1) Here's the thing: Gnome 3 has been largely redesigned. A lot of features went away, because the developers don't want to bother supporting them. If someone wants to develop that feature, nobody's stopping them: All you have to do is do a gnome-shell extension. Then you can do icons and launchers and window-lists and whatever you want. Extra panels, drawers, crazy applets, whatever you want. But the onus is on the extension developer to maintain it, not the Gnome 3 devs who are focused on making the core desktop experience work well. If you come up with something that genuinely improves the experience, they might pull it into mainline, but that doesn't effect whether or not it's useful for you.

2) OpenGL is a problem? It better not be. If it is, your hardware providers are screwing you over. That's pretty crappy. Open-source radeon and intel support's generally worked well for me. Keep in mind they're not doing ooooOOo 3D effects. They're just relying on the drivers providing some basic acceleration primitives. If your drivers can't even do that, your options for running modern maintained software are going to keep getting narrower and narrower, regardless of your desktop environment.

As I understand it: Because they were mapping out GPS locations of WIFI access points people were advertising, and the tool they used to do so records packets by default.

This is the one that bugs me as a Canadian. We can keep up the metric for a lot of things, but being this close on a hard good means using their crappy paper size. You have no idea how much I wish could use metric paper.

This is all good and fine, assuming your video drivers and wifi drivers work. That's still a big assumption.

Precedent says that's not necessarily good enough. MP3.com had a huge library of music, that was only available if you proved you owned the CD already. They were shut down quite dramatically.

You had punctuation marks

Depending on what you mean by "prove". It's all too easy to present an argument and have it taken seriously, because the rigor in filtering out bad science is lacking, so it's easy to get something published that "proves" a position. Of course, when the proof/review system starts allowing proofs of all sorts of contradictory things, people's faith in the inscrutability of the proof system goes out the window.

Now, when you have several thousand people doing scientific research into one subject, you're going to get some dissenting results, either as a result of the "law of averages"-kind of thinking, or because sloppy methodology will creep in. It doesn't matter how rigorous the review system is, this is going to happen occasionally. So we need to figure out how to prevent people from latching onto the one result that shows what they want it to show, as opposed to the thousands that show the opposite.

They have, in the sense that the window list doesn't exist anymore :) Instead, you zoom-out to a expose-style view of what's going on. For windows that need your attention (they used to blink in the window list), you should get notifications by another means.... but I'm not up on what that looks like these days.

If you're considering giving him internet access, consider what it means. It means the ability to interact with random strangers on the internet. I don't mean to over-exaggerate the risk of this, but it's something you would never consider doing in-person unattended.

If he has internet access at all, make sure it's supervised.

Make sure there's some form of security/anti-virus. Other than that, let him run wild, and see what he comes up with, as opposed to what you'd give him :)

Not if you make it equal equal.

Let gay couples have civil unions. Let straight couples have civil unions too.

Let people figure out for themselves what a "marriage" is or isn't, without any government meddling whatsoever.

Is H264 incumbered by any patents not held by the MPEG-LA? Their argument is that if you pay to use their codec, you're in the clear patent-wise, but there's no guarantee that another 3rd party won't pull out a patent they're infringing.... and the MPEG-LA has stated they're going to start charging everybody for access to H264 anyways.

Theora and VP8 are in a better position patent-wise anyways. They both have tearms that have done searches patents (i believe VP8 has, I *know* Theora has), and they've publicly said that you're not going to get in trouble for using their stuff, EVER.

But how do you find a new friend that's got similar connections?

This is/was the problem with instant messaging networks: Unless you were on the right network, along with your friends, you got nothing.

The solution that's quickly gaining ground is federated XMPP, where your identity is tied to a server, but the server can talk to other servers, so you're not stuck in one walled off garden.

Any outlook for good federated, multi-server, distributed and de-centralized social networking? I know there's status.net, where interesting stuff is happening...

The main feature of Facebook seems to be friend suggestions. How to manage the friend graph without the central server could be a challenge...

Just a thought, maybe Linux could be aware of what those cores look like, and what their sensitivities to temperature are.... and change the amount or type of work pushed to that core? Although I suppose heat from the other cores would most likely transmit very quick to the "zombie" core. Any CPUs have seperate temperature tracking per core?

The ipod touch and iphone run darwin, a *nix with full shell/root access... but locked down.