Perhaps about the same amount that isn't being reflected from those areas of the world where snowfall has been at a record low this winter. Like here in the arctic.

So the real story is that the Police Department in question had an outstanding arrest warrant against someone whose address they knew (the court had sent her several certified letters), and they did nothing about it for nine years?

That's the point of a protest though; to get the attention of people who might otherwise not notice that there is a problem.
They are effectively picketing slashdot; inconveniencing the normal readers like you and I, to put pressure on the management to take their protest more seriously, and offer something more than just platitudes and empty promises.

jQuery is the PHP of Javascript frameworks.

As someone who touch-types Dvorak at home, and has to switch back to QWERTY at work, I think I can safely say my experience trumps your few symbol keys moving around...

I'd argue that no, it actually doesn't trump it.
IME it is *far* easier to switch between two completely different systems, than to switch between two systems which are exactly the same, except for one or two minor parameters.

Consider a Brit, who fluently speak both English and Russian, conversing with two people; one of whom speaks Russian, and only Russian; the other speaks US English, and only US English. When speaking with the Russian, the Brit's brain need switch to and maintain Russian only once. When speaking to the USian, the Brit can speak in their native tongue - except when certain words come up, which the brain must anticipate, and engage to translate those to US English.

Indeed. I see a lot of assertions that Ulbricht was "The Dread Pirate Roberts", and in this article that he was the "founder". Has Ulbricht actually been found - in a court of law - to be either, or confessed to being so? Not so far as I've heard. There's a lot of accusations flying from government agencies, which are then repeated verbatim by "news" agencies who are more interested in a dramatic story than accuracy or facts.

However, the phrase "... shall dispose of the bitcoins ... according to law" is pretty much a non-statement. They're hardly going to say "we're going to sell them off illegally". What they will do all depends on what the law says, and it may well say they can't do jack until and unless the accused is found guilty, and the assets found to be the proceeds of crime.
That said, it is entirely possible that his assets could be lawfully siezed and disposed of by US law enforcement at this point, since they apparently have the legal power to do so when they suspect or accuse someone of a crime, in certain circumstances/jurisdictions.

I don't know why WASD "won" (people say "AWSD"? Really?), but I've never played a game which had ESDF as the default. I've never even *heard* of a game which had a pre-configured option to use those keys. Not that I disagree with the advantages, however.

But back in my day, ZX*? was the standard.

IF you start making it to where a company has to pay for the bandwidth of its users, then you raise the barrier of entry. Not good for innovation.

Internet companies already pay for the bandwidth of their users - all incoming and outgoing traffic to a data centre is bandwidth which the data centre must pay their internet provider to carry.

Seems like it might be a win-win for AT&T.

For something to be win-win, it requires two parties to simultaneously "win". In this case, the only "winner" would be AT&T.
And it rather gives lie to what they claimed to be the entire point of data caps in the first place - to help prevent over-saturation and congestion of their wireless networks. If there isn't enough bandwidth, then there isn't enough bandwidth - it doesn't matter whether or not both ends of a TCP connection pay, or only one.

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.