The concept, as I understand it, is that at the moment in order to write a device driver for X11 you have to separately manage code that implements 2D and 3D graphic primitives. Given 2D operations are themselves a subset of 3D operations (even if the API doesn't reflect that), it makes sense to simply have device drivers implement the 3D parts. Then common wrapper code can implement the 2D, alleviating the driver developer of the burden of building and testing an entirely new block of code.

It should make X.org more reliable, as the same 2D code will be used for all drivers, and should end up being pretty solid. In the mean time, driver developers have more time to polish their 3D driver implementations. Win win. Maybe a slight performance hit, but probably not a significant one.

The original Bitcoin paper claims that the currency described by the protocol is "anonymous" ("Participants can be anonymous") yet it's a protocol where every transaction is logged. Can't get much less anonymous than that. So yeah, while it's unlikely this is the Mr Bitcoin Nakamoto, if it were the lack of understanding of personal privacy would fit in at all levels.

Friedman? Tom Friedman? Seriously?! Who the hell takes him seriously?

Good journalists exist, you choose to ignore them, but just look at, say, The Guardian's handling of Wikileaks to get some idea of how the concept hasn't gone away. Now, as always, we have the same mixture of good and bad as we've always had. Thompson and Murrow are not representative of their peers at the times they operated. And there exist journalists today who are the Thompsons and Murrows of today.

Whoever is at fault large scale transportation projects are one if the two main drivers for all short term changes in traffic patterns. The other is weather.

The tail end of the economic bubble and the first round of stimulus programme projects led to high levels of construction. Those projects likely completed between 2010 and 2012. As they completed road capacity increased faster than demand or traffic load. Hence reduced congestion over that time.

Last year it is possible more projects started up causing lane and road closures again. Also as I mentioned weather can be an issue. The flooding in Alberta Canada and in Colorado for example caused extended closure of damaged roads. Also the very cold winter discourages use of public transportation in most cities as nobody wants to walk to a stop and wait for a bus or train outdoors in freezing weather...plus public transportation can be very unreliable in bad weather....more so than using personal vehicles. This may br a long term thing too. The climate is changing (NOT warming... where I live average temperature has gone DOWN most of the last 10 years and it is noticeably colder than at the turn of this century especially...all year but especially in winter...this rapid cooling has changed snowpack melting and caused flooding issues more typical of what happened 100 years ago). Whether you live where it is warming or where it is cooling she effects of weather on traffic are likely to become more pronounced.

Well, I guess you can argue that Bitcoin is as "real" as witchcraft, but the problem with that is that right now a large number of people are actually trading with Bitcoins and as a result is has some trading value and is a real thing, no matter how stupid.

I'm a Bitcoin critic. I consider it a stupid idea that's based upon a naive view of money, and the recent problems that highlight the cons of being unregulated simply add fuel to the fire. But it's one thing to claim it's a bad idea, and another to claim it doesn't exist. People have enormous sums of money invested in the project. Nakamoto is in a privileged position to abuse that. He hasn't yet (to the best of my knowledge) so there's no reason to out him at this stage. But if he did...

Are you under the impression that in the last 2-300 years of journalism, Hunter S Thompson or Edward Murrow are representative of the vast majority of journalists?

Hell, even the supposedly famous "Did a great job on that one famous story" types are rarely as great as their reputations suggest. Look at Bob Woodward. Is he really the Bob Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein, or a hack who reports any old crap to sell newspapers (and books)?

Technically Nakamoto has significant power, and as such it's arguable a case can be made that if he were to exploit that power (there's no evidence he's done so, and one thing that's positive about Bitcoin is that it would be extremely easy to tell if Nakamoto were to, say, flood the exchanges with his own million or so BTC) then he'd need to be held to account, which cannot be done anonymously.

But in general I agree, and at this point, despite my misgivings about his work, believe he should have his privacy respected.

I'm pretty sure it's legal in both countries. The only question here is supposedly whether Dell is violating the Firefox trademark. Dell argues they're not because they're charging for installation. I don't know if that m

But minus the trademark issue, Dell certainly can charge for copies of Firefox, even if it ends up having to install Iceweasel instead. So can I. It's Free Software/Open Source, shipped under a Free Software/Open Source license, and as long as Dell complies with, for example, any copyleft provisions, it can do whatever it wants and charge whatever it wants. There's a myth that you can't charge for Free Software/Open Source software. That's never been true. Indeed, that's one of the ways the FSF originally funded itself, selling tapes containing copies of GNU.

X11 is the technically superior choice. #getoffmylawn

Still, from that point of view, the Mir thing has been a success for all those itching to replace a stable, mature, well known and tested, versatile, and powerful windowing system with a new and untested stripped down windowing system simply because they don't understand why someone would want some of the features X11 has, and are under the impression it's bloated because it's bigger than Windows 2.0 was in 1989.

Mir has helped create the illusion the decision has been made already. We are transitioning, no more debate is needed (or will be accepted) as to whether we should, and the question is what we should transition to.

Much the same mistake was made with GNOME 2 to GNOME 3, a transition that Ubuntu helped along in the same way with Unity. Users rebelled, with forks like Mint attempting to roll back the damage, but the end result was a deterioration in the perception of GNU/Linux as a potential replacement for Windows. Distributions based upon GNOME 3 and Unity got the "slick", "professional", treatment, with users finding fast that it wasn't what they actually wanted. The GNOME 2 hold-outs didn't have the resources to ensure GNOME 2's forks had the same level of support, and so ended up with systems that looked to new users dated and ugly.

We will see the same with Mir/Wayland, except worse. We'll have five to ten years of having to deal with an immature windowing system that, by the end of the process, has just as many hacks and quirks as X11 but will almost certainly still lack key features X11 offers. X11 holdouts will find themselves using an increasingly unreliable and unstable platform as newer hardware requires new device drivers, without the level of support needed within the X.org X11 community to support them.

We're all going to lose. The best free software users can hope for now is that Google continues to extend Android to eventually offer a decent desktop experience. I don't know why they would, perhaps to replace ChromeOS, but at least you're looking at something mature there. But that's not here now, and the next five years will be rough for GNU/Linux users. We'll likely be as mainstream as FreeBSD by the end of it.

Yes, they've done it once or twice, with a tiny number of the headline issues, took an age to do so, and only did so because people were screaming about it.

This is a perverse argument for claiming that something isn't open.

Android is open. Period. The fact Google creates massive incentives to manufacturers to use proprietary middleware on Android is neither here nor there. You might just as well argue that the PC architecture isn't open, because Microsoft creates incentives for PC manufacturers to install Windows.

I seriously doubt any governments feel threatened by Bitcoin, also known as a set of securities owned by clueless nerds. Insofar as we've seen negative responses to Bitcoin by governments, its been in relation to their use as systems of money laundering or as systems to transfer money without a paper trail that fits into the government's existing systems (which is generally important, for governments that is, when trying to follow-the-money in investigations of serious crimes.) Yes, China and Russia have "banned" it, but because of that, not due to some concern about it being a competing currency.

I believe, indeed, that Britain actually proposed some pro-Bitcoin rule making earlier this week.

Honestly, this government conspiracy crap more closely represents the neuroses of Bitcoin's advocates than it does reality.

Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel what means Linux kernel is the complete operating system. There is no other software needed to add to have full operating system than just the Linux kernel.

Bollocks. At the very least you need a shell.

Linux is a complete operating system kernel. It is not a complete operating system. If you have any doubts about this, perhaps you should look back at this obscure operating system called "Unix" that GNU/Linux is more or less a clone of. Back then the creators of Unix created some terms to define different components of the operating system, like, uh "Kernel", "User-land", "Shell", etc. If "Kernel" described "the operating system", then why invent the term in the first place? Why did they continue to use the word "Operating system" afterwards and why did they use it to describe "Unix" which included so much more than just the kernel?

I know people are upset about this because RMS is a horrib... actually, I really don't know why you guys hate RMS, we really wouldn't have Ubuntu, CentOS, et al, without his work, but you hate him and I get that - but the "GNU/Linux" thing is entirely reasonable. What people have installed on their desktops is an operating system that includes both Linux and the GNU userland. Without the GNU userland you'd either have to build an operating system with a different userland (in which case you'd have Busybox/Linux, or BSD/Linux), or you'd have a brick.