Actually, it's only 17 million. A quick calculation gives me that the number of galaxies within 5 billion light-years is 170 million. Neglecting very small, dwarf galaxies, which are more numerous but have drastically fewer stars, I multiplied the stellar mass density by the comoving volume up to z=0.5.

I can not answer about the deadliness of GRBs, but I think you will find those answers in Phil Plaits book "Death from the Skies!".

Yes, insulation is a good idea. But the planet will always radiate as a black body and loose energy, which has to be re-supplied by the suns radiation. The radiation drops with the square of the distance, so rather quickly. These considerations (make-up and size of planets) go into calculations for the habitable zone.

I can also imagine that a GRB comes with considerable photon pressure and might strip the entire atmosphere off a planet, or heat it to a point where it dissipates into space.

I think the rotation of planets around their own axis (spin) is not known outside the solar system. Generally, the spin is generated from formation of planets in the rotating protostellar disk, but interactions and changing orbits may modify the spin (Venus, Uranus).

If you do not have the problem of heating and evaporation of the atmosphere I mentioned above, then yes, that is probably possible. For example if the GRB goes off from the direction of the spin axis ("below/above the solar system"). This may safe you from one GRB, but since GRBs come randomly from all directions it is not failsafe across many billion years.

Not sure. I think it is possible to come up with such scenarios as you stated, but it has to be shown that they are frequent occurrences to be relevant for changing the survival rate of complex life.

While the Universe may be infinite, the Observable Universe is not infinite (limited by the speed of light).
The Universe within a radius of a certain number of light-years (and thus of age comparable to our location) is also finite. So considering the galaxies younger than 5 billion years, the number of those galaxies that can be observed (and can contain life that could communicate/meet with us) is finite.

A quick calculation gives me that the number of galaxies is 170 million. Neglecting very small, dwarf galaxies, which are more numerous but have drastically fewer stars, I multiplied the stellar mass density by the comoving volume up to z=0.5.

Most of the instruments (e.g. electronics) have a large US contribution. CERN operates the ring, but the instruments are "clients", which are international research teams. That was the vision of CERN after the second world war -- bring leading science to Europe, and make research in Europe attractive. Particle physics was chosen back then.

You could filter out all the Higgs events and make them into a artsy OpenGL visualisation or use them in a audio piano piece.
Like here, magnetic field observations has been converted to audio: https://soundcloud.com/esaops/...

I think the way forward will be a lot of systemd forks that strip away functionality, and implement other functionality. That which will bring about the need for a common, standardized interface. And then, choice in init systems will be an option again (but timezoned, hostnamed, logind will be required).

Or why don't they put all of that time and energy into implementing an alternative to systemd.
For example, by implementing a systemd-independent logind.

Sorry, I'm not completely familiar with the US legislative system. Does this election mean it is the law now, or it is just the expression of voters that politicians now have to form into new laws?

People tried that, 15-10 years ago. It did not work.
The reason it did not work is because it required every computer user to make sure their install is working, and the website could not fix setup problems. The user got the feeling that the website did not work and unusable. Sometimes this is justified, when you do not have install rights on the computer (e.g. labs). Websites started to offer plugin/viewer downloads, which caused a lot of malware problems.
Implementing it in the browser solves this problem. Implementation in HTML/CSS/JS on each website would not be enough, because the video data has to be streamed onto the graphic card for fast enough support.

Yes, but: Nature or Nurture?

Two events do not make a pattern. Look at the overall frequency and you will realize that obesity, cardiac diseases and consequences of climate change are more important topics, and should proportionally be addressed and discussed more.

As your quote says, you get a license for universal redistribution, but the developer does not have to provide universal redistribution.

Open Source does not mean available to the public. It just means the recipient of software can modify and redistribute freely.

He was talking about Debian, which is generally a long-term, server operating system, unless you use the unstable/testing branches.

Complain to your distributions!
When someone writes open source software, it is always take it or leave it. Systemd was taken up, because it was the better solution for distros.
Why on earth would you complain about someone adding another choice? Complain about the people not writing alternative packages!