Yes, and journeys in early motorised carriages could have been done quicker and cheaper using horses.
Not very good at the old forward-thinking thing, are you ;)

I think the main reason comes down to binary drivers

Ok, this is at least a valid reason.

I do find it very odd, to say the least, that Canonical is being criticised though.
The criticism should be levelled at the hardware vendors who won't provide open drivers.

I just find it an odd state of affairs when a non-copyleft project (Wayland) is favoured over a copyleft project (Mir) because of proprietary drivers.

Why are we limiting ourselves because of proprietary drivers?
It's all backward.

Anyway...

Because the userbase for Ubuntu is quite huge comparatively, and Ubuntu seems to like doing shit like this "just because" without any reasoning grounded in fact or reality.

Sorry, I don't understand the comment.
Isn't Doing shit, "just because" a fundamental part of OSS software development?
Do you want to remove the "scratch your own itch" element?

Quick google says that Mir is GPL V3
What exactly is the issue here?
I'm missing something...

Gentoo user here, just to side-step any Ubuntu fanboy responses.

Why are two competing display server stacks considered a problem in this case?

Over the years we've had countless situations like this
The various desktop environments, package management systems, initialisation systems, boot loaders, audio stacks, etc. etc.

Often seen as the benefit of open-source software.
The ability for multiple software components to exist that fulfil the same function. May the best man win.

Innovation and progress comes from each project trying to out-do it's rivals.

Often these competing solutions have a single distro or company behind them, driving development forward.

Why is Ubuntu's new display server, competing against X.org and Wayland any different?

Torvald's comments to Nvidia were to do with Optimus (their GPU switching stuff), not their closed graphics driver

Ballmer fired.
New CEO coming in a few months time.
Share-holders are demanding sweeping changes across the board.
MS's Skype division "Look at us, we're doing stuff. We're still relevant. Please don't axe us."

Actual link to indiegogo page, which is missing from FTS
http://igg.me/at/ubuntuedge

The issues here is one of PR and perception by non-technical users

Microsoft requires x86 machines to be unlockable

But it's not called "Locked boot", is it?
It's called "Secure boot"
and disabling "secure boot" is surely, by definition, insecure.

Asking new users to disable secure boot is not what distros want to do.

Seriously. Call the program
"screener-720p"

and when will it become relevant to you?

When they push Windows-only "secure boot" on laptops?
When they push Windows-only "secure boot" on servers?
When they push Windows-only "secure boot" on desktop machines?

When, exactly, will this obviously evil and anti-competitive move be of relevance to you?

How isn't this sufficient?

It's not sufficient, because it doesn't solve the problem.

The problem is that MS's implementation of secure boot allows them to control what can and cannot boot on a device.
It is entirely at their discretion.

This is already in practice with the surface tablets
See Mathew Garrett's recent blog post
http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/21189.html

As you can see, locking out other OSs is already in place for the Surface tablet, which is unable to boot any other system (even with the boot-loader shims done by RedHat, Ubuntu and the Linux foundation.)

A rather literal take on the first step.
Hopes are high for the 'extend' part, but swiftly dwindle at the thought being virtually extinguished

No point supporting i386 anyway
As far as I'm aware, GNU binutils won't work on anything less than a 486

I guess you could be affected if you're using some other toolchain, but realistically is pointless keeping support for 386