Postgres easier really? Maybe I should try it again but I'm pretty sure that it's not going to be easier or better or faster this time either. If my application works then I don't switch out the database just for fun, if it doesn't work then a database switch might break it more so the only time I will shop around is when I'm starting a project.

It's easy to understand why MySQL is more popular - MySQL was popular first and easy to setup from the start. The developers were open and responsive. I've been using it since 97 and it's performed well with everything I've done with it. I haven't needed transactions.

Postgres has however always been more popular on /. and I can only attribute that to US vs Europe. If half the effort Postgres proponents have spent bashing MySQL on /. over the years had gone into improving the Postgres manual then setting up Postgres might be easy too. Have you compared the manuals? The Postgres website is defensive. I don't like Oracle though so I would like it if I preferred Postgres.

There isn't much hype, that is a difference. Attention has shifted to phones. Desktop PCs and the parts that go in them are worthless because they confer almost no social status on their owners, unless the owner is a teenage boy.

Before the battle was about performance, now it's heat, price and performance because every household has a couple of computers per person and the cost of a cpu is much lower.

But this is true of every platform I've ever installed, lots of crap but lots of useful software. The Market brings together the people making the software with the people using the software the right way, something the community couldn't figure out for itself after the dotcom bubble and spam messed with it's vision and morals.

When you replace an uncontrolled intersection with a roundabout then US and European drivers have to start looking for and yielding to traffic coming from the left rather than the right. This is hard to get used to if you have driven a crossing thousands of times. For UK drivers there is no change so those mini roundabouts don't require driver adjustment.

Having shitty attitudes towards cultural differences is a requirement for homogeneous cultures, just look at Scandinavia for proof of this, tolerance here is window dressing. The problem with the US prison system must surely be that it has had too many people in it. Try punishing violent crime with impotency instead..

As the cost of producing bitcoins goes up mining will largely be done by miners (including geeks at work) using stolen computing power. The rightful owners should then be able to reclaim their stolen property provided they can identify it no matter how many times a bitcoin has been traded. Does this not make bitcoin a high risk object for speculation?

I agree that 15 to 20 years is too long but ownership of ideas naturally decreases by sharing and fair IP law should formalize that. Your scheme doesn't change the essential unfairness of the current system. How it should work is very simple - if you have an original idea or creation and don't share it with anybody then you get to own it forever, if you share with a few people then you mostly own it but if millions of people know it then they own it too because their combined effort in knowing it is much greater than your investment in creating it and you only have the right to be known as the person who thought of it first.

You can take harvested content, translate it into lots of other languages and present it back to Google. I would imagine that the translation both makes the copying harder to detect and messes with the translation engine itself. There are modules for wordpress that make automatic translation easy to add to any blog so it might be that a decent chunk of the properly tagged translations on the web are automatic Google efforts harmfully feeding back into the algorithm.

Yes that is a valid argument but the moral is wrong. You want to slow the spread of ideas with copyright for your own benefit, limit the implementation of ideas for your own benefit. The cost for this high. Hardly noble goals.

Your ideas are no longer entirely your property after you share them, that should be the basis for IP laws. The more your idea or work is shared the smaller your stake in it becomes.

Yes put it in the cloud. If you actually have some clever secret sauce then take a loan and pay somebody to do the stuff you can't because you should be in a hurry, otherwise just build it to scale to tens of users.

Schools and Universities have several roles. Partly you go there to learn stuff and be sorted, partly they are holding pens where you are stored while your parents work and partly they hide unemployment by getting the least powerful group in society to pay money to do unwanted work that other people are paid to consume. Do we badly need CS graduates? Giving someone an F and telling them not to come back teaches them a very important lesson.

Yes. The suicide rate in China looks like bullshit, and you could question the competence of the countries engineer leaders for that crap but the the foxconn rate looks pretty normal especially if the majority of those 400k workers are young men. The point being that 10 suicides per 400k workers in a 6 month period does not indicate slavery.

Because the civilian may flee her slaughter but the soldier must stand and die if so instructed. Doesn't that make it worse? The kicker is that we sell despots weapons for the oil money they get from us but when they have too many guns and maybe think about buying other stuff, like our IP, that would give them real power over us then we have to slaughter their men to use up the weapons so that the new guys blow more oil money on more weapons. Where is the honor in that?

Not to me it doesn't and I'm not defending his actions or beliefs.

The point is that US foreign policy is to protect and further the interests of the US and that makes it the duty of the US gov to use whatever methods are effective abroad. Fairness, truth and justice are not required. Defenseless civilians is an interesting term. The US has slaughtered defenseless military opponents for the last 30 years but do you think that make the US bad?

Self driving car. Take me to work, drive very very slowly around the block while I work, great, now take me home. As to safety which I give some though to while cycling to work ignoring all the rules in my quest to average 30km/h through the city (mytracks..), if any of those pissed off motorists wanted to kill me with a deft turn of the wheel they could probably get away with it so I'd prefer them not to have that choice.