Yes, that's what broadcasting means. The problem is that email never had native broadcasting capabilities, it only got bolted on via mailing lists, which lacked a standard interface and made subscribe and unsubscribe extremely cumbersome. The other big problem with mail is that it lacked persistence, if you subscribed to a mailing list in the mid of a discussion, you would miss out on everything that happened before. You could look it up in a mail archive, assuming somebody provided it, but it was again a cobbled together mess with no standard interface or integration into the mail client.

Twitter, Facebook and Co. are solving those problems and giving people broadcasting functionality and persistence by default along with slightly better multimedia support. But what you end up with is essentially email reinvented with broadcast capabilities. You could take all those services and merge them into one, as they are all doing the same thing now.

Where is the huge difference? You have a linear news feed where you can post messages and others can comment on your messages. It's the same as everything else. Back when Twitter started it was a different thing, the 140 characters were all that you got and there was no integration of pictures, but that has been eroded for years, pictures, video and Co. are now all normal on Twitter and natively supported. Even the page layout is mostly the same with friends and photo boxes on the left and news feed on the right.

The more time goes on, the more all the messaging services are becoming the same. Even today the differences between Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat and Co. is already rather slim, as they are all essentially used for the same things: post text, images or video to a group of people or the public. Even that fundamental 140 character limit on Twitter is constantly worked around by posting images of text or linking to sites like Twitlonger. The only real difference is the client, some client make it really fast to post video while other focus on images and text, but all of them allow you to do essentially the exact same things under the hood.

What we are seeing here is essentially see the slow and painful reinvention of email with broadcast functionality. I could even see that turning into an open standard in another few years, as it's rather pointless to have so many apps doing the same thing and be incompatible with each other.

What Amazon is doing looks more like demo-kiosks. All they are selling in these stores is Kindles and Fire tablets to get people to use their online store. Doesn't look like they want to offer their online catalogue in the shop.

Standard Bluetooth audio quality is so bad that the quality of the earplugs doesn't even enter into the discussion. When you want to use the mic on a Bluetooth headset you have to use the HSP profile which can only do mono at like 8000Hz, it is completely unusable by modern standards. When you don't need the mic you can get acceptable quality with A2DP, but then you are stuck with latency of up to half a second, which renders it unusable for anything interactive.

I heard one can better results with aptX, but there seems to be no easy way to tell who supports it or when it's actually in use.

Long story short, finding reliable information on Bluetooth audio is hard and the chance that you end up with absolutely horrible audio quality is pretty damn high. If Apple can clean up that situation, more power to them.

Focus an anonymity is all nice and good, but from my experience the biggest problem with Tor is that the exit nodes are so limited that the fact that you are using Tor is obvious for the server. Meaning websites will block you or become unusable due to requesting a CAPTCHA every few clicks. Thus you have anonymity, but your web access is so drastically limited that it becomes impractical to use Tor as every day Internet access, thus you switch back to a non-Tor browser and are left with no anonymity.

Lifetime of Blurays is said to be rather long, in the 50-100 years range. How trustworthy that data is, is hard to tell. The LTH variety of Bluray is supposed to be worse than the HTL version, so it might be worth to go for HTL as they cost more or less the same. There are also M-Disc BD-R for archival that claims to last around 1000 years, but they are quite a bit more pricey.

2TB is not a lot of data and can be stored on about 40-80 Bluray discs depending on if you use 25GB discs or 50GB discs. It's not exactly the fasted way to do it, but for long term archival it works quite well and requires no extra effort once the discs are created. On Linux dirsplit is a useful tool for chunking the data into BluRay sized portions. xoriso can be used for burning.

In addition to that get some USB HDDs for regular day to day backups. Rotate them to an offsite location for extra protection.

How about fixing the problem at the core and making it illegal for police to break the law instead? Ignoring clear evidence seems like a incredible stupid "solution" to this problem.

Driverless cars exist. Records of past accidents exist as well. Take those driverless cars and put them into a simulation of those real world accidents of the past and see how they would react. If you find a lot of situations were the car might have saved people by killing the driver, then you can come back and have a discussion, but it's utterly pointless to worry about a hypothetical problem that might never arrive in the real world.

Steeling a gun, smuggling it or trying to obtain it any other way gives a chance to catch those people before they can do any harm. As long as guns are legal and easy to obtain on the other side you can't do much until the moment some crazy person pulls the trigger.

Could you point me to the part in the Windows 7 EULA that says that the system will randomly self destruct and replace itself with a different OS at some random point in the future?

The GPL tries to protect interfaces as well, that's why there is a LGPL. With the GPL the idea is that when you use it, your whole program has to follow it. However when interfaces are no longer copyrightable, then that falls apart and linking to a GPL library from a non-GPL piece of software becomes ok. There are some situations where this might not hold true like code inlining, static linking, etc., but in general the GPL would essentially become a the LGPL when APIs and ABIs are non-copyrightable. The FSF's stance on this always felt more like wishful thinking then hard legal ground and is kind of incompatible with their own idea that APIs shouldn't be copyrightable. That logic they apply however only to other peoples libraries, not their own.

The "const int", "//" comments and mixing declarations and code are pretty typical for C++ and atypical for C code (but allowed in C99 I think).

Yep, and those types of questions are actually used in the Winograd Schema Challenge as a alternative to the Turing test. While those questions aren't testing everything a human might be able to do over a text terminal, they have the big advantage of being objective and easily quantifiable. The Turing Test depends to much on the qualifications of the judge, simple multiple choice questions don't have that problem.