If the HTML5 implementations were conceived of as quickly as Flash exploded, my guess is that they're no more secure. The only difference is that people haven't started exploiting all of the bugs yet.

All statements in the Constitution are dependent on the courts agreeing to their meaning. Remember there was a time when there was an assault-weapons ban, which limited magazines to a certain size, and there still is a ban on the sale of new full-automatic weapons to private citizens. The magazine size law expired through its own vocabulary setting a duration of effect, while the automatic weapons ban is still in-effect.

As long as the courts are willing to accept that there are such things as reasonable limits, there will be regulation of firearms.

They didn't around here either, until there were far too many cases of unregistered vehicles with otherwise unexpired plates running around. My guess is that the change was partially a response to the purchasing habits of undocumented immigrants, which could not get vehicle registrations on their own but could 'inherit' the old plates with up to two years remaining on them even if they were technically no longer valid, as it would require comparing registrations and MVD 'sold-notices' to catch the discrepancy. Just easier to pull the plate when selling so that the buyer has to obtain his own registration, and if he can't then he might find himself unable to get plates.

This is fine when the application is high-end and the organization can justify employing expensive, highly-trained staff to maintain the equipment, but for the average business, even one with a fairly extensive datacenter, there is no practical way to do this. Too many staff do double-duty (ie, take care of software applications and occasionally do hardware maintenance) or are too reliant on software/systems vendors that are themselves locked in to hardware incompatible with such an environment for this to be practical. It's cool, but it's definitely a niche within a niche.

Socioeconomic times that allowed women to not generate income are the exception, not the norm. Before the Industrial Revolution both genders worked mostly out of the home or on the farm, and often their kids were also roped into work. Once the Industrial Revolution hit, many women continued to work from home while their husbands went to work in factories, if they themselves didn't also transition to factory life. Only the wealthy could afford for one spouse to not work. It is not reasonable to expect one unskilled or only moderately skilled worker to supply the economic resources for multiple people on average.

I don't think that you're correct. Food production and the supply chain is the most important part of a society after access to potable water. Places where land is hideously expensive want to maximize the yield per acre, and if they can get the energy production cost along with the equipment cost down below what it costs to do it the old-fashioned way, and can also improve the consistency of the resulting crops, they may well be on to something. Think of places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and probably a whole slew of others where this would be economically viable even with the need to build structures from the ground up to do it in, where an interruption to the current food supply chain would have devastating results to the populace.

Don't forget that the sun provides more wavelengths than the plants use. Generating only the wavelengths that the plants use should mean energy efficiency.

IMDB offers a specific service beyond being a forum though. If anything, the forum is IMDB's least important function; the ability to look up credits and resumes is what IMDB is for. I don't even care about IMDB's reviews or rankings, I just want to see who was in what.

At least where I live there are similar problems for both.

If I sell a car private-party, all that I have to do is to send to the motor vehicle department a notice stating that the car has been sold. It doesn't necessarily mean that the title is transferred, but it does notify MVD that I have upheld my end and told them that I don't have the car anymore. It's the buyer's responsibility to register the vehicle. Admittedly, with visible license plates (which the seller is supposed to pull when the transaction is completed) it should be hard for unregistered vehicles to drive around, but it does still happen, either with expired plates/tags or with a stolen front-plate from the same model being applied to the rear of the car.

Similarly, since there's no required registration for firearms, if I sell a firearm that I had purchased new and therefore was registered to me, if the police later come to me I would probably not have to do a lot more than tell them that I sold it for cash. Unfortunately for the investigation that's probably where it would stall. I might find myself under law enforcement scrutiny myself for a bit, but so long as my explanation wasn't contradicted I'd probably be fine.

What method used really isn't the point actually, it's that something else can replace it.

Though for Aether in particular, I have to call BS. Saying that it doesn't use servers is like someone trying to argue that virtual machines don't ultimately have hard disk drives. They may well be abstracted-out, but they're fundamentally still there.

Then the business needs to either spend the money in-advance to be able to mitigate the problems associated with staff turnover, or needs to be ready to absorb the damage incurred when that staff change occurs.

Reddit is finding out how much damage can be incurred when a popular employee is let-go. I expect that this is far, FAR more damage than they expected, but that just goes to demonstrate the disconnect between those that own/manage the business that is Reddit and those that moderate and use Reddit the website.

Trouble is, owners/management wants to economize. They have been penny-wise and pound-foolish.

There wasn't...what?

Posting to Slashdot on a cell phone while crossing the street wasn't a good idea...

I don't think in Reddit's case that it really is. The elements of the site that allowed them to expand it to its current size are not conducive to building it any larger, and there's not enough other mainstream usage to offset the loss of those elements when they can continue to disrupt the rest of site for an extended period of time.

This is sort of Slashdot's problem too; there's an upper bound on how much traffic geek news can drive, and rather than being content to have the best geek-news site such that it draws the most traffic from this niche, they keep trying to introduce non-geek elements, which causes userbase angst, drives away newcomers, and drives away existing users who feel that the site is diluted.

Until sites stop trying to be most or all things to most or all people this will continue to be a problem for them.

It is very easy to make words, it is very difficult to back those words up with anything of meaning. These are just platitudes unless they actually follow up with something, and they're probably not going to do that.

No, the biggest problem is attempting to monetize a fairly long-established platform that is highly dependent on volunteers, who do not appreciate being disrespected despite their commitment, coupled with participants that do not like changes in things that they have grown accustomed to. It's further complicated by most companies' desire to grow, but to grow they have to get rid of elements of their businesses or customer base that detract from outside investment. Slashdot has experienced that last aspect, as has Fark, and Digg, and many other aggregation services. Many of these entities do not survive their attempt to morph into the mainstream, yet everyone still tries.

Without even looking at the individual people manage or working for them, Reddit screwed up. They've tried to change too many things too quickly and have taken their moderation staff and user base for-granted. They've also completely failed to consider that just as quickly a one website may rise to prominence, another may equally quickly supplant it. Look at Facebook replacing MySpace for example. Reddit may well find its users going elsewhere if someone else manages to build something that they find familiar without all of the current baggage.

This is admittedly anecdotal, but my work brings me into casual contact with municipal law enforcement relatively often, and several officers have complained that it's now harder to bust gang-bangers with firearms. The lack of registration requirements also means that it's much harder to prosecute straw-purchases; someone can purchase firearms with the intention to resell, hold them for long enough to 'own' them, and resell them with some mark-up private-party to those that cannot buy firearms through legitimate means.