This study looks seriously flawed. They just throw up their hands at doing a direct comparison of architectures when they try to use extremely complicated systems and sort of do their best to beat down and control all the factors that introduces. One of the basic principles of a scientific study is that independent variables are controlled. It's very hard to say how much the instruction set architecture matters when you can't tell what pipelining, out of order execution, branch prediction, speculative execution, caching, shadowing (of registers), and so on are doing to speed things up. An external factor that could influence the outcome is temperature. Maybe one computer was in a hotter corner of the test lab than the other, and had to spend extra power just overcoming the higher resistance that higher temperatures cause.

It might have been better to approach this from an angle of simulation. Simulate a more idealized computer system, one without so many factors to control.

Be happy. The universe is not structured that way. Copying happens all the time in nature. Billions and billions of bacteria create copies of themselves every day. Events that generate light or sound radiate faithful copies of energy in many directions and also can generate echoes. One person can address a crowd of thousands, and radio stations can broadcast one signal to millions, because nature does work that way.

The insanity is the direction we tried to take ideas. We've tried to treat ideas like they're gold. Try to hoard them, try to demarcate and issue certificates of ownership. Tried to apply the logic of material ownership to the immaterial. Many people have fallen for the oversimplification, and have bought the lines that "property is property" and "stealing is stealing". But those pesky ideas just won't stay safely locked up. Someone else might get the same idea without ever breaking into the vault. The people who are regularly appalled and unhappy that vaults don't protect ideas are fools. That DRM exists and has been forced into so many products agasint the wishes of people who know better, is a testament to the large numbers of people who have failed to grasp this aspect of nature. The universe is a better place because ideas can't be locked up. It's the fools who have tried mightily to make patents and copyrights work who are struggling against reality. They're fighting an unwinnable battle. They will eventually lose, but until that day comes, they continue to cause a lot of waste, grief, and damage.

No, that may not work. One way a city and their red light camera operating partner has devised to get around those pesky legal requirements that you get to confront your accuser and that they have to prove you were driving is to change the offense from a moving violation to a mere violation of a city ordinance. Doesn't matter who was driving, the owner gets punished regardless. It's similar to being penalized for not mowing your lawn. Your insurance rates do not go up, you don't get a strike on your driving record.

Making the crime into a violation of a city ordinance makes it harder for them to collect, as it's not as serious. An easy way to deal with an accusation is to refuse to pay. But they've also worked out ways to get you if you try that. Even though it's not a moving violation, somehow, you can't renew your driver's license until you've paid the fine. They can also call on a debt collection agency who will happliy trash your credit rating.

It's not the features that you stare at with no idea what they do that cause a problem. As you say, a quick look at the manual can help to sort that out (though it does add to the overall cognitive load). It's all the potentially subtle things that you don't even realise are features and so never look up and don't realise that, contrary to first inspection, the code is actually doing something subtly different to what you expect.

Don't be so dismissive of Chernobyl and Fukushima as freak, one time events.

The causes you mention are proximate causes. The root cause was human stupidity, recklessness, greed, and folly. That's what sank the Titanic. That's what has caused hundreds of oil spills, including Deepwater Horizon and Exxon Valdez. It's what killed thousands of people in Bhopal. Upon inquiry, over and over we find that the operators had plenty of warnings and plenty of measures they could have taken to avoid problems. They just chose not to heed the warnings. The Titanic didn't have to charge ahead at full speed at night. Didn't have to cut straight through a field of icebergs.

In Fukushima's case, that recklessness manifested as several stupid decisions that saved a little money but made disaster certain if a tsunami struck. They did not build a high enough wall. The engineers knew how high it needed to be and told management, but management overruled or ignored them. Then, they didn't maintain the emergency generators. They skimped on several other measures. The people making these decisions had no business taking such gambles on behalf of the whole world. They were incompetent to understand the true risks they were taking. They had no reason to suppose that a tsunami would never hit, but they behaved as if it wouldn't happen. We would never have allowed such recklessness if we'd known. And that's another thing those fools did-- cover it up. They knew others would not approve of the risks they were taking. They knew. But instead of heeding those very legitimate fears, they denied that they were taking huge risks. They behave like ostriches, sticking their heads in the sand so they couldn't see doom approaching. Then they have the nerve to say that they are blameless and no one could have foreseen that a tsunami could be that big. The only way anyone could think that is by ignoring or dismissing most of knowledge ever recorded and studies ever done on tsunamis. They built for 3.1m and increased to 5.7m, and there had already been 8 tsunamis higher than that in the past century. The 2004 tsunami that hit Sumatra was 24m, and at a few points 30m thanks to funneling effects. They might have even tried a bit of propaganda, bribe someone to cook up bad studies showing that tsunamis are never bigger than some relatively small size.

It will happen again. We do have honest asssessment and reporting in many areas, such as passenger airplanes. Nuclear power could be operated safely. The problem is, will nuclear power be operated safely? Fukushima shows us that it won't. People can't be trusted that far. The continued efforts of TEPCO to downplay the disaster and spin it as not really their fault and also not really so horrific after all shows that they haven't learned their lesson and they still don't take safety seriously enough. Covering their asses seems to be more important than coming clean on matters that imperil the lives of thousands. One example of the spin that nuclear proponents put on the issue is number of deaths. I have pointed out repeatedly that you can't use that alone as a measure of how disastrous an accident was. By that measure, a bad bus crash (Prestonsburg, Kentucky, 27 deaths) could rank as a bigger disaster than a major hurricane (Andrew, 26 direct fatalities).

Would you put those TEPCO bozos in charge of a nuclear plant? I wouldn't.

Both. Copyright is monopolistic. Why is it that only one publisher at a time can have the "right" to make copies of works still in copyright? There's no good reason for such restrictions. As an example, anyone can print Sherlock Holmes stories. No need to ask anyone for permission. You might think that means no one can profit from printing them, and so no one does, but that is not the case.

As for better models, one word: patronage. Patronage worked for centuries. It worked for Mozart. You might suppose that means only the wealthy would patronize the arts. In Mozart's day, that was largely the case. But today we can do patronage much, much better. Thanks to vastly superior communication, the public can directly participate in the financing of art and science. That was simply not possible centuries ago. Currently we have Kickstarter, Indiegogo, and Humble Bundle.

Patronage can be the mainstay, but it's not all. There's also the advertising and endorsement models. Broadcast radio and TV uses advertising.

Having to get permission to share information is indeed tyranny. Tyranny over our very thoughts. Civilization arose and advanced because we invented and improved ways of sharing knowledge. We created writing systems so we could more easily share knowledge. Sharing is the natural state. It is only relatively recently that a coalition of various small interests have conspired to change the thinking on sharing so that now it's vilified as "piracy". The Gutenberg press was a huge advancement that some, sadly predictably, attempted to suppress. One of the forces attempting to control the press was the Church. They wanted to make sure there were no inaccurate Bibles circulating amongst the people no matter how high their rank, and felt this "need" gave them the right to dictate what printers could print. They helped pioneer the whole idea of copyright, for that purpose. Today, it is unthinkable that anyone could censor the Bible. The Pope himself has no authority to tell printers that they can't print whatever version of the Bible they want.

And today, suppression is happening again with our most recent breakthrough, the Internet. It will eventually end, it's only a question of when. The sooner the better.

docx ?

Most answers to these questions are concentrating on the snooping. System admins should not snoop, unless specifically told to do so by someone in authority.

But few are talking about office politics. Do not stick your head in the sand! Listening to the grapevine is not snooping. Learn what's going on the same way everyone else can, by keeping up with how the company's presentation did at the trade show and that sort of thing, not by abusing system administrator privileges to read private email and the like. You have an interest in knowing if the company is about to go bankrupt, be sold, or layoff a whole division. You also want to know if you have enemies and if so, who they are and why they hate and fear you so you can guard yourself. It may be that someone somehow views you as a threat to their job, and they'd like to get you before you get them. Doesn't matter that you aren't a threat, what matters is that they see you that way. You may be able to show them otherwise, and they'll stop trying to plant knives in your back. Or maybe not. There are a lot of sick bastards out there who want power so they can enjoy making others sweat, make their lives hell. You don't want to be surprised by your job being eliminated, and if that's likely, you want to know that with as much advance notice as possible.

You're right, I had not heard of node.js. Checking, I see that node.js was released in 2009. An eternity for regular users, but for casual users, really not all that long ago. There is plenty of old documentation out there that should be retired because it's older than node.js and Javascript 1.8.5.

In 2011, the Javascript 1.8.5 release added some sorely needed missing functionality that I used to complain about: Object.keys, and similar functions. The book I had was too old to cover these new features.

Although Javascript can be used on the server side, it's not so easy. What do you need to run a Javascript program? A browser. You don't want to have to run a browser on the server. GCC doesn't have a front end for Javascript. You could use Rhino to translate from Javascript to Java, and run that on the server side. Closure compiles Javascript to Javascript. Helpful to make Javascript run faster, not helpful to make it run. There may be some proprietary, commercial tools for compiling or running Javascript.

So, what do I not know about? What tools are there for running Javascript outside a browser? Or, is there some tiny browser like Lynx or Links that can do it?