Yes, it's true. It is possible to become wealthy in a capitalist society by providing a product or service that is a strong net benefit to society. Unfortunately, it's easier to become more wealthy by exploiting others.

MathML attempts to separate the content and presentation. This is fine if you have a tool that properly supports both (I've never used one, maybe Mathematica or similar does?), but it sucks for most editors. The idea is that you can have a single format that describes both how to lay out equations and their semantics. In practice, pretty much everyone who generates MathML does it from the TeX equivalent and so only ever gets the presentation form. The other advantage of MathML is that each individual element is exposed via the DOM, so it's easy to manipulate equations from JavaScript, although I don't think I've ever seen that done either.

Part of the problem with a format that is basically impossible for humans to write is that it also ends up being difficult to produce tools that can write and display it, which is why it's taken 10 years or so for MathML to get even a token amount of support in mainstream browsers...

No, you have that backwards. I know a number of people who recorded their LPs onto CD-Rs, and there are services that will do this for you if you don't have the equipment, time, and patience to do it yourself. And then they've ripped the CDs and used them with portable media players. Then this functionality was subsumed by mobile phones, and so they copied the tracks there. So why do you think that expecting a recording to outlast a generation of technology (or even a single vendor's product) is suddenly a new thing?

Will it still work when you want to play it on another device? Or when you (or someone who compromises your account) do something that annoys Microsoft and your XBox Live account is deleted? Can you watch it when you're bored because your Internet connection is down? Can you watch it while you're travelling on a train or a plane on your tablet or laptop? What about on the next tablet or laptop you buy, from a different vendor?

So, the EFF is Google, which is why we're talking about the EFF opposing a Google-backed extension to the HTML5 spec? Google is really messed up, in that case...

So, step back from the idea of BitCoin for a second - would you use software that used your idle CPU / GPU cycles for some form of distributed computation? How about your bandwidth? For example, would you play a game that ran a BitTorrent client for distributing updates? What about if they also sold space on their tracker for other distributed things, but allowed you to limit to, say, 5KB/s upstream usage? What if they sold GPU time for embarrassingly parallel large-scale scientific computing jobs?

I remember watching one of the WWDC keynotes streamed live when I was still an undergrad, so that would be 2002 / 2003. Mostly it was done as a tech demo of their QuickTime Streaming Server (open sourced as Darwin Streaming Server). So, they almost certainly weren't the first to do live streams like this, but they were doing it a long time before 2010.

Would that be such a bad thing? People go to these conferences because there's a real benefit in the tutorials and so on that are there. The cost is intended to reflect this, but apparently it failed: the people attending believe they get a lot more value from it than the cost of attending. The only problem with this approach is that it skews the market in favour of established companies, and Apple wants to encourage new developers. This could be fixed by reserving, say, 10% of the tickets for prizes for some competitions along the lines of best independent developer in the App Store, best new app, and so on.

There are a few problems with that. First, it only takes one person to circumvent the DRM and then average customers don't need to do anything: the de-DRM'd copy can be trivially redistributed. Second, it only takes on person to write the software to circumvent the DRM and then it can be packed up into a one-click UI for the average customer. If you search for 'copy DVD' in any web search engine, you'll find loads of easy-to-use tools. There's no reason that the UI for ripping a DVD has to be more complicated than iTunes' UI for ripping a CD - it's only because of the CSS licensing requirements that iTunes doesn't have this functionality out of the box.

You probably don't have much contact with people under 35. Watching DVDs (or, more recently, streaming services) on a laptop is something that has been very common among students for around a decade. Around 2000, it was still a pretty geeky thing, but it became mainstream very quickly.

No, it's a (draft) standard. It is being standardised by the W3C, which is a technical standards committee with a mission statement. The goals of the W3C are inherently incompatible with any standard that defines portions that can not be implemented in a compatible way by any vendor that wishes to participate in the market, and that includes DRM.

And that means that they will always be unwilling to reach all of their potential market. And that means that there is a market opportunity for companies that are willing to release without DRM.

As TFA says, the lack of DRM on CDs made it possible to sell portable music players like the iPod along with software to rip all of your CDs. And that increased the demand for recorded music. Now, a significant fraction of the big record labels' income derives from selling DRM-free music downloads. The weak DRM on DVDs was thoroughly circumvented, but it was still strong enough legally to block the sale of set-top boxes that ripped your entire DVD collection and exposed it via a nice menu. It was still strong enough that applications like iTunes and Windows Media Player never got the ability to rip DVDs to play back on your computer. It strangled technological innovation in an entire sector.

Most depressingly, it actually acted against the interests of the people pushing it. I'd love to subscribe to a service like Netflix that let me download films in a DRM-free format (it could even limit it to, say, 30 hours a month). I'd love to have an easy source of films to stick on my laptop or my tablet to watch while travelling. I'd even have liked to be able to buy a DVD at the airport to watch on the plane, but half the time the region locking on my laptop's DVD drive would prevent me from being able to play it back, so I don't even bother trying.

Actually, the PNaCl stuff that Google is pushing defines an ABI for LLVM IR, which is platform independent. It defines a 32-bit address space and a set of calling conventions that don't match any host platform, so you need some adaptors for calling into native libraries, but that's fine because you should only be able to call into native libraries via well-defined interfaces anyway for security.

There's a difference between being opposed to porn in public and being in favour of government-mandated censorship. No one has yet produced a porn filter that restricts access to all porn, but doesn't restrict access to anything else, so we'll either end up with a system that has false negatives and still allows porn through (in which case why bother) or has false positives and blocks things that should be completely acceptable (in which case it's very easy to abuse). Worse, this will likely end up with the same lack of accountability that the IWF ended up with, where the government didn't legislate the block list, they just threatened the ISPs with stricter legislation if they didn't 'voluntarily' comply, so you have a private organisation with no public oversight responsible for censoring almost every UK web connection.

And, as the other poster pointed out, there is a difference between a public hotspot and being in a public place.

Being strong on floating point is an aspect of the implementation more than the ISA. SGI's MIPS chips devoted a lot of designer effort and silicon to floating point, because that's what their customers wanted. In MIPS, however, there is a generic coprocessor interface supporting 4 coprocessors. CP0 is the system management coprocessor, which does all of the things like TLB management. CP1 is traditionally the FPU, and CP3 is sometimes the SIMD unit. CP2 is usually some manufacturer-specific extension. Cavium's Octeons, for example, put some network processing acceleration functions into CP2, but I don't think they implement CP1, or if they do it's likely a single floating point pipeline shared between cores. With a multithreaded CPU and a well-designed memory controller, you can have enough threads blocking on reads that you can handle one read and one write every cycle and completely saturate the bus, which is exactly what you want for network processing.