Please re-read that sentence.

Minimizing mutable state helps. A lot.

Have a look at functional and object-functional languages and the communities around them. You can make use of their concepts even if you don't switch languages.

While this is an interesting variant, it faces the same problem that vehicle-2-vehicle communication based on the DSRC and 802.11p protocols does.

Nobody has ever, as far as I know, built a network technology where you must network with random strangers you encounter out in the physical world. You can't build that because there is no value to the first people to install the tech, no value even to the first million in a country with 250 million cars like the USA. The odds of any 2 given cars being able to talk is one in 62,000 at that point. How can you sell a tech that provides no value to the first millions of customers? Even with the legal mandate they are hoping for, it will take decades before there is wide deployment of the 2013 designed technology that is then very obsolete.

I explained this in more detail in my series on V2V at http://ideas.4brad.com/tags/v2v

Yup.

There's two problems with the current crop of 3D printers. First, the printers are fiddly. It is possible to print out decent objects on a good printer (personally, I'm a fan of the Ultimaker). However, it requires tuning the printer and the software and maintaining them. It's a solution for tinkerers, not for Joe Average. Companies like MakerBot are deluding themselves when they think they've got a RepRap-class printer they can sell already assembled "for the masses". They still need too much maintenance.

Second, you can't just print anything and expect it to look good. If your object doesn't require support material (overhangs are all under a reasonable angle), and the slices don't contain more than one connected surface, then it will look beautiful on a decent printer. If you need support material though, then you have to deal with removing it, which is nontrivial. If you have more than one surface per slice, then you have to deal with stringing. That's not too bad if the surfaces are far apart (you can remove it easily), but it's difficult if they are close together. These are the limitations of plastic extrusion printers today, and you need to design models taking them into account.

On decent prints: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcan42/8542507791/in/photostream/ . That's a gear, about 8cm across. You have to get up really close to be able to see those layers with the naked eye (they're 0.1mm tall). The roughness on the top and bottom surfaces is probably on the order of 50 microns. It is possible to go smaller on this printer.
On fiddling: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcan42/8543920590/in/photostream/ . Left print is before tensioning belts, right print after. Of course, one of the cool aspects is that I was able to print the belt tensioners on the printer itself.

I'm very happy with my printer, but I would never recommend it to someone who isn't already a hardware hacker.

I've written DRM that is good for the "customer" (user). It's a bit bizarre, though. More like reverse DRM. It's purpose is to ensure that the software isn't "pirated" and sold for money, instead of downloaded for free, as it should be.

I'm one of the authors of BootMii and The Homebrew Channel for the Nintendo Wii. It's a free (as in beer) piece of software that you can use to run untrusted code on your console (what people like to call jailbreaking these days). Before it had any kind of security, we found out that scammers were selling it (in violation of our license) along with "piracy packs". We added a big "scam warning" to the installer to clue users into the fact that the software is free, and if they have paid for it they have been scammed. However, the scammers started telling users to use the same tools used to pirate WiiWare games to install The Homebrew Channel itself - this bypasses our installer and the scam warning. So we added DRM that ties each install to a given console (if you try to copy it, it still works, but then you get the scam warning every time you try to use the software instead, until you reinstall it using the proper installer). There's enough obfuscation to stop the (generally clueless) scammers from working around it.

I'm nominally very anti-DRM, but I've thought long and hard about this and I really can't see a significant downside for users. It doesn't affect normal users in the slightest, as far as I can tell. It doesn't actually prevent anything from working (sometimes, you can damage system firmware such that The Homebrew Channel is one of the few or the only option left to repair it, and you can't run the installer - we never want the DRM to accidentally close off a user's last hope for their console, so it's designed to be extremely annoying if the check fails, but not actually stop working). Of course, it doesn't prevent you from installing it on as many consoles as you want - just use the installer (which is a great idea for many other reasons anyway - it's so paranoid about system checks and safety that it has never bricked a single console in millions of installs) and you're fine.

The feedback of the indicator is open to interpretation. If you want to search a car, just use it and claim a positive reading. This gives you probable cause for a search. Same as K9 dogs. They are able to detect stuff, but that seems to be becoming merely an additional benefit.

Nope. Each element would use the relevant display properties defined in the CSS. If the value of a property is not explicitly defined, the default value of the property is used. Some of the inconsistencies between browsers stem from the fact that they assume different default properties (like margins) for specific elements.

Personally, I like the clean minimalism of what I think is being proposed.

One step after the other.

As far as I can tell, this only adds support for using the nvidia card for everything (rendering the whole desktop) while sending its final framebuffer to the Intel for scanout. This is a strictly different use case from what bumblebee enables (rendering *specific apps* on the nvidia card while using the Intel for everything else).

Personally, since I only need the performance of the nvidia card one in a blue moon, the bumblebee approach is much more useful to me. Otherwise, I'd have to deal with tearing on everything (the current version of the nvidia RandR output provider does not support vsync) and increased power consumption.

I think what nvidia calls "render offload" in their README (which is currently not supported) is what would in fact replace bumblebee, if/when implemented. I'm curious as to how it would interact with power management, though. One of the very nice things about Bumblebee is that it doesn't even power up the nvidia card (via ACPI) until required, and that's easy because it starts up a background X server on demand to do the rendering. It's probably trickier to puil this off if you have to load the nvidia driver into your primary X server to take advantage of the direct integration.

The active noise cancellation indeed only works for low frequencies, but noise-cancelling headphones muffle higher frequency noise by design too. I find them quite acceptable in very noisy environments, and I suspect they will work well anywhere where there's a wall between you and the noisy human anyway. If you must, feed them white noise to drown out what remains.

That's why flatr might work. You decide to spend a fixed amount of money per month and that amount is split equally between all the pages that you "flatr'd" in that period.

Clicking a link to a page containing a textbox containing File:/// will. So this is also a remote DoS for Safari.

No. You would have to run a browser that accepts the certificate of the ISP for any domain as well.

If you need some legal photo editing software at your company, but it's not justifiable to buy Photoshop, you can now use this old version for free. That kills the competition with cheaper products. And if at some point you need something more powerful than this old version, you're probably going to buy a new version of PhotoShop instead of learning to use a new software.