In Albini's "use analog master recordings" world, future musicians would have to be "savvy" acquiring and operating decades-old, long obsolete tape machines. That's much more speculative than them being able to play back some form of uncompressed digital audio file on some kind of digital computer.

Well..why would the Intel driver even be used when Xorg runs "hosted" as a Mir client? In that configuration, XMir should be the "driver", and any Intel driver code in Xorg should lie dormant. Or did this patch actually touch something other than Intel's Xorg driver?

Well, that just restates/confirms the layering problem I mentioned, without explaining it.

Why does the Intel Xorg graphics driver have to know anything about XMir, which, as far as I understand it, is just an Xorg driver for running Xorg as a Mir client?

Reiser himself led the cops to his wife's body...

That would only allow for "targeted" (MITM) attacks, rather than opportunistic (untargeted) decryption. And modern browsers perform certificate pinning for some well-known domain certificates, which means MITM against those servers would be detected. Unless the government has the keys for those domain certs as well...

Where did the good old Borg drone logo go that decorated MS stories on Slashdot in earlier years? Never would that one have been more fitting than here...

There's not much "trailblazing" remaining to be done, as long as we aren't talking about entirely new propulsion technologies that are basically science fiction, especially for high-thrust (i.e. manned spaceflight) requirements. I do think that SpaceX can make manned spaceflight (with chemical rockets) cheaper, if you just look at their integrated approach -- where government-built vehicles have all kinds of "pork barrel" issues, e.g. each stage and each subsystem is produced by a different company, where SpaceX just uses the same engine for the 1st and 2nd stage (just several of them bundled in the first stage), and is free to do what's economically feasible, not what pleases a bunch of senators from different states.

Still, I think space tourism will be the only viable perspective for commercial manned spaceflight for an unforeseeable amount of time. Mining asteroids as a private business, and making a profit out of it, is not doable with chemical propulsion. The launch cost per kilogram isn't the only factor there, what counts would be $/kg for the returned material. And that's just not working out. Any run of the mill asteroid that you'd want to mine weighs more than the entire payload mass launched into space by mankind in its history. And "mining equipment" isn't light-weight either, apart from the fact that you'd first have to make it work electrically in zero-G conditions. And the asteroid has a delta-V of several km/s relative to earth. I think there is no way that the combined cost of retrieving any "rare earth" material from an asteroid is gonna be cheaper than digging it out of the ground somewhere, and perfecting recycling technologies.

I always assume email encryption only makes sense if it's end-to-end, so what does an "encrypted email provider" do? Conceal sender & receiver addresses? Guarantee encrypted transport?

Virtually every first-world country in the world "tries" public healthcare systems. And it works pretty well for them. Their life expectancy is on a par with or in some cases higher than the US's, and the cost per capita is lower.

They stated at one of the NTSB press briefings that the PAPI was operational. It was damaged (and rendered inoperative) by the crash itself.

...as opposed to OSX, which actually shares and reuses code from the BSD kernel.

I still don't get what Nokia gains from the exclusive deal with Microsoft. I understand what Microsoft gains from it, but Nokia? Why don't they just offer their phones with WinPhone AND Android, just like all their competitors? They're just sealing themselves off from a very large part of the market. MS can't possibly pay them so much bribe money as to make this "strategy" worthwhile.

If you run a server for your own organization, e.g. a VPN service -- sure. If you're setting up a webserver for the general public -- probably not. You'd just scare away 99% of your users because browsers throw glaring red warnings at them. And this FBI/NSA demand doesn't have much to do with signatures anyway -- they want you to hand them your server's private key directly. At which point the signature wouldn't matter much anymore.

Sometimes when you're fiddling with context menus too much, you manage to lock up the X server completely -- all you can do is move the mouse pointer, which at this point mostly points north-east or has turned into a cross.

Whenever an X client is somehow busy, does something bad or hogs up resources, the whole server freezes, sometimes periodically for half a second every two seconds or so. You can see it e.g. during graphically intensive redraws, or when Chrome loads several tabs simultaneously -- all the animations in the tab headers stop periodically, and the mouse pointer freezes at the same times. When I opened a few Chrome tabs too many lately, the load skyrocketed up to about 60, and the machine was inoperable for 10 minutes, before calmed down again, on its own. This has happened more than once too. These may in part be implementation issues (Xorg being single-threaded and all), and I don't know how well Wayland does in those kinds of situations, all I know is that the OSX display server fares much better. Individual clients may freeze, but the compositor always works, the mouse pointer never freezes, and you never see half-drawn frames or other random artifacts.