Yes. Did you ever stop to wonder why people left KaZaA, eDonkey, Gnutella and so on for Suprnova and The Pirate Bay? We tried it 10-15 years ago and it was vastly inferior to torrent sites, what's new? Except that torrent sites have now gone torrentless and trackerless to mostly carry magnet links.

Statistics. Google has tons and tons of statistics on what links are actually relevant to the search terms, your decentralized crawler will find some random shit and return it as a hit. Search any of the networks above and you get tons of crap. Perhaps you get better results with a decentralized search engine on the web, but only because you rely on sites like TPB and other popular torrent sites to weed out most of the crap. Searching a fairly centralized resource in a decentralized way isn't exactly being decentralized.

They released Haswell in June, they've barely had time to sell that so Q4 2013 to Q1 2014 is still ahead of their yearly tick-tock. They're not announcing any delay to Airmont which is their mobile 14nm chip and we all know one quarter to or from won't change much in the desktop/server market. In related news AMD posted their Q3 earnings today and their CPU sales are still down, their gross margin is down but on the bright side the console sales are finally coming in so overall they're making a profit this quarter. Inventory is way up but I hope that is due to build up before the PS4/XBone launch, what disturbs me is that their R&D is still going down. That's a death spiral in the CPU/GPU/APU business.

Fully decentralized services are full of spam, viruses, trolls, hired goons, crap versions, corrupted versions and garbage. You don't need the bulk data from a centralized source - a magnet link is plenty - but if you don't want to waste a lot of time and bandwidth you want some form of crowd-sourced service to help you find good files. That means moderation, comments, ratings, votes, indexes and so on that don't decentralize well. You could of course try with some PGP "web of trust" system, but you see how well that's worked out for key signing so I really doubt it'll do better at finding good content. As long as places like TPB are up, they'll be used. If they go down, I guess hidden services over TOR are next. If they go down as well, then maybe but not before...

Well, Red Hat found a profitable market. Apple found a profitable market. Google found a profitable market. Has Canonical? They're a private company so we don't really know but as late as a call this year announcing Ubuntu for Tablets they said they were not. Nor can I spot any big and obvious cash flows to indicate they would be, they're a contender in various areas but no big cash cows. It's the same as when Red Hat shut down Red Hat Linux (not Red Hat *Enterprise* Linux) in favor of the Fedora project, sure RHL was great for the community but Red Hat didn't see how they'd make any money on it. About ten years down the road and Ubuntu is exactly in the same spot, they have the same market and it's still not making any money. I think Canonical is suffering the investor's itch, they don't want to wait another decade to see returns.

While 'possible', when you mix the extreme rarity of chimerism (35 humans in US), that mosiacism is an internal mutation (not a mix of disparate DNAs) and the rarity of yeti sightings in the first place, it gets very unlikely either of these are the answer.

This bit of fur is indeed indicative of a all current 'evidence' for yeti. Every case examined thus far has turned out to *not* be a yeti, but a common creature. Or a crappy, blurry photo, or half melted and indistinct footprints. Etc. Etc. Etc.

You cannot determine what a fictional creature 'really' is.

At which point we'll make some token efforts that will look good for a little while because the healthier economy will provide greater tax revenue... until the next downturn. It'll be just like the deficit reduction of the Clinton era, and do nothing to really fix the systemic problems. At the end of the day the federal government needs to dramatically slash expenditures or increase taxes -- or, probably, both.

There is a large and increasing number of economists who disagree, at least with respect to FDR's labor programs. There's a good argument to be made that the New Deal deepened and lengthened the depression. FDR's fiscal reforms were probably correct, and the labor programs did have the beneficial effect of building a lot of great infrastructure (though much of it not economically productive, e.g. national parks), but it seems likely that the private sector would have recovered much faster and unemployment would never have gotten as severe as it did without them.

There's also a counterargument, but it's based mostly on the psychology of economics, not economics itself. That is that while the New Deal's labor policies were bad for the economy they gave people hope, which increased spending and were therefore good for the economy. But the Keynesian notion that the federal spending directly helped to solve the problems is pretty much dead, and has been for decades.

You can now send money with Gmail.

You sure YOU don't work for the NSA? The recording capability is what it is, but the reading capability is whatever you can put in a $100 consumer drive operating at 100MB/s with 1 error in 10^14 bits accuracy. What you can do with a >$1 million electron microscope at 1/1000th the speed at 1/1000th the accuracy is another matter. You might not want a 0.1 MB/s drive that corrupts a bit every megabyte but for forensics that's plenty. Never mind that all modern drives just pretend to offer you a linear disc, in reality it remaps a whole sector if a single bit fails. How much compromising info can you write in 4023 out of 4024 bits of a 4K sector? It's not useless but everything you hope to achieve with erasing is better achieved with encryption. Nor are they mutually exclusive, if you want to wipe your encrypted drive for that extra unrecoverable feeling go ahead.

That's a potential solution to a different problem.

Since that's dependent on handset manufacturers and carriers, both of whom have an incentive to get you to buy a new phone rather than upgrade your existing device, Google has come up with an alternative that mostly achieves the same result -- Nearly all important "OS" upgrades these days are actually updates to the application libraries, so old devices get the most important updates whether the OS is updated or not. This really started in earnest with 4.0, so people on pre-Ice Cream Sandwich devices are still lagging, but from that point on it matters a lot less whether you have the current OS.

I doubt anything has a future in the home, to the home it'll be fiber (23% here in Norway now and rapidly rising) that plugs into a box in the closet that splits it off into TV, phone, wireless and copper wire internet service and so on. GigE over copper is plenty for in-home distribution, even for compressed 4K material unless you've got a big family all watching different things with quad-BluRay quality. Anywhere you're likely to want an Ethernet port you have wall sockets, so no point in powered varieties. Nobody cares about having a 10GbE home network and it'll take forever until you have >1GBit internet connections. Now I'm not going to go 640kB on you and say forever, but for the next decade I see absolutely no demand for anything more.

If anything the trend is the other way around, you supply power and everything else is wireless even over short distances. That the latest standards have poor range and don't penetrate obstacles well means they work better in apartment buildings due to less interference. Actually in my building it works so well that I'm starting to wonder if it's deliberate, non-interfering materials in apartment-internal walls and blocking materials in walls to adjoining flats. Doesn't seem to have any effect on cell phone signals though, but I receive my own wireless AP extremely well and the others much weaker - I suspect out the window to other buildings in sight. It's the interference that kills wireless performance.

Many companies have paid ridiculous amounts of money for code that doesn't work, particularly custom and semi-custom code. The NHS in the UK scrapped a >10 billion GBP - that's 16 billion USD - national healthcare system. Vertical integrators that have a stranglehold on certain professions are often full of horrible, horrible code. Insane amounts of spaghetti code have been made by cheap outsourcing companies to go into "commercial software". Closed source has its gems. Open source has its gems. But as a broad generalization it's the pot calling the kettle black, both have a huge spread. Often it's just good vs better or bad vs less mediocre and the question to pay or not depends on whether a $50k+ worker could be 1% more effective - that's $500 - with that tool or not.

Personally I find there's a difference of layers, closed source software doesn't sell unless it looks good on the surface with user interface and hand-holding documentation, comes with buzzword compliance, feature checklists and fancy demos of the capabilities. Open source is more grab it, put it through its paces and see if it works for you. Doesn't have to be so pretty to look at, but be a solid workhorse with detailed technical documentation but often a high learning curve. It's usually more about manpower though than anything else, often you realize there's five open source developers trying to compete with a hundred closed source developers and it's not so much a better of the quality of the coders but simply about being outgunned.

Do you have any evidence to the contrary? At all?

Not to mention the perpetrator-victim relationship, in the UK and most of Europe a knife is enough. Depending on where you are in the US if you tried to rob anyone with a knife chances are you'd get the wallet while you're up close then get held or shot at gunpoint as you're trying to get away. If you have to assume your victim might have a gun (legally or illegally) the only "safe" way to rob them is to control them at gunpoint from start to finish. As I understand it guns are not that terribly hard to acquire here in Europe but they are usually overkill to commit the crime and they rarely let you get out of a situation you couldn't escape with a knife. Unless you intend to kill but most murders around here happens in close relations with victims in "stabbing distance", not gang violence on the street. And of course to an armed robbery you send armed police...

Google Fiber doesn't sniff traffic.