For a reference point, the Bluecars used in a car-sharing service in Paris are for sale at about €12k, after a €7k subvention, but you need to pay an additional €80 a month for battery rental + battery exchange at 400,000 km. And it's a very spartan car, with 4 places but no trunk, clearly designed for city-only use.

The usual loop song is 99 bootles of beer.

You should look at LWN. It's a news site maintained by Jonathan Corbet, who co-authored the popular 'Linux Device Drivers' books for 2.4 and 2.6 kernels, and maintains a weekly newsletter about what currently happens in the Linux community. It also maintains archives, which gives it an index covering the widest range of topics in the Linux kernel.

You can read the 2.6 driver book on LWN as a starter, as there is no radical departure between Linux 3.x and the 2.6.x series. You can even grab an older copy/branch of the kernel like 2.6.32 and run it in a VM, as then there will be no difference between the source you use and what the existing books contain.

Does it build Linux, this time ?

The Linux build system broke when upgrading GNU Make from 3.81 to 3.82, and all stable branches had to add a fix to handle the changes.

The Belgians did worse than that. After the last general election, the previous caretaker government managed to stay in place for 541 days before an agreement was found to form a new one.

As Skype is a network, and does not offer interoperability, it benefits from a network effect: its usefulness compared to its concurrents is the square of the number of ts consumers. This usually leads to a natural monopoly, and Microsoft must have recognized it.

Nokia is now just a device manufacturer, it squandered its 'network' when it abandoned the Symbian users and developers.

As far as I know, there was no damage to the TGV track after either the 512 km/h test or the 575 km/h test, the 'ballast cloud' you describe is only dust. Do you have a reliable source for your claim ?

You're hopelessly wrong about the origin of Copts. The term itself comes from the 'gpt' consonants in Egypt.

They were living in Egypt before Muslims ever existed, and they still live there because even int the 9th century, Muslim invaders understood that expelling the vast majority of its population is not the right way to do a conquest. They resisted islamic assimilation for 14 centuries, including periods when they were violently reprimed for this. Except for a short period during the Crusades, there has been no direct conflict between Western Christians and Copts, and there was never any significant movement of population from Europe to Egypt.

Unfortunately, this means that all remote servers you interact with need to use HTTPS or the appropriate secure version of the protocol used - but is there an encrypted version of VoIP available ? Barring that, if you only mistrust your local network provider, you need a VPN. With some work, you could also rent a colocated box to install your own.

This quote reminds me of the 19th century Carte du CIel program, where massive numbers of scientists have continued to work on tedious measurements for vanishingly small results.

Just for measure, as you may not understand the EU institutions.The European Council is composed of the governments of the states of the EU. It usually works by organizing reunions of ministers for each political domain, as well as reunions of the heads of government, and that's currently the place where important decisions are taken. Given that there are 27 members, it is a piece of cake for the US to know what is said in there, and some countries' governments will gladly tell the US if they ask. Except that they may distort the message to fit their interests. Thus, it is interesting for US spys to get the information directly.
But on the political level, this spying is tantamount to bugging the White House's main conference room.

We may make a difference between government and distinct individuals, but in the end, the only thing that can stop a government is its own people. As long as the citizens of the States of the Union continue to tolerate unlimited corruption in name of "campaign contributions", broken election methods for representatives, and as long as this corruption leads them to elect a leadership with the same behaviour, the rest of the world can only conclude that the people of the USA wants it.

It's not really possible with USB out of the box. In this case the charger is the host, and is at the origin of all transactions. You need to add another layer over the existing protocols to require the host to give some credentials, before changing the device profile and exporting the interesting interfaces. This means a new WHQL certification / kernel update for your drivers, and ensures that it will not happen immediately.

But OpenGL is even more relevant on all non-PC devices. Whether it's done by software rendering in the old J2ME games, or now by hardware-acceleration on iOS and Android, the common point for all new platforms has been OpenGL ES. It will continue to see evolution and improvement, and nothing will prevent these improvements from going back to the PC. Notably because there is no hard distinction left between a Linux PC and an Android device nowadays.

That's what regulated, cost-oriented prices in a monopoly do. Gold plate everything, spare no expense in the research of perfection, and earn a fixed percentage on it. Nowadays, we spend money on advertisement instead, because it's much more efficient at recruiting clients than quality in a competitive market.