Could an alternative be to use individual repos and also a meta-repo? The metarepo contents are the commit ids of each individual repo.

So let's say you want to update a repo which depends on another one:

Update project A, commit changes.

# Your product hasn't changed at this point

Update project B, commit changes.

# Your product hand't changed at this point

In metarepo, checkout to the new 'master' branches of Projects A and B, commit that to metarepo

# Your product is now updated!

This sounds a lot like git submodules.

Or Mercurial subrepos.

Both of which are far greater of a pain in the ass than monorepos.

Or git subtree

I believe the reason is that exchanging public keys is, unfortunatly, to much work for the average user.

I would be interested in reading more details about the technology. How does it work? How much power does it need? What makes manufacturing expensive? Can you make it bigger (holodeck sized)? Does it track the user's head position somehow or does it work for N users simultaneously?

If you look at the images, they look very much like stacked planes. I'm guessing - and it's a guess - that there is some largely-transparent device which can generate light on points on a plane, and that it is being rapidly moved up and down like a piston head, creating a persistence of vision display much like LEDs on a bike wheel.

The low-light conditions the pictures are taken in support that I think - it might be that the "points on a plane" are some kind of florescent plastic and there's a scanning laser underneath drawing on it, so the amount of light being generated at any given point is probably very low.

Bear in mind that this technique can only produce light, not absorb it --- which means no hidden line removal, so it'll be good for wireframe images only, where you can see all sides of the shape at once. That doesn't mean it's not awesomely cool, but it's going to have limited applications.

IIRC, the piston-head technique has been tried before, and has always had the drawback that it's hellishly loud due to air displacement. I wonder how they're getting round this?

A vacuum?

Concerning the moving piston: Rather than have a moving plane, they could be using stacked, electrically-switchable films. Ones that you can switch from transparent to only translucent (i.e. scattering) very quickly. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_glass)

We did consider that but smart glass is too far slow to turn on and off for it to work.

Yup, you've pretty much summed up the underlying principles of how it works, although we're not using a scanning laser.

It works for as many users as you can fit around it, from any angle, including above.

It's a electromechanical device, so getting it to holodeck size may be challenging.

Do you mean Baikonur (2011) ?

Nope - as I recall, it was a short film, around 15 minutes long.

You have to stop counting the abstraction levels to maintain any sanity these days. I mean we have a computer running a web browser running a Javascript VM running an Android runtime running a JAVA VM running the app. Did I miss one? Maybe the app is Minecraft running one of those graphical calculators :) /sarcasm

That sounds interesting. Do you have a source about him supporting basic income?

The closest I found in the transcript of the talk was this piece:

MR. BROOKS: So something like a guaranteed minimum income for people who are working full time through an expansion on the EITC or a wage subsidy seems like the right way to go.

MR. GATES: Yeah, one of my favorite AEI papers – I didn’t get time to look it up last night

Source: http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transc...

Edit: after re-reading it, I think this has nothing to do with basic income since it's for people who are working full time.

Right, he seems to be saying that instead of a minimum wage that corporations have to pay, there should instead be something that looks like a minimum wage to employees, but where employers can pay as little as they like and the government will make up the difference between that and the minimum, but if you don't have an "employer" or they don't certify that you've "worked" sufficient hours, you don't get the subsidy, either.

So, like a basic income, except that you have to swear fealty to an employer to get it. I see one of two possibilities:

(1) Either the restrictions on qualifying employment are tight enough that it serves as a subsidy for select existing operations and a competitive disadvantage to new business with smaller scale (because of compliance costs) or new models (because of regulatory assumptions), or (2) The restrictions on qualifying employment are so loose that this is basically unconditional basic income with a whole lot more administrative costs and failure modes that exist just to satisfy the desire to create an illusion that it has something to do with "work".

On page 17 of this transcript of the interview, he states that he supports a guaranteed minimum income for people working full-time.

http://www.aei.org/files/2014/03/14/-bill-gates-event-transc...

edit: I got that link from wcarss.

Pages 16-17 of the transcript PDF linked by wcarss above has something similar. He didn't say "basic income", but it's relatively close.

Cars that are so quiet you can't hear them are very dangerous for blind people trying to cross streets, for example.

https://backupsy.com/ ?

If you really want a fast transport system you need not only speed, but low latency. If you need to queue for 15 minutes while you wait for other people to get in, then it's gonna feel like boarding a plane : time wasted. What's really needed here is parallel loading of passengers into individual pods. But then you need a tube switch and multiple tubes and doors and throughways.

Ironically if you're the only guy with a ski mask you're not hard to track.

we should go the route of the Three Amigos' Amigos Amigos Amigos strategy