*waves hand* These are not the users you are looking for. The people who absolutely don't want to leave XP are going to make the smallest leap possible and Windows 7 is always going to be more "Windows-y" than Linux or OS X, particularly when it comes to running their existing Windows applications that they probably also don't want to abandon.

Nothing except that 99% of the population:
a) Don't have a 24x7 connected box
b) Even if they do, it doesn't run the application stack you need and they don't want it to
c) Don't have the skills to run a server and keep it patched/backed up/punch through firewalls etc.
d) Don't have the time or interest to fiddle with it

How many people do you know that operate their own email server as opposed to some webmail provider? Run their own web server for their WordPress blog? Use their own photo/video sharing server instead of Instagram and YouTube? People don't want what you're selling, they want to log in on some website and have a working service. Most people I know would have to have such a system hosted at a co-lo with a support contract, which negates the whole "no third parties" advantage. Alternatively it'd have to be an "appliance" box to plug into the router, but then you're into selling consumer gear which needs some kind of corporation to build these boxes. And it still means that when you shut down your box, "you" fall off the social network unless you use replication but then you also have all sorts of issues with revocation because it's not just on your server anymore.

I guess it's tough to hear, but most people don't want to be the hub of their own data. They won't want to fiddle with PGP keys to make sure that messages sent from them to someone else on email or Facebook are really private. I can sort of understand too, the communication isn't more secure than the account info and tons of accounts get hacked/stolen everyday so even if you removed one weak link it's still only moderately secure not NSA and black hat-proof anyway. Not that we need to make it easy on them, but the inconvenience doesn't really outweigh the gain in security. (Yes, yes, cue the Franklin quote)

Actually the Internet is bad for all religions with deities, because it naturally leads to clashes about what god or gods are the right ones. God/Jesus Christ and Allah/Muhammad are not and will never be interchangeable and believing in one is mutually exclusive with believing in the other. Buddhism is the odd exception because despite the equally superstitious beliefs in karma, reincarnation and so on Buddha is not a god. Others have the equal capacity to reach enlightenment and may recognize the same truths he did, the path was always there he just wrote guides and taught others how to find it. As such the religion has no problems with other texts which might help steer others in the right direction, unlike nearly all other religions that have their scripture as the one and only truth.

Or the new ones are too pessimistic and rely on theoretical possibilities that never can or will come true in reality, but we choose to err on the side of caution. It's not proven necessary until we've had an actual quake exceed the old tolerances, which hopefully won't happen any time soon.

Well, first of all many major copyright holders have special deals with YouTube where they don't actually send DMCA requests. In that case it's just a private agreement between Sony and YouTube on content monitoring, at best you have a slander suit but no basis for a perjury. Secondly, they may have a legal claim to copyright on the whole clip reel as a collection - basically the selection and composition of clips - and that's enough to get them out of the perjury part. In generic terms, "Under penatlity of perjury, we are the copyright holders of movie X. We believe that the posted scene Y is in violation of our copyright on X." Even if that last part is wrong because it's freely licensed or in the public domain or for some other reason not eligible for copyright it's not under perjury. It sucks, but any competent lawyer will manage to wiggle Sony out of any trouble.

They contain quite a bit of error correction so either it won't decode or it will with >99.99% probability decode correctly. You can store almost 3kB in a 177x177 QR code, but for the same physical area it's a trade-off between information density and readability. The bigger you make the QR "pixels" the less camera resolution you need, but the less information you can store as well.

Very unlikely.. the information in a QR code is probably just enough to say "I run kernel X (build Y) and it crashed with error code Z at instruction 12345 in module 123", if it was a kernel dump that's different but I have seen these without the QR codes and there's nothing sensitive there.

This is why I like our Consumer Ombudsman (CO)

They have the power to issue:
a) Bans of marketing activities or terms
b) Requirements like including information on consumer rights
c) Fines (one time or daily until activities cease)
d) Rather hefty fines for violating a) or b)

This is different from the Consumer Council which often helps mediate in individual consumer disputes, the CO goes after policies and offers. For example the "send a letter that looks like a bill" scam, if they issue a ban on your company and don't comply the penalties get nasty. That way they can't simply continue the scam by handing back money to those customers who complain. Sending a complaint costs very little and you as the customer don't take the shit for it personally. I guess it's sort of like class actions in consumer cases, except you get no settlement but it's quite effective at shutting them down or making them change their terms.

Well, Microsoft is fairly predictable in that they'll follow the money. Short time that might mean chasing other markets like the mobile market with Win8, but I don't think they can afford pissing off their conservative customers. That is the non-touch, non-hybrid traditional keyboard+mouse operated desktop often running point and click business applications. They're mostly using Win7 downgrade licenses today and are fine with that, they don't care what Win8 looks like. I'm sure that when they start looking at migrating off Win7, Microsoft will offer them something because they're not nearly as easy to push around as average consumers. They probably don't need to release that until 2016 or so though, to prepare for Win7's 2020 end-of-life.

Hi and welcome to the government. In general, we don't get to save money. Each year we get a budget, at the end of the year they gather it all up in the national surplus/deficit and we start over at zero with a new budget. Without acts of the relevant national assembly to create permanent funds what you are suggesting is illegal. Even transferring funds from one year's budget to the next because the project as suffered a delay is bureaucratic and risky - anyone higher up might decide to ax the project to reach their budget. This is why so many public offices go on a spending spree at the end of the year, if you don't use it the funds will be gone and on top of that next year's budget will probably be cut since clearly you don't need that much money.

The goal is of course to keep oversight, if the government's money went into thousands of small slush funds kept by various departments for various reasons there'd probably be a lot of hoarding and questionable re-purposing of funds and no real guarantee that they'd actually cover the major investments needed anyway. Instead the government believes they are so big that the year to year variations on the total is negligible, every year so many buildings must be renovated, equipment replaced, maintenance performed in all branches of government that all report in their needs and all get their share in the national budget. So in theory you'd put in a request for replacement funds when it needs replacing, it gets rolled up from your department, your hospital to the national healthcare service to the national budget, and funds are awarded down the same line.

Of course there are far more wishes than money so in reality each level down the chain only gets so much money and has to prioritize and more likely than not somewhere along the line your request for replacement will fail to make the cut. And that's where you are in the IT department, it's not going to be replaced and you may try again next year but that's not your call. You are just stuck trying to make the best of it and hopefully not be the cause of any major outages or putting patients at risk. I guess if shit hits the fan you can always say "I told you so", but you'll be the one taking most of the shit anyway. It's the way governments do business, if you want to make it different you'd have to redo the whole system not trying to find one scapegoat.

Care for the elderly seems to be quite effective too, a common cause for having many children in the past was that you had many to take care of you when you grew old. Maybe some died young or moved far away or were just dicks but chances were some would be around to help you out. It ties in with disposable income I guess, but it's also about institutions and a system to take care of you.

Assuming they survive that long, if not I'm thinking that by then we can manufacture embryos with artificially constructed DNA. We're very close today:

Technically you don't even need to produce the whole embryo, just take an egg from one of the (few) women on the planet and replace the DNA. We can already swap DNA between natural embryos, all we need is a DNA sequence from the lab and any woman could be a surrogate mother to any genes that are wanted/needed. Of course people will still want children that are theirs, but say a "one surrogate, one natural" child policy would be plenty.

That way we could also bring the entire human genetic diversity, one complete set is about 725MB but deltas are only about 4MB per individual so about a million people on a 4TB HDD. For that large groups you could probably find a better cascading way of compressing it as well (think base human + common subgroups/sequences + your unique bits) so bringing all of it seems more than plausible.

No, there's no sane world where Kay is right. There can only be one user of a global namespace, if everything made switches or settings there it would be chaos like in this case where it's impossible to turn on kernel debugging without turning on systemd debugging (though you can redirect systemd to a null log target as a workaround). If anyone is to use it, it is clearly the kernel since it's the kernel's command line and it has 20+ years of claim to it. And without any standard as to what those switches or settings should to, it's meaningless to have the global namespace act as global variables and move the kernel's parameters to a namespace. But even if the kernel moved debug to kernel.debug it still means systemd should use systemd.debug, under no circumstances should it use the plain "debug" like it does now. He's doing it wrong and even if he was right, he'd still be doing it wrong.

What's trolling about it? He is banned right now, that the ban may or may not be lifted at some point in the future doesn't change that. Particularly since we're talking about a deep behavioral change from a recurring pattern of behavior at some unspecified time in the future, not whether or not his next patch breaks anything. That none of his code will be merged means he's dead to the project, sure he can write code on his own but it's like a journalist who'll never get their article printed. If your patches aren't accepted by Linus, you're not in Linux. You may be in some fork or branch or distro kernel but you're a third party accessory. It is extremely rare even for Linus to take the man and not the ball (code) and declare a blanket ban on somone's code, so I guess he was already extremely pissed at the guy's attitude and this was the straw that broke the camel's back.

Going there to die is a bit like proving you can survive in the wilderness as long as you don't run out of canned food or that man can fly by being shot out of a catapult. We can put you in a bunker and as long as you don't get exposed to too much heat or cold or radiation or G-forces and have food and water and breathable air you won't die, whether we do it here or ship it to Mars. If survival is not important we can point a rocket in almost any direction, it's keeping you alive that is the accomplishment. Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that we're not ready to survive on Mars or doing the round trip also doesn't provide any revolutionary insight in how we might become ready, if we have at least a working concept before we go that might fail in reality that's different. I'd probably go anyway to be the Neil Armstrong of Mars, but only if I get to be first.

Very much of this will be planned out in simulation, like amounts of radiation absorbed, heating systems, cooling systems, rocket systems, plant growth and so on. You don't just aim a rocket at Mars and see how hard the landing is, you already know way in advance if it's supposed to be survivable or not. Of course if the rockets don't fire or the chutes don't open or anything else goes wrong all bets are off, but that's part of the risk. I guess it's possible to say that putting people on the ground alive and living in a habitat for a while before they die off proves that part of the solution works, but it's rather expensive prototyping in all the ways possible. And the untested parts will still be just as untested next time, the next crew is more like standing on the skulls of their predecessors than the shoulders of giants. It is worth it to pile them up?