I suspect docker is the only real contender to the total systemd domination. I liked systemd until I realized how much fragility it brings to the system with all those supposedly nice dependencies between services. The problem is that when one of the dependencies fails, the rest stops starting/shutting down/working when in fact the failure can be very much transient. So I started to like how docker resists supporting full-featured container dependencies. It essentially requires for containers to deal with connection failures when talking to other containers making the whole setup much more robust. As a bonus it becomes much easier to move containers to other machines making the setup scalable.

The move to Alpine is nice in that respect as it it ensures that the packages to build containers on do not have explicit or implicit dependencies on the presence of systemd and so is much more suitable for docker.

Upgrading is only possible if binary-only drivers are compatible with newer Android. This is what made Fairphone-1 such a bad deal. They cannot upgrade beyond Android 4.1 as binary blobs work only there. I really hope that they learned their mistake with the second version. Still this time I decided to wait and has not preorder the second version until openness of software is confirmed.

There is such things as taste craving. It is very real and a lot of people gave up on veganism just of that. Personally I still avoid even looking at cheese section in supermarkets after being vegan for 6 years for ethical reasons. Fortunately latest vegan cheese taste the same, so that became easier.

I am not sure about it. A lot of taste comes from texture and it could be very well that some pure mechanical trick during production could close taste gap rather cheaply. For example, a blind tasting at family gathering reveled that relatives could distinguish between cheap sosidges coming from animals (like 20% of meat) and expensive veggy ones. It was the texture that tricked them, not some chemical addictives (there were none).

The result is truly about limits of computations and not about practical limits. For example, I will happily accept an algorithm that runs in c*2^(a*N) time when a is 1e-100 and c is not big as for practical purposes it runs in constant time. It is fascinating topic on its own why we do not have such algorithms for practical tasks.

Norway is just slightly less than California. Yet my experience 4 years ago that even in California with population density 6 times larger was that the coverage was worse. And judging by comments I do not see that situation improved.

Population density in Norway is more than 2 times less than in USA. Yet the country has coverage even in the middle of nowhere (as long one stays close to the road) if not with 3G but at least with 2G enough to check email or surf web. Surely sometimes one hits a dead zone, but this is typically due to a mountain blocking the signal. Just drive few minutes, and the coverage is there.

And it is easy to steal solar panels especially in urban areas. So Vodafone is just trying to put a positive spin on anti-theft measures.

The last thing a military contractor want to hear is about cheaper alternatives to their expensive toys.

We still have no evidence that proves for sure that oil comes from fossils, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .

In France cities use taxis as a form of a tax. A taxi license in Paris costs 240 000 Euro making taxi rather expensive and affordable only for relatively wealthy. Drop that, and it opens the market for more customers creating jobs. Also consider that a good inexpensive taxi service means more people will drop cars and spend money in the city rather than give them to car manufactures.

So Uberisation can be a nice win in a long term from jobs point of view. However, that is not going to happen. The problem is taxi drivers who already payed for the very expensive license using bank loans etc. They see that by not banning Uber and related services immediately the cities effectively cheated on them by promising a stable future marked in exchange for license money and not providing it. Add to that that taxi drivers are very socially active and I do not see that in near future there would be a legal option for cheap taxis in France.

The point is that shielding and fuses should be good enough to withstand EMP. From that reference: "Power line insulators were damaged, resulting in a short circuit on the line and some lines detaching from the poles and falling to the ground."

Simply shielding and fusing is not enough against EMP from a nuke, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Pinker claims have been debunked as available histirical data is compatible with a hypothesis that nothing has changed regarding violence for the last 3000 years, http://www.fooledbyrandomness....

Macs are popular with developers (on some software conferences over 50% of laptops could be Macs) and getting control of those machines opens many more possibilities than just threatening to delete or share personal pictures.