You're right, up to 2005 Mozilla got most their money from their AOL sugar daddy, but ever since they've had to make money on their own it's been overwhelmingly Google, it was 85% in 2006 and 90% now in 2013. They've never had any significant non-Google revenue. It's not ads, it's overwhelmingly search engine referrals which means that if Google ended their business relationship with Mozilla they'd have to change their default search engine to either Bing or Yahoo (same thing really) to get referral royalties from Microsoft instead. If users rejected it and kept using Google (hint: Google's market share is much higher than Chrome+Mozilla, meaning many IE users also favor Google) then Mozilla wouldn't see a cent.

It's open source so I'm sure it'd never die as such but the reason Mozilla exists as a major company is because it's better for Google to have an arm's length partner that can attack Microsoft/IE from different angles appealing to different crowds and acting as two voices in the development of standards rather than slim it down to a near-duopoly Chrome/IE marketplace. A lot of people will back Mozilla because it's open source and "neutral" but wouldn't get behind Google or Microsoft to push their browser. But the money to keep developing it comes pretty much exclusively from Google and the only real alternative would be Microsoft, which I'm quite sure neither Mozilla nor Microsoft would want. Otherwise it'd just be the "other" 10-15% of Mozilla's revenue left.

A single silicon lattice is about 0.55nm across, so at 32nm like we had at the start of this decade you're talking about 58 lattices wide. At 5nm (what Intel's roadmap predicts in 2019) you're down to 9 wide, keep that up to 2030 and you're down to 1.5 lattices wide. I guess the theoretical limit is a single lattice, but then you need perfect purity and perfect alignment of every atom of that processors or true nanotechnology in other words. We will probably run into problems earlier with quantum effects and current leakage, but either way by the end of the next decade we're definitively done.

So basically if a girl shows her boyfriend her boobies and he covertly snaps a photo and posts it on the Internet linked to her name for all to see it's the same thing? After all if you showed one, you showed the world right? Or someone accidentally walked in on her because she forgot to lock the door or she had a wardrobe malfunction or whatever, same thing right? One accidental exposure to one person and you're just supposed to accept it being posted all over the Internet? And I guess you think it's perfectly okay if the sex toy store to tell everyone what you bought, after all they know so why not the world? You're creating a completely ridiculous standard of privacy where the only thing that's private are secrets, which don't need any protection because nobody knows about them. You reduce the "right to privacy" to "right to try keeping a secret, and if you fail tough luck".

Don't worry, the MBA has read this and feels exactly the same about you. It goes so well with the law degree most /.ers have, you do know they call it the soft and hard sciences, not easy and hard sciences right? I'd call it the corollary to the Dunning-Kruger effect, the more you excel in one narrow field the more you think you could wing it in everything else. It's why professors are pretty obnoxious to relate to and a lot of IT people are the same just because they know how to command a machine around but couldn't train a dog if their life depended on it. Like it or not big corporations tend to do a lot of stupid things and without MBAs running around trying to find what the ROI on projects are we'd see a lot more stillborn projects. I've been on far more idiotic projects without a proper business plan than with a business plan, it of course doesn't guarantee that it won't be idiotic but some of it wouldn't pass the giggle test if you tried asking how this would ever be profitable. Because engineers just like to solve problems, they don't like to ask if there's a market of people willing to pay to have this problem solved.

Of course these people are using talking about supercomputers and the relevance to supercomputers, but you have to be pretty daft to not see the implications for everything else. In the last years almost all the improvement have been in power states and frequency/voltage scaling, if you're doing something at 100% CPU load (and isn't a corner case to benefit from a new instruction) the power efficiency has been almost unchanged. Top of the line graphics cards have gone constantly upwards and are pushing 250-300W, even Intel's got Xeons pushing 150W not to mention AMD's 220W beast, though that's a special oddity. The point is that we need more power to do more and for hardware running 24x7 that's a non-trivial part of the cost that's not going down.

We know CMOS scaling is coming to an end, maybe not at 14nm or 10nm but at the end of this decade we're approaching the size of silicon atoms and lattices. There's no way we can sustain the current rate of scaling in the 2020s. And it wouldn't be the end of the world, computers would go roughly the same speed they did ten or twenty years ago like cars and jet planes do. Your phone would never become as fast as your computer which would never become as fast as a supercomputer again. We could get smarter at using that power of course, but fundamentally hard problems that require a lot of processing power would go nowhere and it won't be terahertz processors, terabytes of RAM and petabytes of storage for the average man. It was a good run while it lasted.

Ah, the eternal war:
User A: The old works for me and I don't care about your "faddy crap"
User B: The new works much better for me and I don't care about your "legacy crap"

Heck, I'm probably both A and B depending on whose side I want to be on. Kill IE6 with fire so we don't have to support that old shit, I don't care about your legacy enterprise intraweb crapware. Noooo don't take away my menus and replace it with a ribbon, I want it just the way it was. It really comes down to if you think the change is for better or worse and if the change itself is worth the effort. Change for change's sake is just annoying, you need some compelling benefits to want change not just that you can roughly get back to where you were.

No, the maximum distance grows without bounds. What this proves is that you can always find two more primes that are less than 600 apart, so the minimum distance does not grow without bounds. It has absolutely nothing to do with the distance between one pair of primes and another pair.

No. Before May 2013 there was no proof on an infinite pair of primes being a finite bound apart.
- May 2013: Zhang, bound 70 million
- End of May 2013: Others, bound <60 million
- July 2013: Terence Tao & Polymath project: bound 4680
- Now: James Maynard, bound 600
- Twin conjencture: still unproven, bound 2

So the "big" discovery was Zhang, for managing to put a bound on it in the first place. The rest are improvements on that proof, but not very fundamental ones. Proving the twin conjencture would be huge, but nobody's done that yet. The Polymath project and probably many others are working on it. The conjencture is almost certainly true, but notoriously hard to prove. Probably the easiest "feel" to get for it is the Sieve of Eratosthenes, make a long list of odd numbers then strike out the multiples of primes. Once you strike out the 3s it'll be obvious you don't get triplets since 3, 9, 15, 21, 27 and so on are all multiples of 3 so the "candidates" are (5,7) (11,13), (17,19), (23,25) and so on. As you add more primes like 25 = 5*5 it'll get fewer and fewer pairs but they keep occuring rather randomly. It feels like that with infinite primes they'll randomly end up being next to each other an infinite number of times, but proving it is another matter. For example if you take the Fibonacci sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21...) it's obvious it's an infinite series but the distance between numbers also grows to infinity. Not so with primes, by these proofs.

I think Nokia is barely breaking even in a booming market, they're not quite ready for bankruptcy court even if they're becoming a more and more marginal player. But at this point, yeah I'd vote for Microsoft because what alternative is there at this point? None at all.

For what it's worth, I think every hotel I've been to where you insert the hotel card to get lights also has had the AC on a timer when you take it out, it's not like they have the staff running around locking themselves in your room to shut it off. Or if they do that's really odd. It's very common all over Europe, but I've also experienced the same in Asia and South America though most of them have a decently sized AC unit so it doesn't take forever to get comfy again. I can't really remember if I've ever been to a hotel where the AC has been always on, I've been to the US once but it was so long ago I don't remember.

Not caves but... well, most environmentalists don't want to raise the average to modern standards. Looking at the current estimates the average CO2 emissions in tons/capita is:
World: 4.9 (2011)
EU: 8.6 (2011)
US:16.4 (2012)

So if everyone were to pollute as much as the US our total emissions would over triple. People like to blame China but they're "only" up to 7.1 tons/capita, they're lower than the EU they just happen to be a billion people plus. And there's huge countries like India with 1.6 tons/capita that aren't going to stay down there just to get everyone else off the hook. Of course they want the same standard of living as the rest of us. So it is this vast inequality while the environmentalists feel the current 4.9 ton/capita is already far too high. They don't want just the US down, they want China down, the EU down, hell probably India down because the world can't take it.

And you know what? The world won't take it, nobody and I mean absolutely nobody wants to back down to 4.9 tons/capita voluntarily. The EU would have to find ways to cut emissions by 43%, the US by 70%, even China would have to cut 30%. Even if we admit that there's a lot of excess consumption as well, there's a whole lot to modern living that I don't consider luxuries and that do consume power. People lived before refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, dishwashers, microwaves, TVs and computers too but I don't plan on being one of them. And cars and bikes, maybe they'll go electric or whatever but we're never giving up that freedom of personal transportation. Bicycles aren't a full substitute.

Honestly, I don't know what the f*ck Americans are doing to have almost twice as much emissions as here in Europe. But the reason you should get down to EU levels is because otherwise China is just going to point to the US and say why aren't you dealing with the bad boy in class and instead picking on us? That way maybe we could all meet somewhere under 10 tons/capita and agree that's a reasonable maximum for a modern country. Even with the world at EU levels it'd still be a 75% increase from today, but I'm more worried that if nothing happens China decides to become 1.35 billion Americans and if the whole world follows it'll be a 235% increase instead. Because if you can, so can we.

The final estimates is that it was a magnitude 9.0 earthquake, it's on the top 5 list of recorded earthquakes and the others were in Chile, Alaska, Sumatra and Kamchatka, Russia. It tops the list of property damage by earthquake by a factor of two. If this had been a "normal" 8.0 earthquake (which is an amplitude 10 times smaller and 31 times less energy) we almost certainly wouldn't be having this discussion. It's like the engineers of the WTC towers, they had simulated a small aircraft flying into the towers but not a 747. Yes, in perfect retrospect of course it was too little but I think you're being more than a little unfair.

Actually that's exactly what you can't do with a laptop, maybe this bit and that bit works great with Linux while others don't work well or at all. Been there, tried that and it had nothing to do with price or quality but simply that some companies cared to support Linux and other's didn't. Same with accessories, one printer worked brilliantly while an almost similar competitor was a paperweight but at least those you can research. And if it doesn't quite work well you've got nobody to blame but yourself, they didn't sell it with Linux and never claimed it would work.

If you value your time then the fact that they have "jumped through those hoops" for you has value. That you have a company you can actually go back to and say "You sold me a Linux laptop but such and such isn't working!" has value. They're a big OEM, that puts pressure on the manufacturers to have Linux drivers. Perhaps during their testing and validation they've found bugs that have been fixed for this exact reason. Trust me, they do care a bit more if Dell says they'd like to sell a model but their drivers are buggy than if Joe Nobody says it doesn't work for him. But please use the Ubuntu install CD and take your chances on some random hardware, as somebody must figure out how to jump those hoops.

It's from a major OEM, it runs Linux which hopefully means it has Linux-friendly hardware and good Linux drivers. That's enough to be newsworthy on slashdot, which still hopes Linux will overtake the market share of such gems as Windows Vista and Windows 8 ;)

The last few won't be stubborn, they'll die. I don't know how many stories I heard about how their dad or granddad was or is running the farm, but nobody wants to take over. Alternatively, that the kids are keeping the farm running until the old man dies but no longer. If you have younger people running farms then it's typically big and automated or they're aiming for a gourmet niche with self made products. They just had a documentary with two such people, both 70 years old that have worked on their small farm for 50 years. All they know and all they want to know, but there won't be a generation to follow.