Not sure you can rule out the possibility that the gravitational mass is negative. Sure, the inertial mass may still be positive (e.g. merely defined as the absolute value of the gravitational mass), but if the gravitational mass is negative, then you can build an antimatter Alcubierre drive with it---so you can propel something *else* (regular matter that has positive gravitational mass) at high speed.

Or am I mistaken? Can you make an argument based on GR that it should be positive?

Quite the opposite here. I haven't listened to most of the 200+ CDs I own for years now. The newness offered by the tweaked Pandora experience is just too irresistible.

In 10 years when every single interactive product runs server-side only, your comment will seem charming and quaint. We will remember with melancholy the simpler, freer days the days when software ran on machines that we owned.

Physical storage devices (books, CDs, DVDs) were inconvenient necessities required for publishers to make sale.

Wide availability of broadband means such storage devices are no longer required. They will be done away with, and everything wil be kept on the server. And licensed.

In another decade, this idea of "owning" software and books and music will seem quaint and antiquated, much like the idea of gold-backed currency.

So they'll stop saying "own it now." Everything will be licensed. End of story.

Who'll stop buying? Me? You? Maybe. Most people? Nah, they've already been convinced to switch away from "own it."

Just pay the rent, pay the rent, and we'll keep on streaming to you.

It's more than a rhetorical tactic. It's an intellectual fail that was inherited from the GNOME project. The fail goes like this: "We must have a good default UI. Instead of giving advanced users the ability to tweak that interface via an 'Advanced' button, let us just take away their ability to tweak. Because noobs are so noobish they will click on Advanced, screw things up, and then complain to us."

False and Wrong, idiots. And a big fail. There is plenty of software (especially a lot of Apple software, which I hear is quite popular), with preference dialogs that have "Advanced..." buttons, and guess what, noone on the forums is complaining of stuff that was misconfigured. (They are complaining of actual Apple fails, but that is another story).

That one epic fail---that one decision that you can't have both a simple UI, and a button somewhere in the preferences that caters to your advanced users, is the root of all the backlash against GNOME and Ubuntu. Your hubris is costing you dearly.

Put an effing advanced button on all your preferences. And no, gconf-editor or dconf-editor or any of that garbage doesn't cut it. It needs to be COMPREHENSIBLE to be useful.

There's something quixotic about all the recent changes in Ubuntu, isn't there? In the real world they are a Linux distro preferred by 2% of users for its good driver support and its ease of use. But in Shuttleworth's mind, they are a smartphone/tablet/TV operating system that is about to go mainstream and take over the world. Maybe if his desktop market share was a tad higher than 2% it would be realistic, but it just seems to me that they are overreaching and mostly daydreaming of grandeur where they should be focused on serving their core clientèle better.

The numbers cited are for gzip. The improvement over 7-zip is much less than 3%; it's more like 1%, at the cost of a factor of four slowdown with respect to 7-zip. Note that this is for 7-zip when restricted to deflate-compatible formats only.

Here's the paper:
https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/downloads/list

I used to jailbreak during iOS 4-5 days. Spent a lot of time installing this or that tweak, feeling like such a cool "power user." Oh my, animated wallpaper and SSV Normandy replacing the words "AT&T" on the upper left corner of my screen. This or that tweak that let me access this or that feature with one less gesture than before.

What a freaking waste of time. And at what cost? Random applications written by anonymous people on the net running as root on your iPhone, with full access to your private data if they wanted it? You are putting yourself at extremely high risk by circumventing the iPhone's security and running all this closed source software as root.

Jailbreaking is a security nightmare, and you're not worthy of the term "power user" if you allow someone called chpwn or BigBoss to run closed source shit as root on your personal communication device. By the way, that jerk BigBoss wouldn't let me run his software if I blocked ads on my hosts file. WTF dude, let us live a little?

If you really want flexibility, at least go to Android, where they publish their source.

It finally took cold turkey---bought an iPhone 5 when it came out, with no jailbreak for months---to learn that I really like my iPhone the way God intended it: nice and stable and closed---and even if not 100% secure, still better than giving some random dude called p0sixninja full access to my device. I get more stuff done now---you know, real work that I need to get done for my real career and not messing with a half-assed implementation of Expose that causes my phone to reboot half the time (yeah---the instability and the random reboots are yet another downside of jailbreaking).

That was all an illusion. We never had any real rights in the face of the juggernaut that is copyright.

In the eyes of publishers, books, CDs, and floppy disks were inconvenient and flawed means of distributing content, because they could not control the content after it left their hands. Furthermore, they were physically limited and subject to damage, which caused such abominations as lending and backups to become necessary.

The internet handed them exactly what they wanted: no need for flawed, uncontrollable methods of distributing their copyright-protected progeny. They can, and will, eventually put everything behind a server, and make it impossible or extremely inconvenient to use and consume without a regular monthly payment and subscription. That is our future, unless something is done about copyright itself.

It's Windows. Everything had to be windows. They stuck to windows until the gamechangers (iPhone, Android) had market dominance... now is a little too late to switch everything over to Metro.

The problem is, you can't just always be reactive. You have to lead at some point, with real innovation. And this company has simply never done that.

Got an iPhone 5 when it came out. No jailbreak for months and months. Guess what? All those tweaks I thought I couldn't live without? Don't miss them one bit. I don't miss the crashes and random unscreened application running as root on the iPhone either. All that theming and tweaking was just one big waste of time.

No one is making a 13" powerhouse all in one laptop. The closest thing was the 2010 VAIO Z, which weighs 3.5 lbs.

The ones currently available have one of the following deal-breakers: lousy 1366x768 resolution, do not have discrete GPU, or have a lousy screen.

The demand for such laptops, if priced at $2500-$3000, would be high enough to make them profitable.

Not that many people are talking about it, but Exchange support for GMail is also going away for free customers on Jan 13. That is a huge deal.

That means no push notification of GMails on the iPhone without using the GMail app.

Google's strategy is becoming clearer vis-a-vis iOS: replace Apple's native apps with its own. People will be forced to use the GMail app instead of native iOS mail if they want push notifications. Same thing with Maps---people are going to use Google's maps app whenever possible. At least Apple managed to grab a foothold with iMessage. That one won't be replaced by Google soon.

I think you're underrating him. RMS created the whole GNU philosophy, which has inspired thousands of developers---that is his main contribution. Go and read some interviews where Torvalds himself sings the praises of the GPL v2 and its role in the success of Linux.

I myself and many of you use emacs and gcc every day---I do think there's a special credit to be given to the creator of such projects that underlie the whole Linux ecosystem, even if the projects were forked away from him.

Despite being an disheveled person with questionable personal philosophies, RMS deserves credit for having created the notion of software that has a life of its own and cannot be squashed or secreted away by financially driven interests. He is like the NRA---just as the NRA resists any attempt at squashing personal gun ownership (if they came up with handheld thermonuclear weapons, I believe the NRA would staunchly oppose any attempt at regulating them), in the same way, RMS takes an extreme position, because he knows that everyone else will adjust for that and the net result will be something more geared towards the GNU philosophy than if he didn't.

Your ad-hominem attacks disparaging RMS's lowly status and John-the-baptist-like lifestyle are telling---perhaps you yourself failed at making money of GPL software that was meant to benefit everyone? I agree that it is difficult or impossible to make money of this type of software; only a select few can do it. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist, because it has the potential to empower the billions of financially oppressed poor in this world.