What he's saying is that Linus is a more behind-the-scenes person, not a public figure (although he does make quite a few controversial forum posts). RMS is out there, at the front, campaigning for his ideals.
No, but openness has a lot of advantages. It means that it's free, it's guaranteed to be supported by someone even if the founders all go away, you can trust it more since everyone can look at the source, and so on.
Pirates aren't going anywhere. One site shuts down, 5 more pop up. It's an impossible game of whack-a-mole. This isn't a statement in favor of or against copyright infringement, it's a simple fact.
Many of these are "think outside the box" type problems. For example, the one about the lightbulbs makes you think that the only information you get is binary - on or off. There are 4 possibilities - 0,1,2,3 on (position doesn't matter) but 6 configurations (123,132,213,231,312,321) making the problem impossible. The actual solution is to turn 1 on, turn a second on but turn it off just before you open the box, and leave a third off. Then it's a simple matter of checking which one's on, which one's hot and which one's off.
I'm seeing the opposite effect. When googling for "go", first I get the Go buses that make up some of my local public transit, then the Go board game, and then the programming language at #9. It might change as the hype builds up, but I don't see it happening now.
Depends what you mean by mentally superior. Computers can add billions of numbers a second, work at a very high precision with reflexes measured in nanoseconds, do not have weaknesses like boredom and the need to socialize. If you're talking about creativity and navigating the real world, however, computers aren't there yet.
Very cool, but sadly not too practical (very vulnerable to shoulder surf attacks, and it's not that hard to tell that there's something funny about the knock).
Given how slow the site is, can anyone please give some examples of its output? Is it meaningful sentences, "the man walked his dog in the park" type sentences that even things that everyone wants to censor would have or something else entirely?
That's a lot more debatable than you think. Vista was crashing all over the place back before they added some patches and service packs, and from a usability standpoint many people despise the new ribbon interface.
Especially obfuscations like "bob at gmail dot com". If I were a spambot I would just read until the first space and append "@gmail.com" and "@hotmail.com" and 5-6 other mail providers. This would break through 90% of people doing that, and they're high value targets too - they feel secure with their clever obfuscation and chances are their other anti-spam tools (and reflexes) are weaker.
Of course, if someone who would look foolish if he had made a certain statement would vehemently deny making it (or just forget it). Bill's refutation is not proof that he never made the comment.
The article claims that Google is using some form of "volume licensing" with Android. But how can volume licensing be enforceable when the project is Apache/GPL? Is this an error or is there something I'm not aware of?
I used to frequent google.com, but modern web browsers let you search right from the URL bar, bypassing the site entirely. So you do have to go and look these days (or write a script that loads the HTTP and compares it to the standard version).
"Imagine if Wal-Mart tried to offer one-half of its customers one price and the other half a different price. Or even if they tried to change the price for a week to see what would happen."
Someone from the first group would set up a retail store and outcompete Walmart for the second group. Just like what would happen (but much more efficiently since there's no cost inherent in moving stuff around) in a virtual world that allows trade.
Start everything off with a single 50-point score. That way one person ranking it 100 will bump it up to 75, the next to 83, and so on. Such a system would cause teas that have more people upvoting them to rank higher than those that just happen to have one or two good opinions.
The headline seems a bit misleading - it seems to be in favor of spending all of your money as soon as you get it - the article's actual point, that it is better to put your investments in places that do better than 1% per year, is quite valid.
I think the money vs happiness equation is pretty logarithmic. Going from $8000 per year to $16000 is about the same increase in quality of life as $80000 to $160000.
And the middle one moves to the end of the line, grabbing half the clients. Now, the problem is the same but someone else is in the middle, who then must relocate himself, ad infinitum.
It's meaningless because if you're the only provider your price is by definition the market price. Market price means the price on the market, not the price in a hypothetical fair competitive market.
But restricted access causes underuse - people seeing a bump would hold off on paying $300 until they eventually start feeling pain and bam, they have a systemic tumor.
I really have to disagree with this. Piracy will not be moving to rapidshare - it's just not anonymous and decentralized enough. More likely bittorrent protocols will keep improving with more privacy features tacked on.
If you use robots.txt and shut out Google, your news source will fade into obscurity. This is obvious. The conclusion, however, is that by indexing their news sites Google is providing the news sites a service, so if anyone should be paying it's Murdoch.