I suspect "free for the maker community" translates as "free for personal use but if you use this in a product you are going to have to pay". How much you have to pay will probablly depend on the details of the product.

The core of phone networks has moved from physical circuit switching to virtual circuit switching to packet switching with priority but at least here in the UK normal phone lines are still delivered from the phone exchnage as analog pots over a pair of copper wires (which may or may not also carry DSL). I beleive the situation in the US is similar.

Were you thinking of some other place (and if so where) or were you using a pedantically narrow defintion of "dedicated pots line"?

Apparrently it's coming "in the medium term".

They started off copying BBC micro naming but they broke from it when they released the A+ and continued to break from it when they released the Pi 2 (the succsessor to the BBC B+ was the BBC master series)

The register broke a press embargo then put the misinformation about the core in a reply to a comment. Everyone who knew better was forbidden from commenting to correct them for another 7 hours or so.

Theres plenty of demand for mathematicians but most of it is going to be applying existing mathemical theorems/techiques or minor developments of existing theorems/techiques to someone's problem.

Top mathematicians don't want to be doing that. They want to be developing new theorems/techiques which may or may not turn out to have practical applications and that generally means working in a university under government grants.

However engine makers either can't or won't make engines big enough to make a plane the size of a 747 or A380 with only two engines. One large plane means one aircrew, one landing slot at the airport and generally larger planes have better fuel economy per passenger mile.

So if you can fill 747s or A380s then they may still make sense compared to a greater number of smaller 2-engined planes.

Not to diminish your point (you were probablly talking about legality rather than feasability) but I expect you probablly could get over 600 passengers on a 777 if you were prepared to throw the safety rules out the window. el-al once put over a thousand people on a 747 http://www.guinnessworldrecord... . If we assume a similar ration of "maximum legal passenger capacity" to "maximum possible passenger capacity" then you should be able to stuff about 742 passengers on a 777.

I disagree with your professor here, each tool you add to the toolbox carries a cost. Especially if you want to maintain the code on a long term basis or reuse code between projects. So you need to strike a balance between the number of tools in your toolbox and the appropriateness of the tool to the job.

It's pretty difficult to avoid C/C++, even if you don't actually code in it will find the interfaces to your operating system are defined in terms of C and possibly C++. If you are programming devices too small to run an OS you will often find a C (and maybe C++ if you are lucky) compiler is the only compiler available. So the question with a new language is not just "is this better for the application than C/C++" but "is this language sufficiently better than C/C++ to justify the costs of adding it to the toolbox and the cost of potential future problems if I want to port the application to a different target or reuse parts of it in an applicaiton for a different target".

And much as I like object pascal I have to say that I think the answer to that question is probablly no.

but in practice what you have in c is more likely

double a = b/c

is that doing floating point division or floored division? you can't tell without going and searching for the defintion of b and c and if you want floating point division of two integer arguments (a perfectly reasonable thing to want to do in many situations) you have to start putting in typecasts. It gets even worse in dynamically typed languages that use derivatives of C syntax.

Unfortunately it seems it's owner has gone to the "charge locked in customers a shitload of money" strategy. That may be profitable in the short term but it's not going to win you many new customers when the alternatives are free. Theres a starter edition whose price is a bit more paletable but whose license terms are most certainly not.

Theres lazarus of course, not sure how that compares nowadays.

And the lesson is if you care about privacy you should avoid storing your data with multinational companies because every nation in which the company operates is a nation that could potentially coerce the company into handing over your data..

AIUI the original plan was not to have it at all but they couldn't get office converted to metro in time so they included the desktop mode but crippled it by forbidding desktop apps other than the handful bundled with the OS (a cut down version of office, some of the built in windows tools).

The only reason I can see for crippling the desktop mode on the arm port was pushing developers to switch to metro.

Would windows on arm have succeeded if people could just recompile their software for it rather than having to redesign their software to fit within the constraints of metro and then on top of that pay a 30% appstore fee to MS? We will never know for sure but I strongly suspect it would have had a better chance than in the crippled state it was sold in.

From a software perspective what sets memory/IO mapped busses apart from each other is how the OS reads and/or sets their configuration, not what they are like on an electrical level. ISA was either manually configured or (later) used a hacked on plug and play mechanism. EISA had it's own configuration system.

Java protects against some of the common screwups that lead to security holes in C (and to a lesser extent C++) programs. It simply won't let you do things like read/write beyond the end/before the start of an array, perform an unprotected typecast between two object types or use memory that you have already freed. However there are many other classes of security hole it doesn't help with.

Java sees lots of security patches for a couple of reasons

1: Java provides sandboxing features intended to allow safe running of untrusted code. Unfortunately such sandboxes seem to be very difficult to get right (whether it's java applets, flash or javascript in browsers).
2: Java provides a massive standard library. It's virtually an OS within an OS and that means lots of code to be potentially vulnerable (especially in light of point 1)