a few fundamentalist might give up, and more weird space cults will pop up to fill the space. Crazy is a gas that expands to fill the volume of human civilization.

Depends on your definition of "need"

You can enable chord-middle (I don't like it) or setup your .Xdefaults to use a different mouse button or key stroke for past. those xrdb files are ugly, but quite powerful.

I drilled a hole in my trackball and mounted momentary switch for middle click, makes for a cool retro looking button. Since most mouse buttons are a basic switch, it's very easy to keep the original circuit in parallel without any fancy electrical knowledge.

Would be know who thought of it first. I do know that neither Farscape or Lexx were first with that little gem. I'm going to guess it came out of the Sci-Fi novels from the 1960s. Since most of the intelligent ships in the really old stuff had "electronic brains" and that sort of thing. But it's hard to make sweeping generalizations on many thousands of novels I have not ready.

off-topic: I wish there were TV series of stuff by E.E. "Doc" Smith (Lensman, Skylark) or Murray Leinster (First Contact, Exploration Team, Med Ship).

This has been my experience in the industry as well. I don't see OEMs scrambling to get the latest updates from the chip vendor or from Google. And I see chip vendors who basically abandon support for older chips on newer releases.

I blame Google, OEMs and Vendors for the problem and not really the carriers. While carriers usually want software to be qualified before an update is allowed, there are many carriers with different rules and many phones that are not under contract.

Carriers are less particular about OS updates(patches) than they were a few years ago, and have switched mainly to being worried about OS upgrades. Either because it might cause lots of customer support calls with broken phones or it will cut into their phone sales (they sell phones through 2 years service contracts, you thought they were free?).

I don't have to use bytecode for JavaScript, there are some implementations that to not use bytecode, but use a tree to represent the processed source.

Objective-C is dynamically typed, but compiled to machine code.

I think you are chasing a definition for scripting language that depends highly on implementations you are familiar with rather than properties of the language itself.

There are a lot of problems with star trek like teleportation. You can't measure both energy and time of a particle accurately either. Which is a pity because I would want my brain's state to be transmitted perfectly and not a jumbled mess. Even if my brain was only a single particle (an accusation I have received), it would be altered in more than position through any teleportation process.

That's why we have things like OTR. OTR is especially handy because it works with any old IM protocol (I use it with AIM just fine).

I kind of wonder why we need things like Telegram and WhatsApp, when they could be services that live on top of several IM protocols. I just need to find you by phone number, I don't really care if my client then has to use ICQ, Zephyr or some other nonsense to contact you.

Does Farscape count? It was late in 1999 and most of the seasons were in the 2000's. Did it even really take off in the first season? My group wasn't really familiar with it until the second seasons. If it's the year that a series starts, then Futurama belongs on the list as well.

I do agree that it was a great show. But there was so much great stuff in the 2000's. Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, Eureka, and I'm not good at lists.

90's show that didn't make the polls that were better than seaQuest DSV: Stargate SG-1, Millennium, Lexx, Space: Above & Beyond, MST3K, Aeon Flux, Earth: Final Conflict (that one is a stretch that it's better than seaQuest DSV)

Seems like she was useful in several first contact situations. I think having a diplomatic adviser that could send emotions and interpret behavior would be useful to a starship captain.

I don't see any pop-ups?

Oh that's right, it's 2015 and the rest of us have blockers installed.

I don't know, 140 seems like a lot to me when you consider hobbies like six word stories. (not trying to plug the site, it was just the first one that came up in a search, there are a few others that do various numbers of word "stories").

VLC is especially nice because I can play DVDs that I have placed on my harddrive for personal use. a 3TB harddrive holds quite a few DVDs. Then I can keep my massive collection in storage instead of having my living room cluttered with DVD racks. (Blu-ray too)

Same could be said about the closed source WhatsApp as well. We are expected to trust them? No thanks.

At least with an open API and open source clients the community can continuously audit privacy and security.

It's FUD, where is the proof of such things? They have access to the binaries of these apps, they can certainly hire a consultant to reverse engineer it. Why bother doing that when libel is generally not actionable in the US.