In Snowcrash Neal Stephenson describes how professional swordfighting works. He explains that it is very important to stop just a few centimeters after you have gone through your opponent so the sword would not get stuck, which is what would happen if you tried to do this in real life.

At least in Sweden basic carpentry is (was) a mandatory course. Basic automotive mechanics are learned when taking your driving license. Your point?

I had kind of the same problem, and then tried i3, which was awesome at first, but then on the latest version they fucked it up so the tiling doesn't work as it did before. I hacked it so it did, and it works fairly well actually. Try it out!

You haven't customized it as much as him?

One word: Redundancy.

120petabyte*5/3/200000 = 1TB
with 2 redundancy disks per 5 disks

Not only that, but quicksort is faster on average sized inputs, which is what you work with most times.
Low complexity doesn't equal speed.

In a good RTS game the loser loses because he could't foresee an event or he could't figure out fast enough how to stop it. In most sports there may be strategy, but often the better team looses because the other team had one lucky point. How could the losing team foresee that lucky point?

If the video game supporters outnumber the 'real sport' supporters, I would think not... Instead of a game of who can be the smartest*, you prefer a sport where the luckiest win first and the best win second. * Where smartest here means the one who can outsmart the opponent, is better at strategy and can think faster.

If you print out the database, you can still do it by pen and paper?

It's hard going from the biggest company to nothing. They may not be biggest in the smartphone industry, but is still the biggest mobile phone industry, as I haven't heard otherwise. That may not last long though...

No built in mechanism no, but that is where genetic algorithms comes in. Say one would build this into a cell, that could multiply, and then you designed a virus that only let those you want to survive which you can kill by another chemical, then you would have a very cheap platform that can learn anything. Just make a tank of food, put a single of these cells in it. Wait a little, put some viruses in, wait a little, put some virus killer in and repeat.

Natural selection has selected for easy reproduction using few materials, that is the same as cheap.

Too bad they patented it. Every site would benefit from this...

Interesting, but what if we see this as a storage device instead? Isn't the purpose of DNA to be robust, which is perfect for longtime storage, and a DNA-molecule should be very small thus enabling very high storage densities, exactly what our cells are using it for!

IIRC Microsoft didn't come up with it, they just bought the technology from another company. Although Microsoft did develop the software, which probably is a rather large part in it.