Right -- only a communist country would attempt such shenanigans. Western democracies are totally above that sort of misbehavior. ;^)

I always wonder about the psychological mechanism they are trying to exploit with that -- do people really gravitate towards blood-in-the-water scenarios like that? "Oh goodie, finally I can find out the way to put my local grocer out of business!"

I can't speak to old-fashioned soda fountains (with a soda jerk, etc), but modern American-style self-serve soda fountains might be a problem as well -- in my experience at least, when a person can walk up and pour himself another refill "for free" without even having to ask for it, the amount of soda consumed in a single sitting tends to double or triple.

What really causes my eyes to bleed is the new "flat" buttons that don't really look like buttons; they look like text labels. The top of every window now looks like someone gave a junior high student a screenshot of a Mavericks window and told him to reproduce it using construction paper, scissors and glue.

And the frosted-glass semi-transparency effects are just a pointless and unnecessary in Yosemite as they were in Windows. I get the feeling that the Apple UI team has run out of useful work to do, and now they are just changing things because they're bored. The next OS/X release will no doubt change them back, and then add in some other dubious changes that be reverted in the release after that.

I don't see why a browser-base app could not, at least in principle, be as reliable and secure as "real software". As an example, say I write the real application you recommend, and then I also find a way for it to run inside a web page. Will it become insecure simply because there is now a web-browser window wrapped around it?

JavaScript is the 'bytecode' to compile to these days.

Not saying that's optimal, but if JavaScript is what the world's web browsers run, then JavaScript is what people will target to get onto those web browsers. At least you can still use your language of choice to do so...

I don't think it's a real problem. Any laptop on the market today can go from sleep mode to fully usable in less than a second; barring implementation bugs, why shouldn't the electronics in the Tesla computer be able to do the same?

Booting up is something that only needs to happen if the batteries ever completely drain.

Fantastic, but Silicon Valley remains inside the United States. Therfore Silicon Valley companies are still subject to US law.

I completely agree in principle, but in practice, the more software that is using the current version of the code, the more things will break when you change the design. That has the effect of making the code less malleable, proportional to the number of its dependents.

So for a function that is used only by your own program, it's no problem at all. For an in-house library that is used in several programs across your company, it's a bit of a hassle but doable. For a new computer language that is being used by a small number of devotees, it can be disruptive but worthwhile. For a library that is used worldwide by thousands of corporations, it has to be managed extremely carefully. And finally, for a ubiquitous computer language (e.g. C++) that has billions of man-hours of code that needs to keep working, breaking backwards compatibility might not be practical at all, no matter how great the benefits might be.

I think the moral of the story is: rewrite and redesign your code to make it as awesome as possible before it gets too popular, because afterwards you'll be stuck with it. :^)

... and even in that other 0.01% of the time, it's likely that your compiler will optimize the pretty human-readable code into the cool-but-cryptic bitmasking trick at the assembly level anyway. There's no need for the human programmer to do that sort of obfuscatory wizardry at the source code level, when the compiler can do it for him -- and likely do it more reliably as well, since compiler writers pay more attention to what is strictly language-legal vs what-seems-to-sort-of-work-today.

Ah, good old "probably". A sure indicator that the poster hasn't bothered to actually research what he's claiming, but rather is just making something up that would support his pet conspiracy theory, if it were true.

While there may not be any dramatic breakthroughs, wind-turbine technology is become more cost-effective through good old economies-of-scale: bigger turbines, and larger production runs.

The new thing to phase in would be economical wind-turbines (as opposed to the smaller, more expensive-per-watt turbines of previous decades). And arguably, it's happening now (at least in places where conditions are favorable to wind)

I've got $50 that says they will break their oil addiction, at some point. (of course, that point may be only when there's no more oil remaining to be extracted... ;^) )

Power companies may or may not be dumb (YMMV), but like any large institution that manages expensive infrastructure, they are slow to react.

It's not like the day after wind power becomes cheaper than coal power a million windmills will spring up. More likely the power companies will operate their coal plants until it's not longer economical to do so (or until they are forced to stop, whichever comes first) and gradually phase in renewable power instead of building/upgrading their existing coal infrastructure.

i.e. Just because it would be cheaper for them to build windmills now than to build a coal plant now, doesn't mean it would be cheaper for them to build windmills now than to keep using the coal plant they already paid for.

There, fixed that for you.