I totally agree with your statement in general; but in today's society being a well-rounded individual mandates some sort of programming skills. For instance, how can you possibly understand what the free software movement is about when you have never written a single line of code in your life?

Is it? Is anyone besides Apple switching from GCC to LLVM as their default compiler? Are more people having trouble to compile stuff using GCC because developers use LLVM extensions than vice versa? Is there any other sign that LLVM is actually replacing GCC?

Actually, it is much more likely that a CLA will be found to be unenforcable than the text of a well-established software license. In fact, CLAs requiring copyright assignment are probably void in large parts of the world, meaning you are back to square one.

I don't buy that the demise of the median worker has anything to do with technological progress. If the average income increases steadily and the median declines, it simply means that a society has problems to fairly allocate its resources. Since people making less than the median typically also make up 50% of the electorate, it looks like these people are voting against their own interests (or do not vote at all). One also has to keep in mind that the events that hurt the median worker the most (deregulation of banks, Bush-style tax cuts, and the whole war on terror) were all political descisions that were completely unrelated to technology.

Red Hat offers support for their distribution for up to 13 years. If you want, you can still get support for Python 2.2, which was released in 2001.

The emprical evidence for this claim is extremely weak, to say the least. The total number of hours worked is pretty much on par with population growth, so despite the enormous increase in automatization in recent decades, the workforce as a whole appears to be able to adapt to it quite well.

Actually, I used to be working on a CentOS workstation for quite some time and it was a very pleasant experience. The only issue I remember is that I had to manually compile some applications to be able to watch soccer streams during EURO 2012, but I'm pretty sure people at the IT department saw this as a feature rather than a bug ...

That's the usual situation in complexity theory and it applies to classical algorithms as well. There is also no proof that quantum computers are actually superior to classical computers when it comes to cryptanalysis. Still, most people believe this to be true.

Remember that we're talking about actual physical devices that need to be built and being really smart only helps you somewhat when you need to solder electronics or align a laser. And so far, the NSA employs hardly any physicists which you can also tell from the fact that they've outsourced the research mentioned in the documents to a public university. This is very different than in mathematics or computer science, where it is well known that the NSA is a large employer. That being said, I still think that the NSA might possess some interesting knowledge on quantum computing. I wouldn't be too surprised if they were sitting on an efficient quantum algorithm breaking AES, for instance.

These are hardly shocking revelations. The document mentions to achieve control over two semiconductor qubits, whereas factoring 2048 bit numbers requires at least that many qubits, and probably several orders of magnitude more. The current record stands at control of 14 qubits, achieved in 2010 in Rainer Blatt's group at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, using trapped ions.

Some time ago, I wrote something on the history and possible future of quantum computing. Moreover, one also has to keep in mind that there are public key cryptosystems that most likely cannot be cracked even with quantum computers.

To the contrary, Harvard operates another wireless network called "Harvard Guest" that does not require a Harvard ID for accessing the internet.

Not true, in Switzerland it's the same. However, each insurer needs its premiums for the minimum plan to be approved by the government.

Too bad that our universe is neither AdS (the cosmological constant is positive) nor ten-dimensional as in the papers.

In Germany, a lawyer sending a cease-and-desist letter can ask to get paid for his services from the recipient of the letter. However, the fees associated with this (making up most of the €250 in this case) are essentially lump sums set by law that are unrelated to the acutal amount of time spent for each case. If a lawyer sends out thousands of letters, this means huge profits, which are often shared with the rightsholder through illegal kickback schemes.

This is a well-known problem, but most lawmakers (who were often legal professionals before), prosecutors, and judges see copyright violations as the bigger issue so they tend to welcome this process as a private-sector law enforcement despite the fraud that is usually associated with it.

Encrypting your stuff is all good and nice, but you should use a piece of software that has been written using established secure coding standards. Just because it's open source doesn't mean it's also secure (cf. PHP, OpenSSL). Rather, being open source is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion in the evaluation of security-critical applications.

Given the track record of this particular application, I'm a bit skeptical whether one should really use it for anything serious.