Open source developers are not a simpleton code monkeys. Many take on leadership roles and many are backed by companies with the resources to support them and a vested interest in the software. The book you cite is full of examples of companies throwing programmers at a problem, and failing. OSS developers do not tend to spend their free time on lost causes, so OSS projects do not collect monkeys.

OTOH, software that has good features, seemingly good support, and solves a problem they have being sold at $20 actually seems like a more reasonable proposition.

The problem is identifying that software has good features, support, and solves a problem. The app store is full of half-finished weekend projects, each of which is a piece of shit. We'd all be better off if these guys combined forces, released source, and made an open-source app. The app store has a HUGE buyers remorse problem. The app store ecosystem is chaos. Open source is too, but at least you can determine if it solves your problem before committing to it, and fix it if it comes close to solving your problem. (because the source is available) 15 minute returns??!?!! That solves only the "I clicked on the wrong thing", not "I evaluated this software". I'd buy a lot more, and be willing to pay a lot more, if there was a reasonable try-before-you-buy window.

I hate app stores. My recent Android phone purchase has reminded me, forcefully, why I switched to using exclusively open source software around 15 years ago... Android being "open source" is about as useful to me as Macs being "Unix underneath".

Don't worry, I'm sure at least 73 CMS, ALICE and LHCb grad students and postdocs are squirreled away right now making Lego models. But I bet they won't make Slashdot. Oh and CMS (Compact Muon Solenoid) is very dense, I think one would have to use metal Legos...while plastic probably approximates the density of ATLAS pretty well.

I suspect GoDaddy stands to make a lot of money blacklisting, blocking, banning, and otherwise screwing up the DNS, for a price...and that is why they signed.

More importantly, we email people who's mail server admins don't know PGP from ABC.

Many years ago I found that my GPG signed mails were getting quarantined by brain-dead spam and virus filters, because my mails contained a "suspicious attachment". That was the death knell for my use of GPG. Not knowing whether your mail will be received is not really acceptable. Of course that's they way it is with all mail these days...but that's the fault of incompetent law enforcement being unable to shut down spam/trojan/botnets.

PGP was defeated by stupidity.

I was just wondering this the other day...it seems to me that for a handset manufacturer it would make sense to put all of CDMA/TDMA/GSM/LTE/HSPA+ etc onto one chip, and define the frequencies and protocol by some BIOS settings. That way the same phone could be sold to every mobile carrier. I would think it should also be possible to include many antennae or fractal antennae.

Is this already going on? Or are handset manufacturers really putting different chips in the same handset destined for different carriers?

Density of dark matter comes from two measurements: the CMB and galactic rotation curves. The former is more precise and gives a mass density of about 0.3 GeV/cm^3 on average over all of space. Then one can argue how this density increases as one moves toward the center of a galaxy (as it must to explain the galactic rotation curve observations). There are different "density profile" hypotheses people use for this. These sometimes have strong density enhancement at the center, the existence of which is debated, but in any case we're quite far from the center of our galaxy, so we can't enhance the local density of dark matter too much. So, one can screw with dark matter density by a bit, maybe you could argue a factor of 10. But to do what you suppose would require a factor of 1e12 or so. That much dark matter would have a ton of other observable consequences, because you just made empty space have more mass density than e.g. planets.

Your idea doesn't work for two reasons

1. Things in the "vacuum" that could refract light (including big bang relic photons, neutrinos, and dark matter) are all uncharged. They do still interact with light and there is an index of refraction but it is extremely suppressed (loop Feynman diagrams). For light interacting with dark matter, the relevant diagram is suppressed by a factor p_F/M_Z ~ 1e-12. This is far smaller than the effect seen.
2. Let's assume that for some reason the density of dark matter (or whatever) is substantially more than we expect, such that it does cause an index of refraction for light (or neutrinos) of the right size. What we've just done is changed the phase velocity. What OPERA measures is the group velocity. One can have a "faster than light" phase velocity while still having a group velocity less than the speed of light, x-rays in air have this property. (Explanation on Wikipedia)

I second the tablet PC form factor. Others that qualify are the ASUS Eee Slate, Samsung Series 7 Slate, as well as models from HP and Fujitsu.

I use a Thinkpad X61 tablet on linux with the note-taking software Xournal, which also can annotate pdf's.

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs in his infinite wisdom, very publicly denounced the stylus as a failure when the iPad was released, and you know, Steve Jobs is always right. Never mind 10,000 years of history placing sticks to parchment. So the entire iPad clone industry (Android) has completely eschewed the stylus, much to my dismay. Worse, the manufacturers have decided that the only thing people really need to do with a tablet is watch movies, so the screens are low resolution, and 16:9 aspect ratio. This, when placed in portrait mode, is much taller and narrower than a piece of paper. And because the resolution is low, if you put up a full-page PDF on the thing, small letters like subscripts in equations are often readable. And even worse, all the new tablets are 10.1". A 8.5x11 piece of paper has a 14" diagonal, for comparison.

So, if any of you have the ear of any Android/tablet manufacturers, please bring back 4:3 screens at high resolution, with a form factor essentially the same as that of paper. Minimum DPI for this usage is about 150 (or about 1024 vertical resolution).

Why are we allocating in blocks and then assigning devices which are allowed to use fixed frequencies? Why don't we have software-defined radios, antennae, and something like cognitive radio to define on-demand spectrum usage.

For example, when you turn your phone on it pings a tower using a low-bandwidth common channel to get a frequency allocation (like DHCP) and power assignment. Using a software antenna, it configures some internal hardware to transmit on that frequency/frequencies. Let the whole spectrum be used, by anyone, rather than block allocating in a way that is guaranteed to waste resources. This way, multiple carriers can share frequencies, even if they use different communication protocols (CDMA/TDMA/GSM). In practice, I'm sure a single carrier would effectively "grab" a frequency block in an area by setting up a tower. But the key is that if you travel to the next city, that same carrier could be using a different frequency, and your phone could detect it and use it.