The divine plan is missing GNU/Hurd... or is that fate truly so unspeakably horrible?

I'm not so sure about that. While there haven't been lawsuits (yet), Lodsys has already claimed that both companies have purchased their patent license (thus implying that they think it's valid - or at least valid enough that it's cheaper to license than to argue in court), but said license only covers those companies, and not their customers. I don't think there has been any official reaction to that... we shall see.

Of course, it may just as well result in Google and MS joining forces with Apple on this particular suit.

Well, why do you think they were made so popular? Come invasion tomorrow, we're fully prepared for guerilla warfare! ~

I'm sorry, but I have no idea what this means. The issue here is why the scope of variable "local_i" - which syntactically belongs to the body of the for-loop - is not the body of that loop, but rather the entire function "foo". This has absolutely nothing to do with a closure inside that body, except for the fact that it is a convenient real-world scenario where this matters in a very noticeable way.

I wouldn't expect this from any high-level programming language (i.e. not C++) which has closures. That a closure extends the lifetime of variables it captures has been the norm since, um, the very first Lisp 50 years ago?

The reason why the Libyan uprising failed was because it wasn't exactly a people's revolution, where elites are swiped away. It is an uprising against one faction of the Libyan society against another faction - a civil war - and it cuts across the social strata. There are plenty of genuine Qaddafi supporters in Libya, and not just in the army - early on they've been telling us that everyone is deserting him and he only has foreign mercs to fight for him, but by now it's obvious that it's not true. So the whole thing in Libya will drag on until either side will gain the upper hand, and make no mistake - either way it'll be a massacre for the other sides. Rebels aren't really any better than loyalists in that regard - we've already seen summary executions, public torture and mutilation documented on their side as well (plenty of vids on YouTube if you care to look). Not exactly surprising, given that the rebel faction is an unstable alliance of liberals, monarchists and Islamists, and liberals don't exactly have the upper hand. Then there are Black Libyans, who are between the rock and the hard place - loyalists want to conscript them to fight, and rebels (the majority of which are strongly racist) shoot them on sight when captured, as "mercs". Truly a mess.

The only meaningful way is to count similar categories - i.e. phones vs phones, and tablets vs tablets.

Not exactly, no. They're just mad at everyone involved or thought to be involved in any way - Sony, hackers, Geohot and his fanbois etc - and would gladly put them all on the chopping block. The difference right now is that hackers are still anonymous, whereas Sony is not, so they're first on the line.