Yes, but you generally can't ask for the contract to be fulfilled in court. If you agree to build a house for me and fail to fulfill the contract they'll award damages but they won't drag you there in chains to build the house. There are a few narrow exceptions to this called "specific performance" involving unique real estate, antiques, works of art, collector's items and such where the court may insist the transaction be completed, but it's very much the exception and only when money can't fully compensate your loss. They'll never force a company to open up their own source code, even if they somehow managed to mix it with GPL code. Both sides might of course offer it as a settlement or parts of one, but in an actual court verdict it will be a dollar value while the proprietary source stays closed source.

Anything like this? And I'm guessing not in the US because I think you'd get sued to hell even if you were asking for it.

It's not quite as bad as it sounds, the actual hardware drivers are still accelerated and exposed as OpenGL, it's just that XWayland doesn't make use of it. If you look at this diagram it's the line between the X-server and libDRM that's broken when you use XWayland instead because Wayland can't talk directly down to that level. XWayland needs to be rewritten to accelerate graphics using OpenGL instead, then it'll hook into the green box above libDRM and all will be well. Luckily for the Wayland project so does the X-server want to as well, "Glamor" that they talk about is essentially 2D X11 over OpenGL.

Old:
X-client --> X-server --> libDRM --> hardware
Old using Wayland:
X-client --> XWayland --> (broken, software fallback) --> hardware

New in X-server:
X-client --> X-server (Glamor) --> OpenGL --> libDRM --> hardware
New using Wayland
X-client --> XWayland (Glamor) --> OpenGL --> libDRM --> hardware

Long term it looks like the plan is to expose everything via OpenGL/OpenGL ES for rendering and EGL for the windowing system so the direct link between X11 and libDRM would go away. That is still a few years off though.

Client X11 apps speak the X11 protocol to XWayland, XWayland speaks the Wayland protocol to Wayland so it's basically a big compatility shim. From Wayland's side it's just another client and if you use an X11 server you don't need it, it's not really part of either. Maybe the closest analogy is WINE, if you use Windows or run native Linux applications you don't need it. But if you want to run Windows applications on Linux you need WINE, likewise if you want to run X11 applications on Wayland you need XWayland. Basically you take an X11 server, stop it from talking to actual hardware and makes it draw to a Wayland window instead.

I hear you say it but my impression is that Linus personally wrote a lot of the critical code in early Linux. To use a car analogy, it's a whole lot easier to get people to work on fenders and windshield wipers if you know the engine is developed by someone with real drive so you won't end up with all the accessories (GNU utils) with no engine (HURD). It's easy to sit at the top and say this is the direction we're going and by we I mean you because by myself it's not moving at all, compared to actually taking charge and inviting others to tag along. True it doesn't scale as eventually the project needs more and more management, but Linux would never have gotten off the ground if Linus was just a good technical manager.

Sure, but it'll be like opening a warp point inside a warp gate, B5 style. At least I hope it will.

That's who takes care of the bill. If you operate a call center, do you think all the phone lines are free because you only get incoming calls? If you call abroad, do you think your carrier gets to pocket all that money? No, they in turn have to pay the other side of the connection for the privilege of going through their network. Of course both sides will try to keep as much as possible of that money leading to peering disputes.

Also tear-free video seems to be one god awfully big workaround for limitations in X. The stated goal of Wayland was a system in which "every frame is perfect, by which I mean that applications will be able to control the rendering enough that we'll never see tearing, lag, redrawing or flicker." I doubt he'd say that if X had no tearing lag, redrawing or flicker which seems like rather huge deficiencies to me.

It might still come to a full scale shooting war, but it is simply too soon. "First they took Sudetenland (Crimea), then they took Eastern Ukraine (Western Czechoslovakia), then our great leaders went to Moscow (Munich) and bought 'Peace in our time' for the rest of Ukraine (Czechoslovakia). Soon war will be upon you too." may get NATO involved which is realistically the only way Ukraine could ever hope to defend against the Russian army. Politically and socially we're not ready for that yet, if they started a shooting war now they'd stand alone and be crushed. If they try appeasement and show that Putin won't stop his expansion maybe NATO will draw a real line in the sand like England and France did with Poland, which may get Putin to back down or at least give them a fighting chance. Until then, they'll bide their time.

Of course the dangerous part here is that this is not your proxy war in Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan, if NATO first should commit to anything and get called on it we are looking at no less than WW3. Of course Putin would be crazy to risk war with NATO, but the one thing we can't do is bluff and assume he won't as that destroys all credibility if we get caught. And while it's cruel to say it, Russia hasn't done enough to Ukraine just yet that we're ready to commit to such an action. That may change though, if Putin continues the course of action he seems to be on. But if the rest is all blustering I think he can keep Crimea and go home.

Depends, there's investigative journalism and there's a whole lot of news that is simply stating widely known facts about current events, like everything from sports to events to accidents to new products to weather where one newspaper is 95% the same as the next. Other things are more work like food or travel guides, but where the amateur's subject matter knowledge far outshines the journalistic aspects. Yes, journalism is a skill but a lot of "easy" work they did before has been taking over by bloggers and is no worse for wear.

My weekends are counter-productive, I start out with a list of things I should get done but end up tinkering, playing, partying, chilling or whatever else I fancy instead. Nothing gets stricken and usually the list grows to include cleaning up and shaping up after the weekend. In fact, most things that produce a tangible output are chores I need to do for housekeeping, maintenance or other general upkeep of my belongings or person. Quite often I look back and think "sigh, I didn't get anything done this weekend" but in the moment doing nothing is quite alright.

In 2010 my little place on earth was -1.4C colder than normal, in 2011 it was 2.2C warmer than normal so that's a swing of 3.6C from one year to the next. Are you seriously disputing that this is way, way greater in magnitude than any global warming that may or may not have happened in one year? Like I said, 5C in a century is 0.05C/year so how am I to tell if that's 3.6C natural variation or 3.55C natural variation and 0.05C global warming? I wasn't really arguing about whether global warming is real and what the effects are, I'm talking about 99% of the population using whatever their local climate is as indicator and that statistically it's not worth a shit. Even if you've lived there all your life, looking at 115 years of climate statistics for my city there's way too much variation to be certain it's a trend and not just statistical randomness.

Of course, scientists don't do stupid things like look at one local climate or one isolated even, but do a poll on how many in the US believe in global warming before and after the 2014 polar vortex, I dare you. That's what I was talking about.

Time to read your childhood stories again, they were prepared for actual wolves but only as long as they responded and due to the many false alarms they ignored the actual emergency. If there's any relevant analogy to the current situation it's to not run around like Chicken Little claiming the sky is falling unless it's true because nobody will take your warnings seriously afterwards. At least some scientists and politicians like to promote their worst doomsday predictions and every time they fail to come true it hurts their credibility, leaving many people to think it's all bogus and a sham. The media doesn't exactly help either, they like extreme headlines because they sell so they often take highly speculative bullshit and print it up huge as accepted scientific facts.

Even if you take some of the worst case predictions they're talking about something like 5C over 100 years, which might sound a lot but we're talking 0.05C/year on average. Local variations are far, far greater than that, what you personally has experienced is pretty much irrelevant. One warm summer and people say it's global warming, one cold winter and people say it's bullshit. Even when you look at 10+ year averages chances are many places have gone against the global trend, either because of natural variation or because of shifting weather patterns. What matter is if you sample thousands and thousands of places and the total keeps going up, not one particular place. But most people will look out the window and base their opinion on that.

Humm... a site that offers absolutely no actual benchmarks just a mysterious performance number (check their FAQ) with zero ability to reproduce or verify, submitted by users with all kinds of overclocked rigs that's credible. For example it claims the FX-8350 has much better single thread performance (1,512) vs (1,217) which is not supported by any serious review I can find. So either the whole world is in a conspiracy against Passmark, or these numbers are a joke. I wonder how much AMD paid them to invent these numbers?

Well, AMD the company is quite different from AMD the Intel-competitor. While they seem to have stopped the downward trend for now, they're doing it by divesting their CPU/APU business and ramping up lots of semi-custom business like consoles and such. It might be a way for AMD to be profitable but large parts of the market will be left to Intel's mercy.