No. The real problem is that it is not backwards-compatible with Perl 5, making its rate of adoption guaranteed to be almost zero.

ARM didn't make the ARM1/2 either, they were fabricated by VLSI (the company, not the acronym). ARM has always been fabless.

Well it's already solved in places with competent regulators, so don't try pretending it isn't.

Get back to me when we don't have years and tons of nuclear waste just lying around in conditions not in fact all that different from Fukushima.

What, and that nuclear power's fault and not the fault of incompetent lawmakers and intransigent greenies?

No, time has a certain kind of intercourse with you.

I thought PHP meant "Pretty Hopeless Privacy" due to its track record of security flaws...

its turns out that making modest cuts in energy consumption isn't that painful, saves some money, and may have longer term benefits

There are 2 main problems.

First, if we're going to continue to increase in technology and especially if we're going to go for electric cars, we're going to need to use a LOT MORE electricity than we do now. Filling people's heads with the idea that we can use less energy as part of the solution is feeding them bullshit.

Second, and this is from my perspective, any energy generated by solar or wind is energy not generated by nuclear. As I see nuclear as the only viable option for generating the amount of baseload we're going to need for the likes of electric cars, that fills people's heads with the idea that we don't need nuclear, which is also problematic.

No, it's basic human nature to kick the can down the road, nothing exclusive to politicians. Look at things like IPv4 space exhaustion - we're still kicking the can down the road right now and we'll continue to do so until it becomes so painful we reluctantly start transitioning stuff to IPv6. Same for fossil fuels, "conventional sources" have already peaked and the cost of energy is just going to go up, but we will do the minimum possible and kick the can down the road until it becomes so painful we're forced to change.

Lots of people predicted it. I'm not entirely familiar with the US housing bubble, but in the UK the bubble collapse could be seen from a mile off. I remember yelling pointlessly at the radio when someone from one of the demutualized building societies was trying to justify lending an even more stupidly massive amount of money to people charging interest only "because we want to make property affordable" when it was doing the exact opposite (fuelling the bubble and making it more unaffordable). I also remember discussing it with my Dad on numerous occasions who had got caught up in all the hype. The problem is people got so greedy (both banks and customers alike) with the banks breathlessly falling over themselves to give people mortgages on ever more unsustainable and ridiculous terms, and customers falling over themselves to take them including lying on mortgage application forms, it was obvious that it would only take a slight upset in the economy to make the whole thing come crashing down. It was so blatantly unsustainable. Anyone who wasn't one of the breathless banks or customers could see it coming. The only thing that wasn't entirely predictable was the timing of the burst or the cause of the burst. That upset at least here was skyrocketing energy prices causing all the people who had got mortgages so big they were living paycheque to paycheque with nothing left over to begin defaulting as increased fuel and food costs demolished their non-existent reserves.

No, Microsoft's domination is down to pure luck.

If Compaq hadn't cloned the PC BIOS, or the IBM PC been a flop, Microsoft would have been just a page in history now along with Lotus, Ashton-Tate and various other software houses that got borged by IBM and other large companies. With no IBM PC, MS-DOS would never have sold much, and would never have been the "Microsoft tax" that bankrolled the first versions Windows and Microsoft Office. Even Intel might be a secondary player today, it may have been Zilog who became Chipzilla as they became the preferred supplier for CP/M machines and their 16 bit (and later 32 bit) follow ons, with companies like NEC or SGS or possibly Mostek being where AMD is now as they were Zilog second sources. And Digital Research (CP/M vendor) would be the big bad monopolist instead of Microsoft.

The size and construction of the head probably makes quite a lot of difference. I have an old Dallas D banjo ukulele (a George Formby branded one, no less) and the head had an inner hoop in it which makes the effective area of the head a bit smaller than the entire diameter. As such the overtones are softer and it sounds less "banjoey" (but still very different from a standard ukulele). The other consequence of the banjo uke head is that if you play a chord like F# where one string is not strummed, you need to mute the string that's not played otherwise the head will cause the string to vibrate and make the chord sound awful.

You can buy hardware from a factory a la carte. I've done it. There are quite a few companies doing prototyping services where you can do this for easily affordable sums of money.

I've had a small run (100 units) of an ethernet board I designed made in a factory. The board was a 100mm x 60mm 4 layer PCB. I supplied the gerbers and a BOM and a month later I had 100 boards back (I did put on the through hole parts myself). It cost me a couple of grand to do, they could do it cheaper than I could if I had ordered the parts off Farnell and soldered them onto the boards myself. Hardware is much easier to do today on a shoestring budget than it was even 5 years ago.

Now it's different if you're needing an ASIC - then you're looking into spending a couple of million. But off the shelf BTLE SoCs already exist.

The thing I find implausible about this Kickstarter is that they are attempting to break the laws of physics, not that you can't make a pretty decent sized prototype run on the funding they had.

They say their device requires an average of 36 microamps. Even if the chip they use only runs on 1 volt, that would be 36 microwatts (it's going to be more than that, I expect their chip is more like 1.8v). They claim the tag will just run on the typical ambient signal from things like WiFi access points. Their antenna at most is going to be half an inch on each side, and the most they can possibly harvest will be less than 1 microwatt even with 100% efficiency.

The antenna won't be much use for getting power off broadcast radio signals. It's far too tiny. Don't forget a crystal set requires not only a very long antenna suitable for the AM radio band, but a good connection to ground, too, so that it can make enough current to run the crystal radio. This thing doesn't have a ground connection.

Because most of the risk is due to human factors, which have not been eliminated

No, it's really not. It's mostly technical, and we can build integral fast reactors now with passive cooling where a meltdown, or effective sabotage, is virtually impossible. You should actually open your eyes to this evidence.

Why do we need to cover the risk of Fukushima-style accidents when we're NOT BUILDING 50-YEAR-OLD NUCLEAR PLANTS??