So is there currently better support for Flash or HTML5?
There are currently more platforms (hardware + OS) which have browsers included or available with support for some of HTML5 than there are with support for Flash; in fact, I think that the latter set is proper subset of the former.
And the platforms that offer support for some of HTML5 currently but without Flash are, in at least some important cases, controlled by vendors that are very interested in improving those platforms ability to be used for rich internet applications without introducing a dependency on Adobe for that capability, and which, therefore, would prefer HTML5 including a strong standard for video that would make it a viable one-stop alternative to Flash.
Flash, to my recollection, was pretty much limited to ads and mediocre games before YouTube came along. If YouTube dumped flash, would it still be deemed necessary by the average user?
Whether or not YouTube was the "killer app" that drove it to prominence, its become very popular for all kinds of things since, so, yeah, I think YouTube alone being usable without it wouldn't make it superfluous for users immediately. OTOH, the other things it is used for are also things that HTML5+CSS3+Javascript could handle, and many of them are in the realm that would require only parts of HTML5+CSS3 that are more widely implemented now than the video tag.
OTOH, as long as the desktop is the dominant browser platform (which it still is, though less so over time) and IE is dominant on the desktop (ditto), and IE doesn't make any serious efforts to implement HTML5 because Microsoft's preferred competition to Flash is Silverlight, there's going to be a strong incentive for people to stay with Flash, since it will remain the best way to reach the desktop browser crowd, since it will remain the technology with the broadest applicability that also works on IE (whereas HTML5 won't work on IE, and Silverlight won't work lots of other places.)
I'm guestimating roughly 1000% of those platforms that currently don't support flash, won't ever support HTML5.
I'm guessing you would be very wrong even if you reduced that to the less hyperbolic and actually meaningful 100%; Safari for iPhone already supports a substantial subset of HTML5.
These platforms will be replaced by updated/new platforms which may just as easily support Flash or HTML5.
Well, simply, no. It is not "just as easy" to implement a proprietary platform as an open one. Additionally, the former (for any vendor other than the one that controls the platform) involves substantial risks regarding vendor-vendor relationships that do not exist in the case of the latter.
Which is why several vendors of lower-level platforms prefer HTML5 as a long-term web application platform solution rather than Flash.
Really? Why does the HTML5 spec care what codecs are used?
It cares because if there isn't a mandatory-supported codec in the spec, you can't provide content encoded in one codec and no that any HTML5-compliant browser will be able to deal with it. Since the big point of HTML5 is expanding the kinds of rich applicationst that can be built with complete portability between standards-compliant browsers, that's a pretty big deal.
Why doesn't it just provide a way to specify which codec the author used to encode the media file, and let the browser prompt the user to get it if needed?
Because a major focus of HTML5 is eliminating the need for the user to download additional components beside the browser to use web applications.
Remember that Apple can never have >10% of the market for long and that a good number of those Apple users ditch Safari for Firefox anyway.
Mac users might, but I suspect that very few iPhone users "ditch Safari for Firefox", and phones and similar devices are a pretty compelling focus of the drive for HTML5 (its a big part of the reason you want a plug-in free common standard that supports richer UI's than HTML4, audio/video, and local storage.)
Instead, I suspect most website owners would just say "yeah....OR I could just keep doing it in flash and only worry about 1 format that can work in all browsers."
Except that most browsers don't include Flash support, and browsers do exist on platforms for which there is no Flash.
Browsers don't just exist in desktop OS's anymore -- that's one of the big reasons for HTML5.
Right, while convenient, that doesn't strike me as a very comprehensive list of "major browser vendors".
Its a pretty comprehensive list of "major browser vendors" committed to any substantial support of HTML5; sure, it misses Microsoft, but given that Microsoft has pretty much said they don't care about HTML5 at all in any case, they aren't really part of the conversation.
A number of weak typing language zealots like to point out that Design patterns is simply a way to make strongly typed languages "suck less".
That's a common claim from such people, true, but its not entirely true; descriptions design patterns in terms of substantial code structures that must be implemented for each use of the pattern are ways of working around language limitations, the patterns themselves are not. In languages with better metaprogramming support and/or more permissive typing, many common "design patterns" can be implemented in libraries so that they are reusable. They are still design patterns, but they cease to be what you might call "implementation patterns"; substantial code structures that have to be rebuilt for each new use.
In other words, while it's true that malware affects closed-source far more frequently than OSS, that's just because CSS is far more commonly-used, and, therefore, makes a more tempting target. Make no mistake: if Linux were as widely used as Windows, there would be bugs galore to be a-cleaning in Linux land.
Even granting, for the sake of argument, that Linux would be as badly impacted (in terms of cost to users to deal with malware, not in terms merely of the total attempts to deploy malware) as Windows were it as popular, that is irrelevant to the cost to individual entities deciding which they should use, since no individual entity's decision to use or not use Linux is likely to take it from its current actual popularity to near the popularity of Windows (or, OTOH, stop it from being on the order of the popularity of Windows).
Here's the amazing thing though: We're not trying to establish whether or not Google is leveraging a monopoly.
Then you shouldn't ask "How is what Google is doing different different from what Microsoft is accused of doing", since Microsoft has been accused of (indeed, convicted of) leveraging a monopoly.
How do these folks break even if the data will be free to download and use?
They break even by people finding profitable uses for it, which then produce tax revenue. Remember, the agencies doing this are US and Japanese government agencies.
There's a huge codebase out there that's using PHP against MySQL, and using PHP's original ereg regex syntax instead of the Perl-wannabe stuff. What are they thinking, when they set out to break this? When 5.3 rolls out through the distros a whole lot of MySQL backends will fail on the password thing. And when 6.0 rolls out millions of regexs will suddenly be failing.
Uh, no.
Assuming that people running and maintaining the code are paying any attention, when 6.0 rolls out, those installations that have working code relying on features long-announced for deprecation that are removed in 6.0 will not upgrade to 6.0.
Major new interpreter versions enable new projects, and old projects can be migrated to them if there is a reason. But they aren't intended to be minor, backward compatible, performance improvement and bug fix releases -- that's why they are called major versions.
Following your logic above, how is what Google does any different than what Microsoft is accused of doing?
Microsoft has been convicted (not merely accused) of using an monopoly in one field to support coercive efforts directed at computer manufacturers and others in an attempt to extend that monopoly in other fields.
Google uses profits to buy leading companies in fields it doesn't currently operate in to extend its operations to them; while it may have a leading position in search, it hasn't acheived anything like that dominance in any of the other fields, and hasn't used any kind of anticompetitive practices based on its existing leading position in search to acquire what position it does have in those new markets.
So, how are these things even remotely the same?
It seems to me like Google (and Microsoft) are "leveraging their monopoly in one market to influence other markets."
Even granting, arguendo, that Google has a monopoly to leverage, its not illegally leveraging a monopoly to gain position in other markets to simply use the profits from the monopoly to open up operations in other markets, whether that's by starting new operations or buying existing concerns.
Is the difference that Microsoft made the mistake of waiting for Netscape to get big before they crushed them, where as Google simply buys up the companies before they even really get off the ground?
No, the difference is that: 1) Microsoft used anticompetitive tactics based on leveraging its existing monopoly to crush Netscape, whereas Google hasn't done that, and 2) Microsoft was, in fact, competing with Netscape at the time they crushed them.
If Microsoft had just bought Netscape instead of developing IE, would it have been such a big deal?
Microsoft did buy the technology for IE (though not the company), even before the whole Netscape-crushing effort, and it wasn't a big deal. Most of the time, when Microsoft buys a company, its not that big of a deal. (At least, in the antitrust sense.) It might be if they bought, say, Apple (in terms of the desktop OS market), or if they (instead of Oracle) had bought Sun (in terms of the Office Suite market.)
Seems like it sucks being a successful company. If you buy out your competition, you're in trouble. If you come up with a competing product and then leverage your competitive advantage, you're in trouble.
Actually, successful companies have things quite good. Yes, antitrust law does restrict the behavior of companies that get monopolies. But its still quite good for them, and most successful companies are not monopolies.
It seems like we either have two choices. One, we allow companies to get big enough that they can influence the entire market, and with that influence bring about standards. Or two, we completely Balkanize the industry and give up on the desire to have standardized ways of doing things.
There are many more options, of course. Standards don't require a single vendor.
This is about stopping used games sales, nothing more, nothing less
Since it covers movies as well as games, "used games sales, nothing more, nothing less" is clearly wrong.
I think its more about killing off the entire physical distribution chain; in the short term, it stops sales of used copies of the media produced with activation, but it also makes physical purchase even more inconvenient, encouraging abandoning that entire mechanism. Since, in physical purchase, part of what the customer is willing to pay goes to the retailer, converting everything to direct distribution means more of the sale price goes to the distributor.
Except that all of your examples are not Google buying out competition, but Google buying out pioneers in new market spaces in which it does not yet operate.
Which is not the same as buying out the competition.
In the absence of an external interfering force (e. g., the army of the Soviet Union), the fate of a nation is determined by its people.
This is true in the general trivial sense that many of the ideal principles in social studies (whether political science, sociology, or economics) are true, but (as is often the case with such ideal statements) often false in practice. Like many such generalities, in really is only true in situations of universal perfect information: preferences which are general throughout the population but are not known to be general throughout the population are far less likely to be realized. It also is true in the long term; even widely recognized strong general preferences may not be immediately realized.
After the Kremlin exited Eastern Europe, the peoples of each nation in Eastern Europe rapidly established a genuine democracy and a free market.
This is false in many respects; many Eastern European countries began making this transition before the Red Army started packing up and leaving (and certainly before the Soviet Union and later Russia stopped trying to influence the region, which in many cases they haven't stopped doing), and not all countries in Eastern Europe have established "genuine democracy and a free market", though most of them are closer on both respects than they were during the Cold War.
In Iran (and many other failed states),
Iran is not a failed state. Somalia is a failed state. Afghanistan has been a failed state, and arguably still is. Iran is just a state where the West (and, for that matter, many of its own people) just don't like the regime. There is a big difference.
no external force is imposing the current brutal government on the Iranians.
True so far as it goes.
Let us not merely condemn the Iranian government. We must condemn Iranian culture. Its product is the authoritarian state.
This, OTOH, is less true. While certainly, Iranian culture (like many others) includes a tradition of respect for religious authority which aided the rise to power and the maintenance of the current regime, the principal reason the current regime rose to power was anger at the repression of the previous regime (which was externally imposed, by, principally, the US and the UK.) Like many revolutionary movements against repressive regimes, it included both more authoritarian and more moderate factions, and, as is almost invariably the case in successful revolutionary movements -- generally due to the public's fear of immediate threats faced by the nation from either defenders of the old regime or its external supporters, and the case of Iran was no exception -- the more authoritarian faction was ininitially dominant. The high degree of external threat the Iranian regime has managed to convince its public it faced since its inception (factually supported, even if the threat was exaggerated -- Iraq launched a war against it very shortly after it came to power backed by the wealthy Arab states, the US joined that war, the US remained directly threatening to Iran even after the US split with Iraq) helped suppress internal splits.
However, even given that, Iran has faced a strong reform movement largely centered around the same ideas (and, in part, the same people) that were the more moderate faction in the revolutionary movement for many years, which has only been suppressed by the regime carefullly assuring that positions of power and influence are given to loyalists, and doing everything possible to strike a balance between providing an appearance of responsiveness to keep the pressure for reform working within the system while systematically -- by controlling who can run for elections, controlling the media, and, where necessary, more direct action against dissidents -- suppressing the appearance of dissent so that those who di
Haven't relatively mature technologies like GPS devices been providing augmented reality for some time now? I mean, my GPS can show me the location of Dunkin Donuts shops long before I can see them on the street. Integrating the GPS-located items in the camera view seems to be the only innovation here.
"Augmented reality", as usually discussed, means overlaying data relevant to the current view over a normal view of the world, so the part that it adds is the part that makes it "augmented reality".
OTOH, it sounds like pretty lame augmented reality, both because of the interface (using a phone), and because it seems to just use position/orientation data and not, say, any kind of processing of the incoming visual data. As well as positioning problems for things that are close (GPS is accurate enough for navigating on the road, but I don't think its going to be great for this), that means is mostly going to be a pretty inconvenient (hold your phone up between you and and the scene) way of presenting information that would be more convenient to present on a map display.
if the energy density is higher, that normally means "less safe".
Right. Generally, if it stores energy, there usually is a failure mode which involves the rapid release of the stored energy in an unpleasant manner. That's true whether the energy is stored in mechanical, chemical, or other forms. And the more useful energy you can pack into any given size container, the more danger you pack into that same space.
So let me get this straight, the Vice President of a web company is criticizing the hardware guys in two of the world's biggest chip makers?
Wrong.
He is criticizing, in the bits in TFS, two groups: 1) The marketing guys in two of the world's biggest chip makers (he's not complaining that the chips are flawed from an engineering perspective, he is complaining about the claims, which apparently conflict with Facebooks experience in testing them chips, about the performance of the chips), and 2) The people setting the design goals (not, again, the engineers) at the companies making servers, complaining that they are doing a bad job of what he sees as a major need (which is, of course, also the particular thing that Facebook needs), and that Google does a better job of building servers for that need (a complaint which would be more effective at changing behavior at server manufacturers if it was followed up by Facebook going to Google to get Google to build them servers.)
Can we get like a panel of hardware engineers to have a discussion with this guy and can I get some popcorn?
Now you can let the admin in there, they can determine anything they might want to know, but they never actually see any exact data.
If they can determine "anything they might want to know" about the data, that is exactly equivalent to having full access to the data. So if that's what this offers, for a 12 order of magnitude performance hit, I'm not impressed.
makes possible the deep and unlimited analysis of encrypted information -- data that has been intentionally scrambled -- without sacrificing confidentiality."
This is nonsense: unlimited analysis being possible is the same thing as confidentiality being sacrificed.
Maybe there is something significant and important here, but TFA doesn't provide a clue as to what it is.
Converting something that was unmaintainable due to lack of proper skils to something totally unmaintainable due to lack of readability is not a good trade off.
Even if mostly unreadable (which I don't see evidence of, just an assumption), its probably easier to do piecemeal replacement with readable and relatively maintanable code if you are in Java rather than COBOL to start with.
Its not a good solution, but it may be the least-worst alternative for some existing systems.
What will we do once we've filled up space with solar panels, huh?
Given how much space there is, and how much matter there is (that is, enough to, at a reasonable density, fill up only a really teensy fraction of the space), it seems unlikely that we could "fill up space" with anything.
And, really, until you've created a Dyson swarm or Dyson bubble, which should keep you occupied a long time, I don't see what your issue is here as far as what to do once you've built out to capacity with space-based solar power.
Sarcasm aside, nuclear plants in space might not be such a bad idea if we can actually beam the energy to earth. Nuclear waste is no longer a problem, cooling is no longer a problem, not-in-my-backyard is no longer a problem
Actually, all of thsoe are problems. Cooling in space is nontrivial (vacuum doesn't give you a medium to carry away heat, so you are restricted to radiating heat), you still have to do something with spent fuel, and -- since orbitting things have a history of deorbiting -- NIMBY concerns are still a problem, but just not a local problem, since you can't narrow down the area at risk of (unlikely, perhaps, but that doesn't stop NIMBY concerns) catastrophe in that event.
While the moment magnitude scale is log base 30, which would seem roughly consistent with GPs (+1 magnitude => x1000 energy), its not log base 30 in energy, but in seismic moment, which is why for medium earthquakes it tracks pretty close to the Richter scale, which is log base 10 in energy. Consequently, neither scale is +1 magnitude => x1000 energy, even approximately.
Slashdot Mirror
There are currently more platforms (hardware + OS) which have browsers included or available with support for some of HTML5 than there are with support for Flash; in fact, I think that the latter set is proper subset of the former.
And the platforms that offer support for some of HTML5 currently but without Flash are, in at least some important cases, controlled by vendors that are very interested in improving those platforms ability to be used for rich internet applications without introducing a dependency on Adobe for that capability, and which, therefore, would prefer HTML5 including a strong standard for video that would make it a viable one-stop alternative to Flash.
Whether or not YouTube was the "killer app" that drove it to prominence, its become very popular for all kinds of things since, so, yeah, I think YouTube alone being usable without it wouldn't make it superfluous for users immediately. OTOH, the other things it is used for are also things that HTML5+CSS3+Javascript could handle, and many of them are in the realm that would require only parts of HTML5+CSS3 that are more widely implemented now than the video tag.
OTOH, as long as the desktop is the dominant browser platform (which it still is, though less so over time) and IE is dominant on the desktop (ditto), and IE doesn't make any serious efforts to implement HTML5 because Microsoft's preferred competition to Flash is Silverlight, there's going to be a strong incentive for people to stay with Flash, since it will remain the best way to reach the desktop browser crowd, since it will remain the technology with the broadest applicability that also works on IE (whereas HTML5 won't work on IE, and Silverlight won't work lots of other places.)
I'm guessing you would be very wrong even if you reduced that to the less hyperbolic and actually meaningful 100%; Safari for iPhone already supports a substantial subset of HTML5.
Well, simply, no. It is not "just as easy" to implement a proprietary platform as an open one. Additionally, the former (for any vendor other than the one that controls the platform) involves substantial risks regarding vendor-vendor relationships that do not exist in the case of the latter.
Which is why several vendors of lower-level platforms prefer HTML5 as a long-term web application platform solution rather than Flash.
It cares because if there isn't a mandatory-supported codec in the spec, you can't provide content encoded in one codec and no that any HTML5-compliant browser will be able to deal with it. Since the big point of HTML5 is expanding the kinds of rich applicationst that can be built with complete portability between standards-compliant browsers, that's a pretty big deal.
Because a major focus of HTML5 is eliminating the need for the user to download additional components beside the browser to use web applications.
Mac users might, but I suspect that very few iPhone users "ditch Safari for Firefox", and phones and similar devices are a pretty compelling focus of the drive for HTML5 (its a big part of the reason you want a plug-in free common standard that supports richer UI's than HTML4, audio/video, and local storage.)
Except that most browsers don't include Flash support, and browsers do exist on platforms for which there is no Flash.
Browsers don't just exist in desktop OS's anymore -- that's one of the big reasons for HTML5.
Its a pretty comprehensive list of "major browser vendors" committed to any substantial support of HTML5; sure, it misses Microsoft, but given that Microsoft has pretty much said they don't care about HTML5 at all in any case, they aren't really part of the conversation.
That's a common claim from such people, true, but its not entirely true; descriptions design patterns in terms of substantial code structures that must be implemented for each use of the pattern are ways of working around language limitations, the patterns themselves are not. In languages with better metaprogramming support and/or more permissive typing, many common "design patterns" can be implemented in libraries so that they are reusable. They are still design patterns, but they cease to be what you might call "implementation patterns"; substantial code structures that have to be rebuilt for each new use.
Even granting, for the sake of argument, that Linux would be as badly impacted (in terms of cost to users to deal with malware, not in terms merely of the total attempts to deploy malware) as Windows were it as popular, that is irrelevant to the cost to individual entities deciding which they should use, since no individual entity's decision to use or not use Linux is likely to take it from its current actual popularity to near the popularity of Windows (or, OTOH, stop it from being on the order of the popularity of Windows).
Then you shouldn't ask "How is what Google is doing different different from what Microsoft is accused of doing", since Microsoft has been accused of (indeed, convicted of) leveraging a monopoly.
They break even by people finding profitable uses for it, which then produce tax revenue. Remember, the agencies doing this are US and Japanese government agencies.
Uh, no.
Assuming that people running and maintaining the code are paying any attention, when 6.0 rolls out, those installations that have working code relying on features long-announced for deprecation that are removed in 6.0 will not upgrade to 6.0.
Major new interpreter versions enable new projects, and old projects can be migrated to them if there is a reason. But they aren't intended to be minor, backward compatible, performance improvement and bug fix releases -- that's why they are called major versions.
Microsoft has been convicted (not merely accused) of using an monopoly in one field to support coercive efforts directed at computer manufacturers and others in an attempt to extend that monopoly in other fields.
Google uses profits to buy leading companies in fields it doesn't currently operate in to extend its operations to them; while it may have a leading position in search, it hasn't acheived anything like that dominance in any of the other fields, and hasn't used any kind of anticompetitive practices based on its existing leading position in search to acquire what position it does have in those new markets.
So, how are these things even remotely the same?
Even granting, arguendo, that Google has a monopoly to leverage, its not illegally leveraging a monopoly to gain position in other markets to simply use the profits from the monopoly to open up operations in other markets, whether that's by starting new operations or buying existing concerns.
No, the difference is that:
1) Microsoft used anticompetitive tactics based on leveraging its existing monopoly to crush Netscape, whereas Google hasn't done that, and
2) Microsoft was, in fact, competing with Netscape at the time they crushed them.
Microsoft did buy the technology for IE (though not the company), even before the whole Netscape-crushing effort, and it wasn't a big deal. Most of the time, when Microsoft buys a company, its not that big of a deal. (At least, in the antitrust sense.) It might be if they bought, say, Apple (in terms of the desktop OS market), or if they (instead of Oracle) had bought Sun (in terms of the Office Suite market.)
Actually, successful companies have things quite good. Yes, antitrust law does restrict the behavior of companies that get monopolies. But its still quite good for them, and most successful companies are not monopolies.
There are many more options, of course. Standards don't require a single vendor.
Since it covers movies as well as games, "used games sales, nothing more, nothing less" is clearly wrong.
I think its more about killing off the entire physical distribution chain; in the short term, it stops sales of used copies of the media produced with activation, but it also makes physical purchase even more inconvenient, encouraging abandoning that entire mechanism. Since, in physical purchase, part of what the customer is willing to pay goes to the retailer, converting everything to direct distribution means more of the sale price goes to the distributor.
Which is really just an ambiguous question that becomes easy to answer as soon as you define what you mean by "chicken egg":
If you mean "an egg which, when fertilized appropriately, will produce a chicken" then clearly the chicken egg must have come first.
If you mean "an egg laid by a chicken" then clearly the chicken must have come first.
Except that all of your examples are not Google buying out competition, but Google buying out pioneers in new market spaces in which it does not yet operate.
Which is not the same as buying out the competition.
This is true in the general trivial sense that many of the ideal principles in social studies (whether political science, sociology, or economics) are true, but (as is often the case with such ideal statements) often false in practice. Like many such generalities, in really is only true in situations of universal perfect information: preferences which are general throughout the population but are not known to be general throughout the population are far less likely to be realized. It also is true in the long term; even widely recognized strong general preferences may not be immediately realized.
This is false in many respects; many Eastern European countries began making this transition before the Red Army started packing up and leaving (and certainly before the Soviet Union and later Russia stopped trying to influence the region, which in many cases they haven't stopped doing), and not all countries in Eastern Europe have established "genuine democracy and a free market", though most of them are closer on both respects than they were during the Cold War.
Iran is not a failed state. Somalia is a failed state. Afghanistan has been a failed state, and arguably still is. Iran is just a state where the West (and, for that matter, many of its own people) just don't like the regime. There is a big difference.
True so far as it goes.
This, OTOH, is less true. While certainly, Iranian culture (like many others) includes a tradition of respect for religious authority which aided the rise to power and the maintenance of the current regime, the principal reason the current regime rose to power was anger at the repression of the previous regime (which was externally imposed, by, principally, the US and the UK.) Like many revolutionary movements against repressive regimes, it included both more authoritarian and more moderate factions, and, as is almost invariably the case in successful revolutionary movements -- generally due to the public's fear of immediate threats faced by the nation from either defenders of the old regime or its external supporters, and the case of Iran was no exception -- the more authoritarian faction was ininitially dominant. The high degree of external threat the Iranian regime has managed to convince its public it faced since its inception (factually supported, even if the threat was exaggerated -- Iraq launched a war against it very shortly after it came to power backed by the wealthy Arab states, the US joined that war, the US remained directly threatening to Iran even after the US split with Iraq) helped suppress internal splits.
However, even given that, Iran has faced a strong reform movement largely centered around the same ideas (and, in part, the same people) that were the more moderate faction in the revolutionary movement for many years, which has only been suppressed by the regime carefullly assuring that positions of power and influence are given to loyalists, and doing everything possible to strike a balance between providing an appearance of responsiveness to keep the pressure for reform working within the system while systematically -- by controlling who can run for elections, controlling the media, and, where necessary, more direct action against dissidents -- suppressing the appearance of dissent so that those who di
"Augmented reality", as usually discussed, means overlaying data relevant to the current view over a normal view of the world, so the part that it adds is the part that makes it "augmented reality".
OTOH, it sounds like pretty lame augmented reality, both because of the interface (using a phone), and because it seems to just use position/orientation data and not, say, any kind of processing of the incoming visual data. As well as positioning problems for things that are close (GPS is accurate enough for navigating on the road, but I don't think its going to be great for this), that means is mostly going to be a pretty inconvenient (hold your phone up between you and and the scene) way of presenting information that would be more convenient to present on a map display.
Right. Generally, if it stores energy, there usually is a failure mode which involves the rapid release of the stored energy in an unpleasant manner. That's true whether the energy is stored in mechanical, chemical, or other forms. And the more useful energy you can pack into any given size container, the more danger you pack into that same space.
Wrong.
He is criticizing, in the bits in TFS, two groups:
1) The marketing guys in two of the world's biggest chip makers (he's not complaining that the chips are flawed from an engineering perspective, he is complaining about the claims, which apparently conflict with Facebooks experience in testing them chips, about the performance of the chips), and
2) The people setting the design goals (not, again, the engineers) at the companies making servers, complaining that they are doing a bad job of what he sees as a major need (which is, of course, also the particular thing that Facebook needs), and that Google does a better job of building servers for that need (a complaint which would be more effective at changing behavior at server manufacturers if it was followed up by Facebook going to Google to get Google to build them servers.)
Why? His complaints aren't directed at engineers.
If they can determine "anything they might want to know" about the data, that is exactly equivalent to having full access to the data. So if that's what this offers, for a 12 order of magnitude performance hit, I'm not impressed.
This is nonsense: unlimited analysis being possible is the same thing as confidentiality being sacrificed.
Maybe there is something significant and important here, but TFA doesn't provide a clue as to what it is.
Even if mostly unreadable (which I don't see evidence of, just an assumption), its probably easier to do piecemeal replacement with readable and relatively maintanable code if you are in Java rather than COBOL to start with.
Its not a good solution, but it may be the least-worst alternative for some existing systems.
Given how much space there is, and how much matter there is (that is, enough to, at a reasonable density, fill up only a really teensy fraction of the space), it seems unlikely that we could "fill up space" with anything.
And, really, until you've created a Dyson swarm or Dyson bubble, which should keep you occupied a long time, I don't see what your issue is here as far as what to do once you've built out to capacity with space-based solar power.
Actually, all of thsoe are problems. Cooling in space is nontrivial (vacuum doesn't give you a medium to carry away heat, so you are restricted to radiating heat), you still have to do something with spent fuel, and -- since orbitting things have a history of deorbiting -- NIMBY concerns are still a problem, but just not a local problem, since you can't narrow down the area at risk of (unlikely, perhaps, but that doesn't stop NIMBY concerns) catastrophe in that event.
While the moment magnitude scale is log base 30, which would seem roughly consistent with GPs (+1 magnitude => x1000 energy), its not log base 30 in energy, but in seismic moment, which is why for medium earthquakes it tracks pretty close to the Richter scale, which is log base 10 in energy. Consequently, neither scale is +1 magnitude => x1000 energy, even approximately.