Rejiggering the launch site for an unmanned craft, with several seconds round trip phase lag for course corrections from the ground control, is an even worse problem.

Chiang'e 3 had a ~30 second "hovering" stage during its decent, during which it scanned the area it was over (using radar and laser IIRC), and itself made the decision where exactly to land based on that information.
AFAIK ground control could have interrupted and overridden the process at any stage, but did not.

If everyone worked together on a single tool for each job, we'd likely have a bunch of tools which are bloated, complicated, try to be everything to everyone, and end up being useful to nobody.
Some projects might be wildly more successful than others, but that doesn't mean that one is a fundamentally better solution than the other, or that the less-successful one is pointless or useless. It just means that more people prefer one over the other.

Why is it seen as good that we have choice and competition in mobile operating systems and devices, for example, but so often not that there exists a choice in desktop software?

I suspect many have, but I've been thinking about a similar kind of project.
As a theoretical and architectural exercise, I've been considering that the only direct interface to the universe would be over XMPP. So at the very simplest level, you could use an existing chat client to interact with ships and stations by sending simple messages to them like "report status", "report location", "buy firearms", "set course for Kerbin", etc.

OTOH I don't see where that change could possibly come from.

Engineers. The Snowden leaks have been a wakeup call to the security and networking communities. Sure, we always "knew" that stuff wasn't really secure, but when something is shown to be actively being exploited, people tend to sit up and take notice.
Nascent and floundering security and privacy projects have been galvanised by the realisation, and work seems now underway apace, to rebuild erstwhile accepted habits on solid cryptographic ground.

The privacy and security you seek on the Internet, will not come from the laws of politicians, decisions of courts, or blood of protesters. It will come from the mathematics of cryptography, and the collaboration of engineers worldwide, working in the background for the liberty of us all.

That controller appears to be made of corrugated cardboard.

free software needs to start leading rather than following, just about every noteworthy foss product is a generally crappier knockoff of a proprietary one (notable exceptions include the linux kernel and blender) or just a me-too product. open source is supposed to be about innovation

Firstly, Free software !== Open Source.
Secondly, no. neither Free software nor Open Source have been about innovation. Free software it is a philosophy concerned with Freedom. Open Source is a development methodology which has to do with openness and collaboration.

Thirdly, there is innovation from the Free/Open Source community, it just tends to be at a lower-level than most end-users give a crap about. Then there is also the "problem" of openness - innovations tend to be suggested and discussed openly before they are implemented, so are no longer considered so "innovative" by the the time they get released.

You're mis-attributing statements in the article:

The COO said he thought the cost of a single desktop PC was around GBP6,000 per year - for which he could go and buy 10 Apple iPads.

This is, I admit, rather ambiguous, but since the very next paragraph begins:

Far be it for V3 to quibble in affairs of the state, but I feel that either Kelly is misinformed over real-world IT costs or has got his sums mixed up. Firstly there's the minor point that for GBP6,000 you could actually get hold of as many as 22 iPads

Here disputing the claim, so clearly demonstrating that the "10 Apple iPads" comment was made by the COO in question, and not by the author of the article.

That's not to say that the article was of a particularly high quality. It seemed to be all downhill into opinion and insult, from the second above-quoted paragraph.

IANAA, but there's "creative accounting", and then there's fraud. One is perfectly legal, the other not. It's like the difference between "tax avoidance" and "tax evasion".

The thing with creative accounting is not that it hides or creates money from nothing (which would be fraud), but that it moves it around from other places/times. If you see a really good quarter now, it's possibly because some income has been moved from elsewhen. So it might be expected for the next few fiscal quarters to be more disappointing.

The old guy gets to leave on a high, and the new guy gets to "improve" the company's financials after an initial few bad quarters. It's an accountancy win-win.

You say that like it's not feasible, from a religious perspective, that the concepts behind the Star Wars universe were divine inspiration bestowed upon mankind by some supernatural Force.
That is, after all, no different to the root source of religious "knowledge" quoted by most (if not all) religions. The only difference is that other religions generally started with oral traditions and writing books, rather than going straight to cinema.

Think about the ways social engineering occurs. If you have, say, a call centre operator who gives out sensitive information to someone who is not who they say they are, there may be two failings:
1. They have deviated from the security procedure, or
2. The security procedures were insufficient.

In the case of (1), retraining. In the case of (2) redesign. Expecting the call centre operator to think back to some "social engineering" training is a ridiculous control notion, you instead tell them not to ever deviate from the security procedure.

But surely, if it is even possible for (1) to occur, it is a failure of the system storing the data; that sensitive information was disclosed without the security procedures being enforced.

The only thing I find strange is that GPL have been fairly efficient when it comes to being a sort of DRM.

The GPL isn't about Digital Rights(/Restriction) Management, it's about Legal Rights Management. That is; it doesn't actively try to prevent you from breaking the license, it just describes consequences for doing so.

I am surprised that no-one have released GPL-software on TPB with the license stripped away yet.

Piracy isn't generally an intellectual philosophy for the abolition of copyright; it's a practical philosophy for getting stuff cheaply and conveniently - which the GPL already allows.

Not only that, but the article linked provides no actual background to how it is "known" that Google "snitched" - just an unsourced quote.
A little digging indicates that the quote comes from a Financial Times article (registration required). Here are the relevant paragraphs:

Brussels punished Microsoft for failing to give at least 15m consumers a choice of web browser - a violation of a voluntary antitrust pact that was spotted and raised by Google and Opera, according to several people familiar with the case.

The US software group was left to police its own compliance and Mr Almunia said the lapse was brought to his attention by a Microsoft rival. According to people involved, Google and Opera informally provided the tip-off and helped investigators.

A lot of intelligent, enlightened people pursue peace, relaxation, and fun, through their work.

The Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license is currently the closest thing you're going to find to an official, globally effective, public domain grant.

I've seen several people comment that they have their home directory config files under version control. If you're using git for that, it's a fairly simple next step to then "backup" the repo to github.
"It's only config files; nobody would be interested in those."