It's a stock Debian kernel with some minor packaging changes and support for a new game controller. All those realtime patches? Not actually used by default. The full list of exciting changes:

• Make the binnmu regexp also reconize our build suffixes
• New XBox controller driver
• Disable Intel P-State driver as it causes issues with sound being choppy during BigPicture trailer video playback.
• Hard-code parallel build for now since our OBS infrastructure doesn't know how to set these options yet.
• Add postinst step to touch /var/run/reboot-required

Repeated merges have worked well for a while now (maybe since 1.6?). It's not quite as good at merging as git is, but it works well enough. But I have to agree with the general sentiment against merging from release to devel branches. Merging should be considered an expert-only operation (not expert in version control, but in the code base). Cherry-picking/backporting fixes from devel to release is safer because then you know exactly what you're changing.

Whenever a web site has a form, some other site can set up another (hidden) form pointing to the same URL and with any values they like. Someone who visits both sites can unintentionally submit that form (together with their cookies from the first site, so it's properly authenticated). This is 'Cross Site Request Forgery' and the usual way to avoid is to check the Referer header.

The current Debian stable release (6.0, squeeze) has kFreeBSD ports for i386 and amd64.

Sam Hartman and Mario Lang gave a talk and demonstration of accessibility in Debian in 2009, covering various software in Debian (and Windows). Video is linked from the talk page.

I personally haven't experienced abuse of my card details - so far as I know. But if I did, how could I tell who was responsible - especially when there are vast leaks like this? It seems like it would be more fair to have an industry-wide fund to compensate victims, which the leaking companies would pay into proportionately to the number of valid details leaked.

Of course. But all the creative work is squeezed into 64K.

They use DirectX, because that is the only way to support a reasonable range of hardware. (Also, you can't hit the hardware without installing a new driver or exploiting a kernel bug. Neither of which is very friendly.)

Cycle counts aren't even documented today. Now it's all about avoiding cache misses and cache invalidation.

I think you're mistaken about PCIe link speeds, and you're also failing to account for the transaction layer protocol (TLP) overhead which can be quite substantial. PCIe 2.0 link speed is 5 GT/s but that's with 8b10 encoding; the data rate is only 4 Gb/s. PCIe 3.0 doubles the data rate to 8 Gb/s. Two 10G ports require 20 Gb/s plus some overhead, hence 8 lanes on PCIe 2.0 or potentially 4 lanes on PCIe 3.0.

If browsers don't impose such a minimum, devices with embedded web servers (think printers and home routers) become vulnerable to Cross-Site Request Forgery. They can potentially defend against this by checking the Host header on requests, but since these devices are only manageable through the web there's no good way to establish what the correct value is.

With Intel you have to buy a CPU, buy a north/southbridge. If you want custom interfaces beyond that, that's more chips too.

Not so. Intel has SoCs now. Apparently they're quite popular for use in IVI applications.

Explorer isn't the window manager, although it does have some integration to make minimised windows appear within the task bar. The window manager largely runs as a library within the application (USER32.DLL). Windows 2000 added the feature that lets you force minimisation or kill the window's owner if it doesn't process window management messages quickly. (I don't know what component or process handles this.) More recently DWM.EXE was introduced to handle some window management and particularly compositing.

Try migrating a running system with dd. Many VM systems can do live migration, with a fraction of a second of down-time.

In Israel, the parliament only ever specifies the period of DST for one year at a time. I hear that Israeli Windows users don't even bother with automatic DST adjustment.

Actually, no, this has nothing to do with linux-libre which simply breaks every driver with firmware or a table of numbers they don't understand.

Apple has way too much experience being burned by Motorola and IBM both being unable to supply chips in heavy demand.

As I recall, Motorola and IBM had no problem with regular supply. The problem was that Apple was the only major customer for desktop/laptop-suitable PowerPC processors, and those vendors quite reasonably expected long-term order commitments for these products while Apple wanted more flexibility. With Intel, Apple is just one of many customers and while it has less control over x86 processor development it also doesn't have to make such commitments.