Several groups have tried and failed. The main problem is that Facebook owns the ecosystem today, and it's incredibly difficult to compete with that. Facebook has no incentive to inter-operate with anyone else, and they shut down any third-party integrator that they deem to be a competitor.

I was once optimistic that "the rest of the web" could band together and create a decentralized system more interesting than Facebook, but Facebook has done such a good job of creating a hub-and-spoke model where Facebook is the hub and everyone else is the spoke that it's really hard to pivot from there to a truly-decentralized social network.

And the best thing is we already have both of these systems, and individuals can use whatever is appropriate for a given situation. The armed forces are a good example of where it is more important to know exactly what time something will happen than to know whether local people will be sleeping at that time.

The concept of timezones is a compromise between each longitude having its own time-of-day origin and all longitudes sharing the same which attempts to keep the advantages of the former (easy to determine approximately what phase of the day it is at any longitude) while avoiding constant clock adjustments as one moves between longitudes. I think I'd agree with the grandparent that the idea of timezones makes sense, but the implementation of it based on arbitrary administrative boundaries (countries, states) rather than on actual longitude increments is what adds the complexity for software, since the only way to work with administrative boundaries is to maintain a database of the boundaries and each of their special cases.

A large reason for that is that watching shows on broadcast TV is pretty damned inconvenient.

I discover every day new shows on Netflix that aired years ago but I wasn't able to watch either because I wasn't in the right country (wasn't in the US) or because I had something better to do when they aired.

However, if these things had been available for on-demand streaming from the outset I'm quite likely to have watched them, just as I currently watch new TV shows on-demand through Amazon VOD or Hulu.

You made an error in your third line:

.5 * 10 = 5
5 - .5 = 4.5 = 9 * .5
4.5 / 9 = 0.5
0.5 = 0.5. QED.

The original nook gets "free" 3G because the device (as shipped) is locked down so the only thing you can do with that 3G is buy books from Barnes and Noble and download them. The cost is eaten by B&N as part of the book purchase costs. Note that in particular the included web browser application only works when a wifi network is available.

Nook color is unlikely to get this functionality unless they can find a way to allow third-party apps on the phone without allowing them to use the subsidized 3G.

Given that "wine is not an emulator" but rather a library that mimics the Windows API and a loader that understands the Windows executable format, the code that is running is native code for your architecture and can potentially do anything a native application can assuming it's been written with that in mind. So you should expect a Windows application running under Wine to be able to do anything a native application could do running under the same user account.

There is one aspect of running under Wine that leaves you in a better situation than running on Windows XP: on Wine, the entire Windows filesystem lives under your home directory as far as the native OS is concerned, so you never end up running things as Administrator (or root) to get them to run, which means if someone does make a rogue Windows app that detects when it's running under Wine and tries to do something mean it'll be constrained by the access rights of your user account in all cases.

I think the crux of the issue here is that Apple is the party distributing the app via its app store, and as a distributor it is bound by the licence of the software. In this case the licence is the GPL which requires that all binary distributions be accompanied either with source code or an offer of source code. Therefore to be in compliance Apple must at the very least make available the source code of the application by some means. Other requirements in the GPL may apply here too.

Engineering of application-layer protocols is far easier when everyone is addressable. The deployment of NAT has had a cascading effect on many application layer protocols that would have had a simple, obvious implementation were every node equally addressable. Instead, every new application protocol has to consider and work around NAT.

So sure, as we stand today that ship has sailed and NAT has created a hierarchy of nodes that is unavoidable in today's network engineering, but I wonder how much innovation has been stifled by time spent working around NAT.

I've even had them visually check me from right over at the self-checkout console. The better self checkout systems will make the age check asynchronous and only block if you get to the end of checking out before they get to you, which is usually fixable by making sure to scan the restricted items first.

And now if I'm watching a full-screen video and Update Manager starts up I lose my full-screen context and need to get up to my keyboard and mouse (because if I'm watching full-screen video I'm probably not sitting at my desk) and reset the fullscreen setting.

So I solved this by turning off Update Manager updates completely. Well done, Shuttleworth.

If you take one step back and look at the effect of the previous generation on the next then life after reproduction can be significant to evolution. A species with a genetic tendency to murder its offspring a year after they are born isn't going to last long, and conversely a species where older creatures tend to care for their grandchildren so that the current adults can go out and "hunt and gather" (or sit in an office playing with computers) is more likely to succeed.

By "minor issues with my Intel video card" I assume you mean "There's no hardware-accelerated video and thus movie playback is unusable unless you futz around with xorg.conf to enable a feature that by all accounts seems to be pre-release quality and write some incomprehensible junk to some file in /proc every time the X server restarts".

The Intel video driver issue in 9.04 should have been a release-blocker. It's ridiculous that Ubuntu shipped with broken support for one of the most popular graphics chipsets in low-end computers. My trust of the Ubuntu brand was seriously tarnished when I upgraded my media center PC from 8.04 to 9.04 and found it completely useless at playing back video; this is not what I've come to expect, and I certainly won't be upgrading so readily in future.

The data connection is similar in concept to a dial-up modem where you establish a point-to-point link and send datagrams over it. On Android (which is based on Linux), the cellular data link is a normal ppp interface as far as userspace is concerned, and it uses the normal Linux IP stack making it completely transparent to app developers. I've no idea how this manifests on the iPhone, though. Apple may well have artificially split the API to make things like this (allowing Skype only over wi-fi) possible.

Off the top of my head, I don't know the answers to any of those questions. Does that matter?

I do understand the questions, and I know how to find the answers to the questions, I've just not committed those facts to memory. I agree with the premise (science education sucks) but not with how they "proved" it (by asking people to recall facts.) What I expect people to have is the ability to think critically and hopefully also an understanding of the scientific method.

I think the real story here is that the people administering this study apparently completely fail at science.