Yes, X is a lot more bloated now than it was back in the late 1980s, when I was running it on 386/25 PCs or Sun3s. But on just about anything but an ARM microcontroller, it's still small enough that you can run a basic X distribution that's enough to fire up a browser, and still not make a dent in the system resources. And you need that browser to use lots of management applications, some of which you're going to need before all the networking is really done, and you probably also want to run a couple of X-terms at the same time, doing something that alternatively you'd have to do on a 24x80 Emacs screen.

Yes, there are lots of tools that want Gnome or KDE, which are both a lot more bloated than some TWM upgrade or Motif or something, and sometimes they're useful enough to drag them in, but you can still have enough X Windows for a server machine without including all the LibreOffice, GIMP, and other large desktop application suites.

If it's in the San Francisco Bay Area, which roastery is it?

Reclining is perfectly reasonable, even though there are people who whine about it because they'd like to be using a laptop. The exception is during meals, where people behind you need to be able to reach their tray and where most airlines no longer provide enough space (though they've mitigated this by no longer providing meals either.) And as a tall passenger, I especially need to recline, because airplane seats aren't built for tall people's backs.

However, I agree with you that you should recline slowly, giving the person behind you time to move a laptop.

It should be pretty obvious. Reclining seats is more comfortable, and that matters more on long flights or flights where you want to sleep.

Sure, it's not the only thing I drink, and there are lots of really great arabicas, and even some of the libericas are drinkable. The taste is different, and if you haven't had it, Vietnamese coffee is the easiest source to find. (There are some non-Vietnamese robustas, and some non-robusta coffee in Vietnam, but basically they dominate the market for good robusta, plus there's some from Africa as well.) Many of the varieties of coffee out there were developed by looking for mutations in existing coffee strains, trying to find weird beans that would breed true, and mainly looking for disease resistance and good production quantities.

And you really should go read the recent research article on DNA results from coffee, or at least the popularized summaries. Interesting stuff about how caffeine evolved separately in coffee and tea plants, in both cases probably because it kept insects from eating them.

I don't know how many tabs I have open right now, probably around 500. And while most of those are mostly text, Firefox might very well keep them as full-color images to avoid re-rendering when it needs to display them.

Sorry, but web pages get rendered into images before displaying them. (Though at least Firefox's semi-recent versions don't bother rendering web pages until needed when you crash&restart Firefox, which I do all the time - usually not on purpose, though I'll occasionally do it to scavenge memory or when performance has become unbearably slow.)

If you read the article, the paleo-Eskimos weren't North American Clovis descendents - they were a group of Siberians who'd come over much more recently, but still a long time before the current Inuit.

The press is reporting that the Napa quake wrecked about a billion dollars worth of wine. Beats having a quake in Diablo canyon spilling plutonium.

The reason for self-driving cars is so they can drive you by the billboards that match your demographic profile and skip the ones that don't bid as much for display time.