Ugh. Now you're just pandaring to the crowd.

That only applies if when traveling faster than light within flat spacetime. A consequence of high speed travel is time dilation, where the elapsed time is noticeably different between, say, the earth and a traveler going at say 1/10th the speed of light.

While the math is beyond me, the Alcubierre drive apparently works around this mess (while introducing others) by contracting spacetime itself. The most notable mess is the requirement of negative mass exotic matter, which we have no way of proving or disproving can even exist. This is the same type of exotic matter which can also be used to open worm-holes.

That said, I would happily fund this sort of research out of my own pocket for the rest of my life. Maybe it's because I've watched/read too much sci-fi but I'd like to think humanity can accomplish far more than than the the Internet and combustion-based travel.

Of course, wait until a global famine hits and see how many 6-foot individuals last.

In the big scheme of things, is being a CEO so important? What do you get out of a it? Perhaps the chance to associate with (or spawn) individuals like the following Rich kids of Instagram?

Psychopathy and other behavior "problems" (binge eating also comes to mind) may have been survival traits during our hunter-gatherer times; these behaviors only become problems in the context of a civilized life. If civilization only goes back to 10k years to our 200k year history--which apparently included a number of ice ages--and given how fragile our civilization is today, I'm not ready to agree we have a moral obligation to start modifying and engineering behavior. Quite the contrary, I personally believe we have an obligation to let things run their course even if it's cruel to individuals 99 out of 100 times. Note that on a practical level and as a parent, my feelings and beliefs are just the opposite!

By offering as reason that certain patent becomes crucial before it expires as a reason for being shared, Google is basically shooting down their own argument. Barring patent-trolling, this is exactly what the patent system was designed to do: Grant a limited monopoly--a short-term disadvantage to everyone else but a high-risk/potentially large-returns investment--to spur constant innovation, which is a long-term benefit to society. Sure, the owner of the patent can choose to share (for a fee of their choosing); but they can also use it as an exclusive seed to build a thriving business. Or do nothing at all. There are many things wrong with the patent system (too longer? too easy to write spurious patents? too hard/expensive to be a lone inventor), but this isn't one of them and I'm disappointed at Google for voicing a short-term view like this.

Sure there is: If a block of memory doesn't contain a null-terminator--as expected by the library functions--then the item in question isn't a c string. If you're saying C-strings don't exist because it's purely a standard-library concept, then we'll still have to disagree: The standard libraries make the language as much as the syntax and base-types, and this is even more true for established languages.

Don't get me wrong, I think C will have a very long and robust life: It's the one and only bootstrap language of choice offered by just about every OS and CPU maker. And I think that it's too bad.

Many of the reasons for wanting to discard C have nothing to do with the low-levelness of C. Dependencies in C are a nightmare to trace, and probably bloats compile times by a tremendous amount. Then there are deadly designs such as C-strings and even worse inconsistencies within the string functions (think null terminator).

A better-designed system language is certainly possible (e.g., Google Go which is dying a slow death,) and it wouldn't be the worst thing to happen if it were to catch on.

Some of the science is dated, but the stories are short (18 in all) & they're all quite good.

Competition sucks, but it's the best we have. Even Socialists recognized the need for it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_competition

Why would you think (since you seem to be agreeing with the poster) that FOSS enables the market?

No developer wants to deal with an unstable (as in constantly changing & fragmenting) ecosystem, and the GPL-branch of FOSS movement does just that.

Perhaps it's ironic that the most popular Linux distro, Android, creates a working ecosystem because its market is closed-source. What would happen if Google made the market open-source from day 1? How would anyone benefit by having N number of competing Android markets to deal with from the get-go?

Can you imagine if carries like Verizon and ATT decided to create their own markets?

What are the artificial barriers to entry?

I don't see where anyone has given serious thought to the harmful effects of open source software. In the free market, one of the assumptions is that I will be compensated based purely based on supply and demand of my commercial software product.

And (or "but", depending on your perspective) to encourage innovation, I'm also are granted the right to a short-term monopoly in the form of patents and copyrights. This keeps competitors from gaining a foothold and allows me to grow my work into something that's extremely useful and keeps people employed.

What's left unsaid is this: Any significant piece of machinery requires a significant effort in reverse engineering; at least if somebody hopes to produce a competing version. Why should software be any different? The efforts involved keeps half-hearted attempts from gaining any sort of foothold. This effort in turn keeps the market spared from having dozens of spectacularly inferior products.

And what is a commercial "software product"? Until we make bugfree software on platforms that never change, it's not just the compiled product but also the services involved (bug fixes, feature requests, upgrade paths, etc.). By making software OSS, you've unnecessarily made the barrier of entry unnaturally easy since you're only relying on legal protection to keep the competition at bay.

I definitely think Farhad Manjoo is wrong. If Facebook were to make a phone, I'm sure they wouldn't make it ad-heavy. In fact, I think the phone itself would (or should) be close to ad-free and very inexpensive to make it very compelling to use. After all, the more targeted and precise the data the more valuable it becomes. One they put a phone in you're hand, they could get info like: - Who you really are (confirmed ID). - Some of your habits (e.g., where you tend to eat). - The people you tend to socialize with on a regular basis. - The people you (probably) live with.. - If the phone will support a "wallet", your spending habits and probably/baseline income. - If the agreement includes mining all communication (voice, at least, would probably be illegal), somebody is about to get married, go on vacation, thinking about lunch, etc. i.e., when they're primed for some solicitations I *think* this is what they're shooting for. But I think Facebook will run into a couple of hurdles when they have to deal with: 1. Wireless service providers. Unless Facebook and Google collaborate and create network of their own (do they have the cash?), or unless they throw the service providers a bone. 2. Regional privacy laws (both Federal and state, for the U.S.). Disclaimer: I also think Google flipped to creepy & evil a while ago; and also think they're priming to mine some (or all) of this information via Android.

Awkward phrasing. But he said "genetically less apt to LIKE..." (emphasis mine), which I think the jury is still out on.