And that's exactly the sort of thing that the grandparent is talking about. The vast majority of the US population lives on the coasts near the big cities, where the population density is significantly higher than most of Europe, yet the telephone networks are inferior. If you look at the population density of the USA, the nationwide statistics are skewed by the enormous areas where basically no one lives. If you focus on the areas where 95% of the population lives, the US and most of the EU have quite similar population density. Both can suck for Internet access if you're in the 5%, but the US also doesn't do a very good job for the 95%.

Of course they're not - China doesn't make them wait in line. It says 'welcome, here are where you can find people to work at your company, we'll put you in touch with local suppliers, do you need any more investors?'

People having problems with Facebook 5 years ago had some excuse. Now, there have been loads of stories in the mainstream press (TV news, front pages of newspapers) about privacy issues regarding Facebook. If you look at a company offering you something 'for free' and don't spend a bit of time wondering what they're getting out of it, then you're going to spend your life falling for scams. In the case of Facebook, the information about what they get out of it is very public and easy to find.

It's short for alternate and is the one that you use to type characters that are not part of your default character set. On some toy computers that don't have a proper keyboard with a meta key, it's used for commands, unfortunately eliminating its intended use and confining the users to ASCII.

Pepper isn't an API that is in any way portable across implementations, it's a chunk of WebKit / Chrome rendering guts that are exposed for external use. Supporting it in another browser is theoretically possible, but would be a huge investment in time and effort because you'd have to translate a lot of things from what Pepper exposes into something that makes sense in your own rendering engine and browser.

Not quite, but we're getting there. This is part of the reason why lots of people are moving to smartphones and tablets as their primary computing platforms: something with the computing power and memory of a laptop from 5 years ago is ample for their needs. If it can browse the web, play back music and video, send and receive emails, and edit basic office documents, then that's enough for a massive chunk of the population. It's not enough for everyone, and some of the people that it's not enough for have very deep pockets.

I was recently talking to someone at ARM about Moore's law and how it applied to different market segments. Moore's law says that the number of transistors that you can get on an IC for a fixed cost doubles every 12 months. In desktop processors, that's meant that the price has stayed roughly constant but the number of transistors has doubled. In the microcontroller world, they've been using about half of the Moore's Law dividend to increase transistor count and half to reduce cost. A lot of customers would rather have cheaper microcontrollers than faster ones and getting ones that are a bit faster and a bit cheaper every generation is a clear win (faster reduces development costs, cheaper reduces production costs). I just got a Cortex M3 prototyping board. It's got 64KB of SRAM, 512KB of Flash, and a 100MHz 3-stage pipelien. That's an insane amount of processing power and storage in comparison to the microcontrollers of 20 years ago, but it's nowhere near as big a jump as mainstream CPUs have made. It used to be that a microcontroller was a CPU from 10 years earlier (that's about the time for the Z80, for example, to go from being a CPU in home computers to being an embedded microcontroller), but the M3 isn't even as powerful as the MIPS chip from 1993, by quite a long way. The M0 has the same transistor count as the very first ARM chip back in the early '80s.

I've not noticed any slowness and the Cortex A7 is not exactly a nippy CPU. Sure, it's quad-core, but in terms of performance (and power consumption and die area), those four cores all add up to about the same as a single Cortex A15.

I switched to Opera back then (and actually paid for it). I then went to Safari when I got a Mac because all of the other Mac web browsers had crappy integration with the rest of the UI. This has improved a bit, and I'm quite tempted to start using Firefox again on the desktop. I like the UI in new versions, but I don't like the lack of security. Once they start sandboxing tabs properly, I'd be very tempted to switch. Lack of keychain integration was an annoyance, but apparently there's an extension for that.

Right, the 'exponential growth' thing seems to assume that it can just start connecting to other computers and use them and completely ignores the fact that the speed of light is really, really slow. It's pretty slow when you're dealing with the distance from one side of an IC to another. It's annoyingly slow when you're trying to send signals between chips on the same circuit board. Once you get off-site, then it's likely to be the bottleneck.

Effective policing depends on the consent of the police. Once respect for, and willingness to cooperate with, the police goes away then they're going to have an increasingly hard time. The easiest way to alienate the police (and therefore make their jobs harder) is to pass a load of laws that guarantee that everyone is guilty of something. Why would anyone sane cooperate with the police when pretty much anything that they say will incriminate them, using laws that they didn't even know existed?

That's fine. We'll just make sure that, unless you drive it entirely on roads that you own, you're liable for every accident that you're involved in that would have been avoided if you'd had sub-millisecond reaction time, including ones where your car isn't part of a collision but impacts the fuel economy of nearby drivers or causes others to collide having determined that avoiding you will have a lower probability of a fatality. Oh, and we will insist that you have insurance that's willing to cover all of these costs before you're allowed on the public roads.

I think the USA is pretty unique in that regard. Here, if you intended to drive it on the roads, you'd need it to be taxed and insured (third-party, at least), which would make the cost per year far more than $100.

I grew up in the countryside and now live in a small city where I can cycle verywhere, so I've seen both sides of this. The problem with this argument is that you forget how population density works. The people who live deep in the countryside are basically noise, statistically speaking. If a solution works for everyone else, then no one cares if they're going to keep needing private cars - it's just one more expense to counter their very low property prices.

Or some people are going to have to flip their switch from manual to automatic when they get near populated areas.

Politicians already have other people drive them. Ambulances and fire engines would be a lot safer if they plugged into a control system that made other cars get out of their way, rather than relying on humans to react sensibly to a siren in the distance. Police would almost certainly want a non-networked version with a manual override, as they are very likely to have an active adversary.

It's basic queueing theory. Decelerating slightly on a free-flowing road can cause traffic jams a few miles behind you.

We've had fully automated trains (and trams) for well over a decade. Most of the reason that they're not widespread is consumer confidence. Some carry a human 'driver' whose entire job is to sit there and press the emergency stop button if the computer breaks.