Forking does that, because the GPL doesn't require that you contribute your changes back only forwards: you must give the code to the people you give binaries to, nothing more. It's easy to fork a project, make some structural changes, and then release your version that has all of the code that isn't necessary for your use removed and other things that are annoying for anyone who doesn't have access to the rest of your system added. The code is still available, but the cost of merging changes back upstream is often greater than the cost of rewriting them from scratch.

This is fine according to RMS, because the GPL is not meant to protect the authors of the original code, it's meant to protect the users who receive products based on it.

Add to that: speed doesn't matter to commercial transports nearly as much as reliability. There are a lot more people who are willing to accept shipment in 3 weeks from today than in 2-4 weeks from today. 5 knots is probably a little bit too slow, but 10-15 knots is a very respectable speed for a large cargo ship. It doesn't seem like much, but you cover a lot of distance doing 10 knots 24 hours a day...

Most of the more distant islands were colonised during small ice ages, when it was possible to walk much of the distance and people had to move a lot because food was scarce. There was thought to be a land bridge from South-East Asia to South America well after homo sapiens came along, and getting from Europe to North America via Iceland and Greenland wasn't such a massive journey for a lost Viking ship aiming for the islands around the north of Scotland.

For a long time, the limiting factor was the amount of food and water that you could carry. The reason that Columbus couldn't get funding for so long was that intelligent people did the calculations of his journey time and worked out that he'd run out of food about half way to India. Fortunately for him, there was a convenient continent a bit less than half way there for him to stop and resupply...

Sailing ships can be becalmed for days or even weeks. This is more of a problem the bigger the ship, as the more wind you need to start it moving again. Even at the best of times, their speed is highly variable, depending on wind speed and direction - if it's a head wind then they need to tack, which can significantly reduce their maximum straight-line speed, if it's a run or a reach then they can go faster. This makes them tricky from an economic perspective, where you need to book dock time well in advance to get goods loaded and unloaded and where your customers typically require things delivered within a fairly narrow window. For low-priority goods, it might be fine, as long as you were willing to wait at the far end for a few days for a free slot in the unloading dock.

There have been some attempts to address this, by flying kits up in the jetstream and using their rotation to drive a screw. This has a lot of potential, but the last demo I saw was only generating 20% of the energy required to propel the craft - the rest came from burning oil.

Sure, that's why, in the past year, we've had a load of network stack improvements contributed back by NetFlix and Juniper, a new flash filesystem and NAND layer by a company building embedded systems, a load of storage stack improvements contributed by iX Systems and NetApp, HyperV support contributed by Microsoft, sandboxing support funded by Google...

It's the world's oldest good cop/bad cop story, first we're terrible sinners that must be banished and entire cities nuked from orbit and then comes our savior who loves us and will forgive everything if we just love him back. The whole old testament is a guilt-trip in order to set us up to need redemption, then it comes like water to a man dying of thirst.

Voyager has been underway for 36 years and is less than 0.002 light years from earth so it's 10,000+ generations away unless we can go much, much faster. And the concept of generation ships is exactly the opposite, they're massive constructions big enough to sustain a civilization that move very slowly between stars. If we send "humans" I expect it'll be frozen embryos or electronic DNA sequences to be reconstructed on site on a massive rocket ship that'll still take hundreds of years. A light year sounds so short until you realize that if you've traveled 7.5 times around the world you've gone one light second. Only 31,556,925 more to go in order to make a light year.

Yes, it should also be noted that we've put no humans on the moon but NASA, ESA, Japan, India, China have all had missions to the moon since and Russia is also planning new missions after they stopped the Luna program in 1976. Mostly what we lack is a compelling reason to send people, it's been done and even repeated a few times so it's a bit like after the first 10 people had been on Mount Everest there's not really much to be proven that we could climb it again. I'd say go straight for Mars, break some new ground not just revisit the old ones.

Whatever, if they were complaining about things like what the Wii was to the XB360 and PS3 that'd be one thing but when you get quotes like

That is real hardware and software usability issues, not just lack of eye candy. It's an entertainment device, if it's more annoying and frustrating than entertaining it'll be a $99 paperweight.

Yes but it was sort of like the pony express shutting down their rush service because the telegraph arrived, maybe that sucks if you wanted to send a package but for the 95% that wanted to send a letter the telegraph was faster and better. Not every aspect of every old service is going to be preserved by the new ones, there will always be some regressions in the overall picture. Even though we're making incremental improvements I doubt we'll see any revolutionary changes in things like jet propulsion, internal combustion, gas turbines and whatnot - it's just minor tweaks to squeeze more efficiency out of it.

The overwhelming number of changes I expect is for things to get smaller, smarter and for more and more things to go electronically rather than physically and applying brute force. Maybe you get another 5 mph on the interstate but the main difference is an AI that drives itself. My dream of "real technological development" would be things like having nanobots to destroy bacteria, viruses, toxins, cancer cells, cure genetic diseases and prevent aging on the cell level. In the future maybe we all have personal assistants like only the rich have today, only they're robotic. It couldn't be done today because to have servants somebody would have to be the servants, but we could all have a robot the way we all have cell phones.

I'm not going to bash the system we have today, I can go down to the grocery store and buy a finished meal, pop it in the microwave and put the dishes in the dishwasher but it certainly could be taken to the next level where I just tell a robot I'd like spaghetti bolognese today and it'd shop, cook like a professional chef, serve and clear the tables when I'm done. Having a washing machine and a dryer is also rather relaxed, but again being able to throw dirty clothes in the bin and have them sorted, washed, dried, ironed if applicable and put back in the closest by themselves would be even better. Roombas and electronic lawn mowers are just a shadow of what robot housekeepers and gardeners could be. In short, even if I don't see flying cars on the horizon I see plenty things that could make life in 2013 seem rather primitive compared to 100 years from now.

A probe would probably be meant for observation, not communication since it's so much easier to just boost the signal if there's someone answering at the other end. I think we'd already know if there was a probe in orbit, if it's in transit or just doing a fly-by it'd be a silent black speck of dust we'd have no chance of detecting.

But you've never had the right to control what people say about you to others. If that was the case we'd be casually breaking the law all the time every time we mentioned somebody else.

And here's really the issue, tagging is more formal but in principle it's the same thing so to you want to make that posting illegal? Just saying it too?

No, I own my own memories and have the right to talk about them to others. If I see you cheating on your wife then I don't need your permission to tell her, if I saw an anti-porn priest go to a strip club where he thought no one would recognize him I don't need his permission to call him out on his hypocrisy. It is a very important part of free speech to be able to talk about somebody against their will. Do you think all the "birthers" should be put in jail for questioning Obama's heritage without his permission? Don't be silly. You can ask people not to tag and not to post photos, but I don't think you with force of law can demand that they don't.

I don't, I'm afraid. My school had a book shelf full of books of fun projects involving the BBC, and this was one entry in one of them.

I just signed up with these guys about a year ago:
https://www.exascale.co.uk/

I'm stupid happy with them. If you want, I can set you up with my own reseller account with them. I won't even charge you for the month or so while you get stuff up and running. Once you're happy with the way things are going, I'll charge you cost for the server space, if it is a non-profit that I agree with. Who is the non-profit?

I'm also a developer by trade, so though I won't commit to doing 'free work' I will happily help with some technical issues or advice if need be.

I read a different book, in the '80s about things that you could do with a BBC Micro. One of them was a sound recogniser, which worked in a similar way with a 1MHz 6502. Most of this kind of book seemed to disappear in the '90s though, and didn't really start to reappear until recently.