BSD historically got more total (including proprietary) contributions - but fewer contributions that were shared back.

Recall when every server vendor had their own proprietary fork of BSD (SunOS4, etc) and kept all. A lot of the top software talent was employed by those companies - making proprietary unshared contributions to BSD.

Worked fine for BSD for a while. But as the companies started keeping more and more to themselves, GPL'd alternatives (linux) passed the BSDs as the corporate sponsors died off or lost interest.

For a lot of people I think Facebook accounts really are transient ephemeral things more like colds.

Whenever when some damn website or game makes me have a Facebook account to sign up -- I make a new account with a throwaway username / password / email that I never care to remember -- and never use it again. That's why I think a lot of those "facebook has X users" or "Y% of users have abandoned facebook" are totally bogus. For just my accounts, sure I've abandoned 90% of them. But that doesn't make it fair to extrapolate that 90% of facebook accounts get abandoned. Just that some people don't want a permanent Facebook account.

TL/DR: I do get facebook accounts very much like I get mild colds. A get a new one a couple times a year; it doesn't last for more than a couple days; and they're merely mildly annoying.

Hasbro vs. Internet Entertainment Group "CANDYLAND Case" 1996 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11626 (W.D.Wa. 1996) HASBRO, INC., Plaintiff, v. INTERNET ENTERTAINMENT GROUP, LTD., et al., Defendants. 1996 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 11626 (W.D. Wa. 1996) .... 6. Hasbro has shown that defendants' use of the CANDY LAND name and the domain name candyland.com in connection with their Internet site is causing irreparable injury to Hasbro.

That's exactly what all parents should teach kids to do: Don't talk to strangers (whether online or in the real world. And especially don't give them true real-life information. And remember - to your kids, Zuckerberg and the Google kids giving out "free" internet services are just as much strangers as a guy in an unmarked van handing out free candy to kids. I thought that's just basic parenting skills; and one of the first rules anyone teaches kids.

And wonder if it makes sense to use as a firewall in front of a US-friendly one.

Seems a pair of firewalls ought to be configurable so unless *both* have a back door you're safe.

It's not hypocracy if her position is consistantly that the elite and rich defense contractors (doesn't her husband own much of URS) are above the law, and everyone else must bow before them.

Her legislation could say "only senators, former senators, people with over $100 million, and defense contractors can use drones to spy on others" -- and it wouldn't be hypocracy. It'd just be evil.

Another guy'll be making a robot painting system that aims it's cars "so make a more profitable assembly line".

Yet another'll make a self-driving car "so you won't have to worry about drunk drivers anymore".

Once those pieces are all there (hint, today), it doesn't take much for the last guy to glue the 3 together; hand it a gun instead of spraypaint; and load it with a databases of faces you don't like.

Seems backwards.

In our work ("Enterprise") setting, we have RAID-Z that does plenty of checksumming to survive failures; so we'd want the extra performance (the only reason where our work uses SSDs instead of spinning disks).

In a consumer setting; where people store precious irreplacable memories (pics of kids) and their ownly copy of financial data; it seems reliability should rule.

The biggest opportunity for GPUs in Databases isn't for "performance". As others pointed out - for performance it's easier to just throw money at the problem.

GPU powered databases do show promise for performance/Watt.

http://hgpu.org/?p=8219

Also note that you can write PostgreSQL stored procedures in OpenCL - which may be useful if you're doing something CPU intensive like storing images in a database and doing OCR or facial recognition on them: http://wiki.postgresql.org/images/6/65/Pgopencl.pdf

The tricky part people are overlooking is value to whom?

Disagree - it basically means the information will be kept forever in certain silos. The NSA will probably keep your information forever - so 999 years ago of your descendants are suspected of something controversial then they can use what you post on /. to go after them. Health care & life insurance companies will probably keep some of your data forever so they set the rates for your descendants based on statistics from your genetic makeup. Google (or whomever buys them) will probably keep some of your information forever, just because they can.

But these will all be in private silos of data. The public internet will probably forget you much much much faster.

Interesting and sad.

Those links would probably also be great for NSA & Google like data mining to monitize those users too.