As a student, a large part of my work involves remembering. I have found that I need 8 hours of sleep – if I sleep less than that, I'm useless all day: I have trouble concentrating and usually don't get any studying done.

Others however, seem to be off fine sleeping only 3 or 4 hours a day. Sure, they are tired, but it doesn't impact their ability to concentrate in the same way. Any biologist / neuroscientists here who can explain this?

I think they do replicate DBs to Florida (the former main data center), because they wrote it's a hot failover. The other data centers are just caches, because that's most of the requests.

Virginia has had 90% of all requests anyway already, they are serving bits.wikimedia.org (JS, CSS, ...), upload.wikimedia.org (images and media) and I guess also Squid+Varnish. The "only" thing missing is the actual mediawiki software, databases and things like memcached. Here's the checklist

While probably somewhat known among Slashdotters, I think it is worthwhile to remind people of Alan Turing, mathematician, logician, WWII code breaker and father of computer science (as well as being a victim of cruel injustice by the state).

He's unfortunately by far less recognized than people like Steve Jobs (probably because turing machines don't have rounded corners by design). It's a bit like the story of Tesla vs. Edison. One was a genius scientist, the other one an asshat making lots of money, without contributing nearly as much to the field, but still being more famous and celebrated.

There's a ToS;DR campaign to end unreadable ToS/Eulas or provide ways of getting useful summaries of them. Check out their List of ToS.

Don't just stop at not building them in your country: Why not make an international treaty banning killer robots globally? Hell, it worked with landmines (except some savage countries like the US and Russia still haven't signed it.)

The issue with killer robots is that once you introduce them, you won't be able to let the decisions be made by humans. At some point robots will fight robots and at that point it just matters who shoots first. Quick reactions matter and a human will always be slower than AI. So you end up with autonomous killing machines and sure enough they will also kill humans in the process.

The incident to which the AC is referring is about a poppy burning which was in the news just a few days ago. A man was arrested for burning the poppy on Remembrance day.

This is probably similar to the flag burning controversy in the US. (See also the excellent Futurama episode on why it makes not sense to defend freedom of expression by abolishing it)

Saying something stupid is not a crime. The simple fact that you are not telling the truth does not constitute a crime, nor does your ignorance in making false statements.

What you were probably referring to is saying something offensive or insulting. I think you're right insofar as free speech is indeed under attack in a lot of countries, but that should be all the more reason to defend it. It has been proven numerous times that in practice it is impossible to outlaw insulting statements without harming free speech.

For example, in the UK, a teenager was arrested for calling the "Church" of Scientology a cult. You can't tell me that this is not a ludicrous undermining of free speech laws.

In the UK you can get arrested for all kinds of things you say: Calling a police horse gay, for example. If someone feels like something you say could insult someone, you get arrested. Now, not all of these (ludicrous) charges are successful, but still I think there already is a bad chilling effect.

Listen to Rowan Atkinson's (Mr. Bean) excellent 10 Minutes speech on the topic and why he is part of the campaign "Feel free to insult me".

In the early days, it was pretty easy to be a computer hobbyist. Nowadays we see that manufacturers restrict their devices (including the iPhone) and the user loses control, being locked out and unable to tinker freely with their device. Cory Doctorow suspects that many powerful advocacy groups will try restrict general purpose computers and the general purpose network (possibly outlawing tinkering, which in part is already being enforced), which poses not only problems for hobbyists, but the whole society.

Do you recognize that there might be a genuine problem in restricting the user to a – maybe somewhat safer, but unfree – walled garden and using laws to enforce it? I know you've stated your opinion on DRM before, nevertheless I'm interested what you might have to say about more recent developments.

Hi! I invite you to read this explanation why NC licenses are problematic.

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/705/

In Germany there is an odd situation right now, where ISPs can't be held accountable for what their users do, while private individuals or small hot spot operators are (somewhat) liable for someone else using their network for illegal activities. This basically means you can't open up your WiFi to visitors and neighbours without spying on their Internet usage.

(On the other hand, in contrast to the US, if you get caught, you don't have to pay $1.5 million (or even $54,000) for copyright infringement.)

Me still thinks this is doubleplusungood. If you want to protect your kids, don't let them unsupervised on the Internet when they are still young. You don't let them play on a dangerous road either, do you?

Collusion Download/Demo. Looks like a pretty nifty tool. And completely without flash!

My university building is 80m from SuperMUC; there is a large campus at the site with several thousand students and employees. In winter it most definitely makes sense to use the heat from SuperMUC, as the average temperature is about 0 degrees Celsius. In summer it might be a bit more difficult to dissipate heat on hot days, though the average temperature is still only 19 decrees Celsius for July.