The did adequate load testing. The testing results said the site would fail under load. They released it anyway. The flaws are there, but they were not in the testing.

The bottleneck seems to be in how they calculate the discount you get. If they just showed you the plans without telling you what discount you might get, then they might have avoided that particular bottleneck.

Kaluza Klein models basically have this property with everything moving through a higher dimensional space (5, 10, and 26 dimensions being popular) at the "speed of light", but which are constrained at the macroscopic level to four dimensions, which are what we observe. When they are, some of those things appear to move slower than the speed of light, because more of their paths are in the alternate dimensional directions.

This actually happen, although not too violently, because good faith is assumed.

Markets already do most of the work by enabling trade, which is voluntary for the parties to the trade contract. You still have externalities.

It removed money from the hands of an irresponsible party. And unlike my mugger example, Knight Capital agreed to these trades.

These guys specifically sign up to be part of the nuclear arsenal team - it's not like they assign these jobs to random privates fresh out of boot.

Kinda like the saying*, 'don't join the Marines if you don't want to kill anyone,' you shouldn't join the nuclear arsenal team if you don't want to spend the majority of your time sitting on your ass guarding missiles from nobody.

* Yes, I just now made that up.

Google just had a data-breach not long ago where IM messages were getting sent to the wrong person.

That's a real possibility.

You don't get it - Sony removed the ability to install Linux on a PS3.

Not being a software engineer, I lack the expertise to hack the thing back to working condition. It's not a reasonable expectation to say that all consumers should be able to reverse engineer every single thing they buy.

That's my bitch - not that they would void my warranty for installing Linux, but that they removed my ability to do it, period.

Um... because that's not all he cares about?

RedHat's done pretty well for itself selling little more than support contracts, as have many other server distro vendors. A sticker price isn't the only way to make money from providing software. And given that Ubuntu embraced advertising a long time ago, it's a bit of a strawman (or at least quaintly archaic) to argue with the GNU Foundation's core principles.

Don't forget those of us who like to occasionally play PC games on the big TV in the living room, but don't want to have to deal with unhooking the tower, dragging it downstairs, then hooking it all back up again.

It moved money out of the hands of an irresponsible party. Keep in mind that unlike the mugger example I gave earlier, Knight Capital agreed to every disadvantageous trade.

You wouldn't.

HOWEVER, if you didn't want to have to pay almost $200 for a proprietary OS that's so locked down and filled with trash it makes the Georgia State prison system look like an all-inclusive Hawaiian resort, then the fact that gaming on Linux is finally getting some respect would be a very good thing for you.

The driver improvements are actually what Linus is talking about if you RTFA. That's how desktop Linux will benefit.

As for why SteamOS: about a year ago (I think) Valve demonstrated that you could get superior performance on Linux because the code was open. It's a lot easier to do optimizations on a platform when you have comprehensive documentation on how it works—and where the bugs are. Valve's devs were also greatly elated to discover that they could actually fix said bugs instead of just working around them, like they had to do on Windows.