Because nations have adversaries. This adversarial relationship can be as benign as economic competitors, instead of full-blown hot/cold war enemies. At the level of governments, control of information flow is a form of power.

For example, consider the game of chess. In chess, the entire state of the game is visible to all players at all times. There are no secrets. But there's no way to enforce anything like that in the complexity of the real world. Imagine how a game of chess would go if just one of the competitors could choose to hide the locations of their pieces, what moves they've made, and even when they've made moves. No high-stakes human organization would either unilaterally submit to being the "out in the open" player. Nor would they refuse the leverage that information control provides. To do so would essentially be organizational (if not literal) suicide.

This does pose a dilemma: if a government must resort to information control, what kinds of "process controls" are needed in a democratic society to maintain a sufficiently informed electorate? Note: "sufficiently informed" isn't just information about the government, but information about the entire world the society must interact with. Even more importantly: how might we measure the health of information flow and knowledge within a society?

If you bothered to RTFA (emphasis mine):

I.e. they're not talking about hooking up individual gates or even basic logic units with optical communications. Anyone who's actually dealt with chip design in the past several decades realizes that off-chip communications is a sucky, slow, power-hungry, and die-space-hungry affair. Most of the die area and a huge amount (30%-50% or more) of power consumption of modern CPU's is gobbled up by the pad drivers -- i.e. off-chip communications. Even "long distance" on-chip communications runs into a lot of engineering challenges, which impacts larger die-area chips and multi-chip modules.

If the "data" is a full, bootable USB-powered backup drive you can worry about getting at the contents later. Keep a disk in your backup rotation in an emergency pack prepared with other grab-n-go essentials. Search the web for "emergency preparedness" and similar for other ideas for such a pack.

If you'll need access to the data in an emergency then either store that as printouts/photocopies in your emergency pack (passport copies, etc.) and/or encrypted on your mobile device of choice.

Real computer geeks fear the pointless loss of time that simple and cheap preventative measures could have avoided.

... that Duke Nukem Forever would ship before RHEL 6! ;-)

But seriously, congratulations are due to all the Fedora and RedHat folks who made this happen. This opens the door to a modern package set for many, many organizations.

The Wayland site has a good exposition of how Wayland and X differ at the architectural level. This also clearly explains (and diagrams) what happens when X runs as a Wayland client.

Looks like a breath of fresh air in the Linux rendering space, and someone with enough momentum behind them to drive it.

Whoa. Not enough caffeine yet.... momentarily misread that as "Fanboynotify is disabled in this version." Which then had me wondering why it was posted here... O_o

I call your bluff: Show source control logs that demonstrate that any significant Google open source release (of which there are many) has more than a trivial percentage of non-Google contributions. For full credit, you must show that these non-Google contributors were somehow not working in their self interest by contributing to the project.

On that latter point... Last I checked, "open source volunteer sweatshop" was still equal to the empty set. I.e. no one is forced to contribute to any particular piece of open source code. The deal for all OSS projects is essentially the same: "hey, I made something cool, come help out if you like!" Whether "I" is a corporation or one or more independent volunteers is irrelevant. Any external contributors to a project do so for their own reasons, reasons which have been extensively discussed elsewhere.

blah blah blah biodiversity blah blah ecosystem disruption blah blah blah(**)

(**) yeah, it's Friday and I'm feeling snarky.

How in the heck would a 90% reject rate indicate "the system is working"? If that number is correct, that supports the idea that the U.S. patent system under our current legal system is stifling innovation. I.e. "the system is broken" is a more sensible conclusion. With that kind of failure rate on a challenge, the patent trolls simply must not care that the patent is weak. They expect targets to just roll over and settle most of the time. Business model:

1. Buy up patent with a domain applicable to targets with money. Patent needs only be domain relevant, not actually defensible.
2. Sue
3. Profit, no question marks needed.

All this suggests that we really need both legal reform and patent reform.

Wow, what's not to understand here?

1. Animal adapts to its native environment, and survives just fine.
2. Humans introduce invasive, non-native species that displace and/or devastate native species. Being capable of awareness of our environment and capable of compassion, we eventually feel like fuck-ups for this. "Damn, made a mess. Maybe should go clean it up."
3. We try to do something about it.

It's #2 that's key, and it doesn't require being a "hippie" to get it. Even non-hippies manage to keep a clean house. Is that sentiment so hard to grok?

Hell, I love to shoot large format cameras. Forget the fossil fuels, those things burn souls! :D

Seriously though, the control and creativity afforded by view camera movements is fantastic and the resolution of sheet film rocks. Large format cameras come in both point-and-shoot variants (e.g. old press cameras) and the classic view camera design. View camera style is pretty much diametrically opposed to point-and-shoot style: using a view camera has both a certain meditative workflow and encourages the photographer to develop good visualization skills, i.e. to see the photograph before taking the photograph. Both are a blast in their own way, and it's great seeing those big, big negatives on the light table.

Seriously, you haven't researched this any better than just using iBooks for managing your research library? Three solutions right off the top: GoodReader, Evernote and Papers all offer a selection of features that address (each a bit differently) your scenario. Many folks I know use more than one of those tools depending on the specific situation.

On a related note, there are some airlines that have deployed boarding passes via a scannable image displayed on your smartphone's display... but let's just say that this technology seems to have a few bugs. A friend recently tried this, but the image didn't scan. Oops. Back out of security to get a proper boarding pass, back through the security line, etc. Apparently a Retina Display isn't good enough for the scanner. /snerk

At this point it's best to play it safe with a printed boarding pass as a backup until you're proven to your satisfaction that the paperless stuff actually works with your phone and airline.