I think a combination of inertia, ignorance, idleness and carelessness in changing default browser settings makes it so that their main page is still getting a decent amount of traffic. Thus, I hazard that their core business is advertising to a mostly accidental audience.

I don't think they really plan to make a permanent fork of Debian. It looks to me more like a hard tactic to try to sway the Debian leadership towards a more conciliatory attitude towards other init systems, a bit like Go-oo and OpenOffice. If Debian announces that they make systemd optional, and remove the silly dependencies Gnome has for it, I expect this fork to fold overnight.

Yes, I think we had totally different things in mind when you mentioned the term "software engineer", especially now that you reduce the term to being able to apply a patch to source code.

Ignoring the pointlessly offensive comment about Skyrim, I think requiring a software engineer as part of every IT infrastructure team maintaining Linux servers seems difficult to achieve. I'm not saying it's extremely rare, but I don't think it's all that frequent right now, at least not outside of Fortune 500 companies or so. Furthermore, even if you had one in your team, what makes you think he will be able make a patch for bash faster than to wait for one to be released?

I'm probably wasting my time answering an anonymous coward but, oh well.
- The UI changing complaint is mostly about Firefox constant changes to match Chrome. Thunderbird moves a bit slower, because the UI really only changes on ESR versions (10,17,24,31), but they are there, and I don't think they are an improvement. The 6 months UI change may be an exaggeration for Thunderbird, but not so much on Firefox.
- Well, it appears the Thunderbird developers made their email program just for you, and you never need to configure or change anything, and that you like how they move the UI around. Good for you, but different people use the same program differently.
- In Thunderbird, go to the Tools Menu->Options->Privacy tab. The ad tracking settings are right there. Thus, it's not only a browser setting.

Disclaimer: I haven't used KMail for years, yet I use Thunderbird and Firefox every day. I just want to point out a few things that the KDE team has gotten right, as opposed to the Mozilla team.

Things that I like about KMail and its settings:
- The UI doesn't change every 6 months in an attempt to ape their closest competitor.
- If a settings can be configured, there's a button for it in the settings. I don't have to download a plugin that might get updated at any moment with spyware, or to muck about in the configuration editor. Do you remember that, in order to show http in URLs, you have to change the setting browser.urlbar.trimURLs in about:config? For some reason, I have to look it up in Google every single time I set up a Firefox. If there was a button for it, I would probably remember where it is.
- They are not so utterly reliant on ad money that they set the default tracking setting to "Do not tell sites about my tracking preferences", which is a lame cop-out. Maybe they could cut some of the compensations they are giving to their executives instead.

With all that said, it is true that the settings in KDE and KMail in particular can be confusing to new users. Maybe they could have a "show settings: simple/all" radio button in the corner of their preferences windows, like VLC?

Why? Why should I stop using Windows? I've used a few distributions of Linux before over a span of years as my desktop OS. I still run it in VMs, yet I still run Windows for the most part. I could tell you why, but since you're not exactly making a compelling counter-argument against it, I'm not going to waste my breath. Furthermore, the GP is right: Google has decided not to put privacy controls into Android, because it goes against their business model, so even the most trivial flashlight application is a privacy nightmare. Furthermore, I simply can't think of any Android application that I would want to use on my desktop.

//How to know if an important back-end component of Linux will soon be replaced
if (component.name=="linux-kernel*") { false; }
else if (component.inventor=="Red Hat") { false; }
else { true; }

Disclaimer: I am not a citizen of the US, but I am in favor of any actions my government will take to help fight ebola.
Maybe you should think for twenty seconds before shooting your mouth off.
- It is still early enough that it is (relatively) cheap to contain the disease. If the disease is left to run amok, it is going to be astronomically more expensive to fight. When should action be taken? When the disease crosses into the Europe? Into North America? Into the US?
- This is a valuable opportunity to learn the most effective measures to fight a major epidemic. Americans seems to be take the terrorism threat very seriously, maybe you could simply see the money spent as part of that effort. The lessons learned here could be useful in case of a biological attack. It would be drop in the ocean of US defense spending, anyways.
Honestly, I find ridiculous (and abhorrent) your reduction of Obama's effort to political pandering. I sure hope the US Congress is more open minded than you, because nothing would ever get done if every Bill was turned down when it came from the opposing party. But from reading your post, that's probably what you want.

I think they should collect some statistics on network usage. They might suddenly start using a lot less bandwidth if restrict access to a few sites.

I like your idea, I agree it is better than mine. I'm not sure I buy the "forgotten ticket" line though. I admit my total ignorance of the public transit system in Sweden, but where I live, we are issued permanent tickets cards . My card is at all times in my wallet, and it can even be registered so that I can get back my monthly pass in case I lose my card.

Indeed, but it would probably require to hire more security staff, which increases the costs of running public transit for everyone.

According to TFA, the organization that pays of the fines is currently profitable because it rakes in twice the money as it pays off in fines. It seems simply raising the fines would quickly make that unprofitable.

You think Facebook will actually do something with the Oculus? You're more optimistic than I am. I think they will try to get whatever patents they can get out of it and sue whoever tries to make something similar to it, once their bank account dries up after it turns out all the property their bought for a king's ransom turns out to be worthless.

I agree with most of what you said. With that said, I am really sick and tired of having to create an account on some service I don't care or need every time I buy a game. I already paid good money for the stupid game, but the greed of game distributors is endless. They probably milk the personal data they ask for for everything it's worth, and then they want to nickel and dime their customers to get every little trivial addition to the game, such as new players skins and weapons. Honestly, if buying a movie DVD was as complicated as installing a triple-A game, the movie business wouldn't be a tenth of the size of what it is right now. It's gotten to the point I have to write down a long list of made-up personal details, such as my birth date and address, and to create a disposable email address with every new login that I store in my password database. There is a need that the laws be changed to put a stop to the personal data collection which is being performed by all the big actors in the game industry.