Part of the problem is the traditional large subsidy that agricultural water gets (both via the infrastructure costs and in direct pricing). Farming would make better use of water if it had to pay the price.

PS: "Olympic-size swimming pools per year" is a strange way to measure water usage. "about 6.8 cubic metres per day" is a much clearer way to express this number. In particular, this makes it clear that low-flow toilets have a negligible effect on water use compared to dishwashing, showers, etc.

I got the email too, and it used the unique email address I gave to the NY Times, so either they were breached or some company they gave my data to was breached.

Indeed, this will probably force the NYT to shed light on who they share their subscribers' contact information with.

To be clear regarding "flat surface". Apple might mean by this a touchscreen-only phone without buttons, which is indeed something they introduced. But in that case the argument is again about distinctiveness of the design rather than any "invention".

What's notable about this list is that nearly all items are either industry-wide practices (rectangular phones with flat surfaces) or obvious design choices (a thin rim around the front maximize screen area compared with a thick rim). In particular Apple opted for choices anyone facing the design problem would make, but is now trying to prevent others from making the choices.

Even worse is that the remaining items reflect aesthetic choices on the part of Apple (no adornment, for example). Such choices should indeed be protected, but they are not inventions which deserve patent protection. Instead they are identifying marks which should be protected under trademark law.

I think it's important to realize why the four directions /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin exist (and similarly why /lib is separate from /usr/lib). The reason is that once upon a time discs were small, so that /usr would be mounted separately from the root partition. So /bin and /lib are small directories containing as much of the operating system as you need to get going before you mount /usr and get everything else. In particular, this means the utilities needed to mount those other filesystems and to fix errors in them (e.g. fsck). The separation between /usr/bin and /usr/sbin means that ordinary users don't have system programs (those from /sbin) in their search path. Today most installations have the whole system (/ and /usr) on the same partition and it seems that many users use a GUI rather than a terminal. This means that the separation is not needed. Note that this change is not about multiple-architecture situations like /usr/lib and /usr/lib64. It's about the separation between /lib and /usr/lib (or /lib64 and /usr/lib64).

/usr/local/bin is not supposed to contain any system executables, only locally installed ones. Fedora does not install anything there already. In any case, /usr/local/ seems to have been replaced by /opt/ in most UNIX installations today.

It's not precisely a household term ...

For short in-city trips electric vehicles are fairly efficient (especially with regenerative breaking). Moreover, these vehicles will have established parking spots where they can be efficiently charged. I can see this being a cost-effective alternative to taxis, and possibly to public transport (especially for several people at once). The question is what to do about them if they are driven until the battery is drained, which is not an issue for bicycles. If that becomes prevalent it will increase costs.

Currently the minimal threshold for filing suit is way too low. The "rights holders" here surely have some colorable claim that infringement happened (i.e. some kind of network monitoring log, and a claim from an ISP that the monitored IP address belonged to this guy). So far US courts have decided that this is enough to file a lawsuit, something which creates a lot of work for lawyers and greatly advantages those who file extortionate suits -- the cost of actually defending a suit like this (tends of thousands of dollars) is much higher than the cost of settling. Worse, by filing suit the plaintiffs get the right to use the courts to coerce the defendant into assisting in the investigation (and to pay the costs of that!).

A second problem is that even if you are successful in defending a lawsuit you are unlikely to get your legal (let alone indirect) costs reimbursed.

So, the solution is: first, to require more evidence before a lawsuit can be filed, and, second, to make cost shifting the default when a lawsuit is dismissed on the pleading.

Hurray, now we can buy crippled CPUs and unlock them later.

I think you don't understand what's going on. Intel is giving everyone more options. There's no way this can make you worse off. You probably don't realize that Intel doesn't make separate "1.8 GHz" and "2.0 GHz" chips. What they do is make many of the same chip, test each chip, and then set the clock frequency depending on how well each chip handles things. Now imagine many people would rather buy a 1.8GHz chip (it's cheaper and they don't need the extra speed), but the manufacturing process is good and makes mostly 2.0Ghz chips. Intel now has three choices:

1. Keep things as they are. This makes 1.8GHz chips more expensive (supply is less than demand at the current price), and forces people to buy 2.0GHz chips they don't want.
2. Lower prices on 2.0GHz chips. This will increase sales, but means giving up on the money of those people who really need (or think they need) the extra speed and are willing to pay for it.
3. Take some chips that could run at 2.0GHz, mark them "1.8GHz" and sell them for a lower price.

Under the last scenario Intel is happier (they got the money of the people who want cheaper parts and got to charge a premium from the people who want faster parts). The consumers are also happier (they got the processor speed they want at the price they want). Why should the people who wanted 1.8GHz speed care that the part they got could in theory run at 2.0GHz? that's not the speed they wanted in the first place.