When I was a teenager there always were a few used mags that we swapped or gave each other. If kids have smartphones, they'll resort to video sharing, and there are few ways to avoid it.
I'm not sure that's a good way to spend the taxpayer money.
Pretty safe until a machine in the network gets infected. The first infection comes from a phishing email or similar. From then on, the worm infects other machines connected to the same network, but usually not across the internet.
It uses a vulnerability in a protocol that's used for network sharing, and that's usually blocked at your router
How do you deal with optional fields in documents? do you modify the table schema on the run?
If there's a larg-ish number of optional fields, but each document has only or a few of them, would it create a sparse table with lots of columns? Did you find any problem in these scenarios?
And Hewson Consultants did the same in their "interactive video adventure" Avalon circa 1984. The game -for the Sinclair Spectrum- asked for a four digit code printed in non-copy blue that came in the box. Quite a few games would do the same later, like Larry's, monkey island or Elvira, Mistress of the dark, with different approaches, but Avalon's was pure blue over white paper.
Now combine Hyperloop with self driven cars that you can take at your convenience in both ends to arrive to your destination and most of the problems you stated seem easy to overcome.
Probably in a few years, when the hyperloops are ready, owning a car won't be as usual as now, but you'll be able to pick a self driven one paying per mile or a fixed per monthly quota.
Being a user of both Linux and PostrgreSQL, I'm very interested in this issue, but I only understand some of the words...
Could everybody wiser than me tell me if I should be concerned and the possible implications of these decisions? Should I invest in alternative platforms?
That would be against all economic theories I know. I'd demand is lower, profits use to go down too.
I understand part of your reasoning, buying a car for the joy of driving, and probably some sport cars wouldn't be as affected, but for the automobile industry, it's going to be a hard blow.
You didn't address any of my points. Perl may have been horrible, line noise or a read only language, but 20 years ago was the quickest way to write a visitor book or a mailform. You could do it in C but didn't, just because you didn't need to. If the perl prototype was good enough, you could use it in production, and thousands of sites started to build whole e-commerce systems and found they worked.
Thad was a tipping point for the web, and the world now is different just because of that.
If you have to choose between power and easiness of development, most people will choose the later, and if I can try a new hardware board that doesn't force me to learn anything new, I'd probably try it.
Twenty years ago I read exactly the same about using the abomination that was perl/CGI instead of the so called correct C. And history tells us that the prototypes that were made to test the concept where, most of the times, good enough to stop further development in the academic way. This product (or a similar one) can empower lots of people in ways that we cannot imagine yet.
Not all hardware has to be made by hundreds of thousands and be able to tinker with real world devices will be a bigger asset than we think right now. The web we know now hasn't been developed from tall towers but from the trenches. New ideas will flourish and then great developers will be needed to optimize, refine and scale projects that will change our view. At least that's what I hope.
I'm not sure that's a good way to spend the taxpayer money.