That's stupid.

If the terrorists changed their tactics, and you state that they've changed their tactics, you're revealing that the terrorists took action in response to finding out you've been monitoring them. If their new tactics made them vanish, made them hard to read (encryption), or did nothing, you would still notice: you'd notice them disappear if they completely beat you, or you'd notice their tactics change if their new tactics were just as ineffective as the old ones. As you say, giving terrorists information which they act on does help them, even if their response doesn't gain them anything; so saying in public that the Snowden leak helped terrorists, in any situation where they responded to the leak by change, is both accurate and not revealing.

If you confirm that the leaks haven't helped the terrorists, then you're only confirming that the situation hasn't changed. This would only happen if the terrorists didn't gain enough information from the leaks to make any changes--useful or otherwise--and thus you would confirm exactly what the terrorists know: that they don't know if there are any leaks, what the extent of the leaks are, and where those leaks may be. This is, again, unhelpful.

The report is a lie.

Terrorist groups have absolutely changed their behaviors and communications patterns to increase obfuscation and move attention away from their important operations. The United States National Security Agency, the US Military, and other terrorist operations have added increased layers of misdirection to better cover and draw attention away from their most critical activities.

The liability shift from Visa's incredible marketing of the Visa Shield protecting you from identity theft with charge backs and banks calling you to tell you they're declining a suspicious gasoline charge in California after you've been using your card in Vermont all morning and since forever to "oh, someone else used your card? Well, sucks to be you. We can close the account and give you a new card number."

How do I turn this into a hot story to get the production crew salivating over running this on the evening news?

The US is the third world.

Oh, and this absorption chiller seems to provide 76% efficiency, versus 320% for a regular AC; but the cost is comparable, such that a $1500 unit would supply the same cooling.

Where I live, gas (heat) powered air conditioners cost less during the season to operate than electric ones.

Really? Because the installation of an AC and heat pump here is expensive, and the heat pump is wildly inefficient in the winter. It's good for the temperate season in the spring and fall, a total of about 3 months per year; there's 4-5 solid months where a heat pump trying to heat my house is either ineffective or a huge energy hog pulling in tons of electricity per unit heating. My most efficient option has been using a space heater in whatever room I'm in, keeping the rest of the house at 62F; otherwise I spend $300+ per month on natural gas at 1,400,000 BTU for my 1300sqft house.

I did mention the use of more efficient (20%-30% vs 14%-19%) sterling heat engines for power generation, but figure you'd use most of the heat directly and get little benefit. Sure, with a dT of 600C, you can pull 38% or even as high as 42% on a sterling engine; but at 300C vs 10C, you're going to get 20%, maybe 25%.

Solar hot water systems tend to heat the 150L tank to a maximum 190F before shutting down, in the first 2-3 hours of the day; a thermostatic mixing valve provides 120F-130F off the tank. This allows for less hot water usage when the water is hot, and stable temperature as the water cools, as people take showers at night or in the morning. Residential evacuated tubes have boiled coolant at temperatures as high as 350C in unusual conditions, but are commonly accepted to run as hot as 300C, and typically don't exceed 285C. It's considerable that a system running less than 5L of water in a loop can heat 150L to almost 90C from tap cold (10C) in under 4 hours.

In practice, people have a single 1.2m^2 panel here, running their hot water at 160F in the winter with short days, not quite enough to use hydronic heat. 2-4 panels would do it, at $500 each, with proper insulation.

Ocean warming is a bigger opportunity. Jabbing a thermal collector into a volcanic vent, rolling it through a sterling engine as a cooling system, with the cold side submerged in the cold ocean.

A lot of new, green tech is ludicrous. People want solar farms in the desert because of all the arid heat and lack of clouds, but discount the fragile ecosystem. Wind farms take up much more space than nuclear plants for the same power output. Hydrogen is difficult to store without supercooling, and is only a storage scheme and not a generation scheme, and only operates at 50%-80% efficiency. Hydroelectric is an environmental disaster.

Direct heat applications from solar-thermal water heating are about the only thing that make sense. Their efficiency is high, and their cost is low. A small, 1.2 square meter collector provides 3000BTU/hr, about 85% of a kW; I can fit over 20 of these on my roof at a sun-receiving angle and spacing, giving over 65,000 BTU/hr average throughout the day. My roof can produce 19kW of heat output, while I only need 3kW to stay warm or cool--the AC breaker is 30A, providing about 3kW of cooling.

A hydronic coil off the water heater, an absorption cooler, or so on can harvest the heat collected by less than $2000 of tubes and a total of $3000 of equipment to provide for about $2500 annual air space and water heating and cooling in my house. Excess generated heat could theoretically drive a sterling engine to produce a small amount of electricity, but the investment for more tubes to generate a useful amount of electricity would be unjustifiable; I can buy 100% solar electricity for 12 cents per kWh.

Thus, in just over a year, I can recover my investment in solar water heating by incorporating space heating and cooling, assuming I was in the market for a new furnace and air conditioner anyway--the furnace would be an air handler with electric back-up, vastly cheaper than a new gas furnace, offsetting the expensive absorption chiller. A $900 pellet stove would serve as a back-up. Overall, the setup would save an immense amount of electricity and natural gas.

Because they manipulate each others's data directly, instead of passing messages, thus opening the potential for one functional unit to pass and integrate unvalidated data into the memory space of another functional unit; and because a systemic failure in one unit will bring down the entire system; and because the security contexts of various functional units differ, thus differing policies may apply; and because you may restart or reconfigure one functional unit without interrupting the others.

It's the same question as why not to make bash, sed, perl, X11, and Firefox kernel modules.

Hit it dead on.

People don't want the added work of making things work. It's like building a floor: you need to strip off the old finish, reenforce the subfloor, ensure the floor is level, pour thinset, roll ditra, pour more thinset, lay tile, clean, and grout. Some folks leave old linoleum or hardwood flooring, claiming it's stable, and then pour self-leveling compound or just screw down concrete board, then put tiles on top. Some just cement tile straight to the floor, or pour SLC and cement the tile to that.

A properly built tile floor has many interfacing components. Tiles don't delaminate due to deflection or material expansion. Expansion joints at walls and proper intervals prevent buckling and delamination or cracking. The floor holds heavy appliances and large live loads, handles vibrations, and even impact. By contrast, a poorly-built tile floor tends to delaminate when temperature or humidity change a few percent repeatedly over 2-3 years, or crack tiles, or have grout rapidly decay from deflection and vapor infiltration.

Modern Web browsers isolate plug-ins and separate rendering threads (tabs) in separate processes with IPC. A runaway page still freezes the entire Chrome browser until something kills it; a crash in a plug-in or page doesn't bring down anything else. Isolate contexts allow security context changes: a simple render process can drop all access outside of specific system calls (openGL, etc.), actions on open file handles at current access (i.e. open for read, read-only--allows for giving ownership of a network socket to a process), and IPC to the parent (through sockets, pipes, shared memory, and so on); most of this falls under system calls to affect open file handles (i.e. an OpenGL object, an open file, an open pipe or socket).

It would make sense to have an init system, like SystemD. It would make sense for SystemD to provide an init like SysVInit: a simple, small, very basic program to read the init configuration and start the system. It would make sense for the init process to start first an init manager that resolves dependencies and tracks running start-up daemons, which examines the system on initialization and starts the mount point manager if not started (to ensure the temporary and runtime directories are mounted), and then begins bringing up other init system components, hardware managers (udevd), and so on, as per the configuration of the init system.

It doesn't need to be a giant monolith. It can be a collection of utilities all dependent on each other, running 3 or 5 or 15 services all communicating with each other, all to bring up the system and supply system state management. This is the simplest and easiest way to make a complex system, aside from the overhead of writing a new program from scratch to surround the collection of functions you want to use. You'd have to put the IPC stuff into a library, and work out how each program communicates with its dependents and dependencies and how it reacts when they're not around. Each task, however, acts as a readily-verifiable utility or daemon, and so does not interfere with understanding of any other task by mixing their code together.

People don't seem to get multi-desktop versus multi-screen. Nobody's figured out split desktop yet--I want two monitors with different desktops on each, changeable separately.

If I were a project manager for Microsoft, I would strongly push to port Gnome 3 onto Windows, folding the changes back into upstream. Gnome 3 on Windows, shipped as a standard option, would eliminate the usability issue between Windows and Linux: nobody would move to Linux after seeing the zoom-out view, application searching, and automatic virtual desktop features of Gnome 3. Windows on Explorer wouldn't be a crippling anchor to the 90s; Microsoft could just provide option for the next-generation Gnome 3 desktop.

The high productivity provided by Gnome 3's workflow--WinKey pulls up all your current desktop's windows, CTRL+ALT+[ARROW] moves you up and down, type to instantly search installed applications, drag-and-drop windows between desktops--is my major pitch for using Linux over Windows. That plus the Software Center (Pirate, Ubuntu Software Center, etc.) make Linux the top operating system in existence for people who actually want to use a fucking computer to get shit done.

I just wish Gnome 3's alt-tab swapped between windows, not application contexts (it's terrible, and doesn't swap back when you alt-tab twice); and that they hadn't made scroll wheel swap up and down between desktops, but rather left it as a zoom function on windows in the Activities view. If I want to scroll through desktops, I'll put the mouse over the desktop list and scroll; if I point at a window and scroll up, I want to zoom in. How is this difficult? Scroll wheel is a function of what at which you're pointing.

It's different when you're trying to argue with Apple, because you can't just download the Apple UI and tweak its source code. But Linux? You can port all those DEs to Windows (except Unity, which is a piece of shit). Marketing, boys.

Yes. Minix writes to a memory area shared between contexts, so there's no copying. Messages are also fixed-length packets, so no buffer overruns.

Not necessarily.

There is a single, absolutely-optimal way to implement a computer program for a specific task in a specific language on a specific compiler targeting a specific CPU platform for a specific CPU model. In practice, we worry more about code readability, code maintainability, and the general-purpose usefulness of the operating system.

Given what I said--that IPC carries about as much overhead as a function call when calling out to another part of the kernel--we don't even have to consider whether that overhead is so negligible as to be ludicrous to account for or whether it's incredibly large. The only practical impact is the same as using OpenBSD versus NetBSD versus FreeBSD versus DragonFly BSD: different approaches are taken in various kernels to solve the same problem, and they all jump through different numbers of lines of code, different interactions (i.e. DIV takes more cycles than SHR), different call traces (more or fewer function calls passing more or fewer arguments), and so on.

In other words: the overhead is on the level that calling it "slower" is an abuse of terms, the same as claiming that the execl() call shouldn't be a wrapper for execve() because it makes the system slower. The practical impact isn't just small; it's smaller than the practical impact of every other factor in the execution of the code in question, and thus has no real implications for performance as an architectural consideration.