You may wish to double-check your figures on the profits of the culture industry. It may be shocking, after the bullshit spewed by the RIAA, MPAA, etc., but they are making a hell of a lot of money despite piracy. There is also a substantial amount of research that suggests those who pirate more also legally purchase more when it comes to media.

KDBUS sounds okay to me. Apparently it, in a lot of people's views, boils down to "DBUS done right" -- the protocol is completely different under-the-hood, and will be (or is intended to be, if the userspace side people don't fuck it up like they constantly do to udev) supported in userspace by a translation layer for old-DBUS programs.

Further, the kernel devs have a habit (substantially creditable to Linus Torvalds) of doing a lot of things right, and making sure they don't break anything in the process, so I expect KDBUS will end up being stable and usable. Unlike, for example, udev which has made about a half-dozen hard backwards-compatibility breaking changes in the past year or so.

Unfortunately Apple has a tendency to do weird, non-standard, undocumented things with their hardware configuration, or else I'd be using an Apple laptop myself (without OSX).

See the stuff surrounding the Thunderbolt connector under Linux for an example -- despite, ostensibly, being a standard Thunderbolt port, the Linux implementation doesn't quite work properly with Apple's hardware (hotplug doesn't work, and the OS doesn't even see the Thunderbolt port unless something was plugged in at boot), but works perfectly with the reference Intel hardware. Not to mention their exclusive use of Broadcom wireless cards, the most difficult cards to work with in general (no supported open source drivers unlike the other big two, Atheros and Intel).

How do you 'win' against a concept?

Terrorism isn't a person, it isn't a nation, it isn't even a religion. There is nothing to win a war against, so you cannot ever have a traditional end to a war against terrorism. If those in power wish, it's a 'war' that can go on forever, quite easily.

git does include support for gpg signing of commits and tags, which I think is what the GP was talking about (though wrapping one's head around the cryptographic security of how git does it is a bit difficult).

SHA1 in git isn't really used as a cryptographic security measure, but git's structure does allow for some innate security because, if a colliding SHA1 hash is to show up... git looks at the new object, says "Huh, I already have that one." and just uses a reference to the original object instead. I'm not sure just how much git protects against an attack targeted against a single copy of the repo as, like I mentioned earlier, it's pretty difficult to wrap one's head around git's security due to how everything interacts.

Or at least that's the case for me. Maybe someone else has a quick explanation for how it all fits together.

While there are problems with monarchies, this is not one of them, not relative to modern society. Gaps in inequality were much less in feudalism (though everyone had less overall, too), and the life of a serf.... Really actually wasn't that bad, no worse than your average modern wage-slave (and serfs actually tended to work fewer hours each day than we do).

Class is still present, it's just less formally structured than it used to be. Despite what "the American dream" tries to get everyone to believe, it's nearly impossible to actually make any significant change in social class throughout one's life. The exceptions to this are all that you hear of (and especially all you remember), so it gives the illusion of being much more possible than it really is.

And there are many rules just as arbitrary as the ones you listed, including hunting laws (still, especially considering that these have never been that arbitrary), laws against gay marriage (in some places), and some restrictions on clothing (such as forcing people to wear it).

Was monarchy and feudalism problematic? Sure, but the economic aspects of it really weren't terribly awful, not in comparison to 'democratic' capitalism.

You know why there's been so many "Worst. Storm. EVER!" incidences lately?

Climate change. This is not going to help them.

The SHA-2 family are still unbroken, and I don't believe there are even any substantial weaknesses known. No reason to drop support for them at all.

Not to mention that science, math, and engineering degrees are all-but-worthless in IT, as being able to design a circuit board, or optimize a search algorithm, or sequence some DNA has little-to-nothing to do with your average IT department's concerns about practical matters. I'm not entirely sure what a "tech" degree even is (I've never seen a university offer a "bachelor of technology", for instance), so I can't say anything about that.

IT, especially as defined by the linked article, is not programming, after all.

Actually, yes, it does.

...It just also needs to spend it on worthwhile things, such as a proper healthcare system, a proper social insurance system, and proper infrastructure (roads, water, sewage, etc.). Sadly worthwhile things isn't what get people elected anymore -- it's military/'defence' spending and lowering taxes on the rich that does. The American Delusion is that anyone and everyone could make enough money to take advantage of those lowered taxes, so they're fooled into believing its in their best interests.

The expanded universe novels and other media are hit and miss. Really hit and miss in some cases. Though you'll probably have most fans agree on at least one thing: Timothy Zahn's works are the best of the lot. Especially his original Thrawn trilogy, which was the first post-Return of the Jedi stories, and he had quite free reign as to how to handle the entire universe. His later works suffered somewhat for being saddled with baggage from some of the ... less-than-good novels. Though this wasn't all bad...

If you've read (or at least read summaries) of most of the works between his original Thrawn trilogy and the later Hand of Thrawn duology, it gets rather amusing to see him duck around and, ahm, reinterpret some of the works by others. He and a couple other authors tended to do this a lot when some of the stories got rather over-the-top (indestructible star exploding ship, Hutt with a Death Star laser, the Force being able to rip capital ships apart with a thought, etc.), and only he and one other author (Michael A. Stackpole) seemed to have a really solid grasp on how to write the Force without it becoming absurd, and with it feeling more in line with how it was treated in the original trilogy of films.