Silicon Valley had a purpose at first, but I can't figure out for the life of me why anyone would want to invest, today, in companies that are based in one of the most business-and-individual-unfriendly regions of the nation.
Because there are a lot of competent people there and these days people don't stay in the same job for a very long time. People circulate between companies quite a lot and it's easier to get people to move to a place for a job if they have the option of other jobs in the same area if it doesn't work out for them. If you create a company in the bay area, you can easily find people who are looking for a bit of a change to work for you. If you move to the bay area, you can easily find a lot of companies looking to hire competent people (and some who will settle for not-totally-incompetent people).
You need to develop a critical mass of demand for a particular skill set for this kind of environment to become self-sustaining and the more companies are there, the easier it becomes for others. It's somewhat counter-intuitive, but it's the same reason why you often see shops and restaurants selling similar things in clusters - both benefit from people who go to one in the knowledge that if it's full or out of stock of what they want they can go to one of the others.
The BSD licence provides building blocks for non-free projects that compete against free software. The GPL provides building blocks only for free software projects.
That's only true if you define "free" to be "GPL-compatible." The GPL provides building blocks only for GPL software products. Software licensed under the CDDL is also free software, but GPL doesn't provide you building blocks for combining with that.
Pretty much. As someone involved in cross-platform app development, iOS is still the undefeated king at around 75% of app sales. Even better, iOS sales result in 1.5x-2x better return on average overall.
How do the revenue numbers look when you add in apps? The last numbers I saw were about a year ago so things may have changed, but back then iOS users were a lot more likely to buy apps, but Android had a much bigger share of downloads for ad-supported apps. The revenue was about the same for both platforms, because you'd get less from the ad sales in Android apps, but you'd get more downloads.
Is that a serious question? Take a look at the proceedings from any security conference in the last 2 years and you can find a very long list. The latest trick is for individuals who release small apps for free or a token amount to be offered money to sell their app, especially if the app already asks for more permissions than it really needs (great incentives there...). The buyers then release a new version bundled with malware. The new version is installed automatically if it doesn't need any more permissions, and since most manufacturers don't ship software updates for Android phones in a timely fashion there are typically a few nice root vulnerabilities lying around on a significant fraction of the installed base. From there, the attacker can do what they want (attack mobile banking apps, harvest passwords, send premium-rate SMS, or just proxy all network traffic and inject their own ads, the last being the most common).
I know a couple of people who have turned down money to sell their (free, with only a few thousand users) apps for this purpose.
Not an alternate universe, but a planet closer to the sun. With current panels, you get around 100-200W per square metre of sunlight. The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar panels is somewhere around 40%, bringing it up to 400W. Over 8 hours a day of useable sunlight (that's the output with the sun directly overhead, it slowly drops off over the day, giving an average of around 8 hours, assuming good weather). So that gives a total of around 11.5MJ per day. One litre of petrol releases around 34MJ when burned, so to generate the equivalent energy of one litre of petrol per day, you need three square metres of solar panels, assuming magic future panel technology and losses equivalent to a petrol engine.
With current technology, you'll need closer to nine or ten square metres, or more if you don't have a very efficient charging system. If you're living out in the countryside, this is quite possible (if you can afford the massive up-front investment for the panels, but let's assume that the price will come down quickly), but for anyone in a city it's quite unlikely. Add to that, you don't (depending on where you live, of course) get bright sunlight every day, so you're most likely going to need to store energy over the winter in fairly large amounts. Why not make that more efficient, by centralising it? You could lay a set of power lines to people's houses and they could send their unused power back to your storage plant. And, once those wires are there, you can probably build a centralised power generation facility and sell them power more cheaply (and reliably) than they can generate it themselves, if you factor in the capital and maintenance costs (after all, solar panels need cleaning, replacing, and so on). Such a system would be like a computational grid, but for electricity. You could call it an electricity grid...
God help those who do not help themselves. -- Wilson Mizner