Snowden's principal value to the Russians is for propaganda purposes, and this was the case all along. Making one's opponents look very bad is quite thoroughly valuable from a diplomacy perspective, since it persuades third parties (e.g., most of Latin America and Africa) to be more receptive to your message.

At a cost of quite a lot of complexity and weight. That might be justifiable, but it sure isn't free.

With large server deployments, performance per watt is a very relevant metric. This is because the limiting factor is actually keeping the server cluster from cooking itself, even with very good cooling in place. PPW is an area where ARM is generally quite a lot better than the x86 variants. After all, who cares if a system is slower when you can compensate by just cramming more cores in? (I don't know if ARM's floating point handling is good enough yet to compete in this area though; the big server guys really care about their number crunching.)

That said, ARM's really large advantage over at least x86 is that they're a design that they license out to others to manufacture. This does mean that they can't typically use all the very latest fabrication technologies, but it also means that for a third party manufacturer who has some of their own secret sauce for a specific market, they can get an ARM core for a reasonable amount and integrate it (rather than having to send it elsewhere for fab where they won't know who is watching). This is an advantage that it is hard to overstate; there will be lots of ARMs about for a long time to come.

The other thing to consider in mobile applications is what the noise ceiling of the CPU is; lower noise means less shielding and so less weight and cost. You've got to think in terms of optimising the whole system, not just the CPU core.

Not if the serial killer has stolen someone else's phone (and killed them too, natch).

LHR (except T5, and possibly the new T2 but that only opened this week) is like one of these intelligence testing devices for mice, but for people. You just have to follow the signs and hope. I find that FRA and ZRH are pretty bad that way too, at least for transit passengers, and BRU was managing to hide where the gates were at all earlier this year. (Past the bar and hidden behind some large advertising stands promoting an anonymous sports-car that were also covering up the signs saying where the gates were; yeah, hiding the absolute #1 thing that people want in an airport is idiotic.) And please don't route me via LIN. I'll be good, I promise.

In the US, the places to really avoid are JFK and LAX. Both are horrible places to change planes (especially between terminals). ATL, DTW, MSP, ORD, IAD and SFO are all much better. (MEM is OK, but a bit twisty, and I hate BOS for other reasons that aren't the airport's fault. I've yet to change planes elsewhere in the US.)

Don't know NRT well enough to comment.

In an airport, a place with substantive overt security, likely many cameras, and where the government sees passenger manifests before takeoff? Oh noes!

That would be the farm budget; this is robotics we're talking about here.

That's a lambda term (i.e., anonymous function) and not a closure. You tend to use them together, but they're formally different. A closure would be having a variable defined in the outer function being accessed and/or updated in the inner one.

What kind of glass are you using?

Oh, that kind of "bullet-proof". Not the Chicago Musicians' Union kind...

The original Linux shared library system was the toxic waste dump, being basically impossible to use if you weren't a distribution maker (every shared library had to have its own unique address in memory because code was just mmap()ed in without relocation). What we've got now is better, with just the problems of ensuring that versioning across effectively-independent software products works (and that's just plain hard for everyone).

Memory and disk have only recently become effectively too cheap for anyone (excluding embedded) to worry about the size of code; that's a new phenomenon.

At that time there was 386BSD but they were tearing themselves apart for some reason which I never bothered to get to the bottom of (I think the corpse of that became FreeBSD, but I could be wrong). Linux was not as polished at all, but did a few things reasonably. In particular, it had shared libraries, greatly reducing the memory requirements at a time when memory was expensive, and it had built in floating-point coprocessor emulation. (This was back when programming on DOS/Windows still meant using a segmented memory model or futzing around with a DOSExtender. Linux's flat model — heck, all Unixes' flat model — was much nicer, with far fewer contortions in the code to deal with squeezing things into 64kB blocks.)

Good memories...

Those are only mid-tier carriers really. The major carriers are the people who build national fibre backbones, trans-oceanic links, etc. The end-customer doesn't normally see them (unless they use traceroute) but they're there and they're important.

You need to think more in terms of how to monetize! Media rights. Merchandise. Special access opportunities for other super-fans. Franchise-themed credit card. If being a super-fan is the only thing you can think of, you're wasting that asset...

I think that's going to be close to 100% of all users...

Really? I think I'll define "give dkf lots of money for doing nothing much, so he can spend it on beer and pizza and the other good things in life" as a cause and see how effective that is! Contact me for detailed instructions on how to remit payments.

(I know, it probably won't bring in much, but it also takes so little effort I might as well try.)