IPv6 addresses are so long that you can't remember them long enough to read the address from one machine and type it into another.

Which is not a problem because normal people don't have to read the IP address from one machine and type it into another. They use DNS and DHCP, which were specifically intended to eliminate the overwhelming majority of instances of dealing with IP addresses directly.

I've been a networking software engineer for most of my career, so I do have to deal directly with IP address (v4 and v6) routinely, and I don't complain about it. My mother is not a networking software engineer or IT person, so she's had to do that exactly ZERO times in the 15+ years that she's used the Internet.

But, it seems unworkable from a human perspective. No I haven't thought of a better solution. I'm just saying that this is a significant usability problem and a barrier to adoption.

It's not a usability problem, because people shouldn't be directly dealing with IP addresses. If people are directly dealing with IP addresses, that is the usability problem which needs fixing, and not the length of the address.

XFS is prone to data corruption when improperly shut down.

Really? Ugh. I thought most modern file systems were consciously designed to avoid that sort of problem.