The Way Things Work, David Macaulay.
Sophie's World, Jostein Gaarder.

Interestingly a recent serious virtual machine security vulnerability affected Intel but did not affect AMD:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/qubes-devel/JIpZoQUP6dQ/g6TvtpUHzBQJ

I'm well aware that technology but I don't see how it is relevant here. I doubt you can convince the phpmyadmin developers to require the use of apt for downloading new releases of their software.

How would you know which md5 hash was correct? They are listed in http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php which is also hosted by sourceforge.

X11 forwarding is not very nice since the remote server can fully control your client machine in many cases (e.g. in Debian/Ubuntu "ForwardX11Trusted" defaults to true). I prefer xpra instead.

I have never used whatsapp but I was still fully aware that they use IMEI as a password. This was no secret.

Do these really work for desktop use? The links that you provided don't seem to mention graphics, sound or clipboard handling. Perhaps you have some more information that I didn't find when I quickly browsed those?

The way Qubes shares composition buffers of X applications over xen shared memory is much nicer than VNC. It is rootless unlike VNC and there is no extra copying of data over a socket so you get nice performance. They also do sound so you can actually watch youtube in a web browser that runs in a disposable VM.

That bug was found by Rafal Wojtczuk who is also an author of Qubes: https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/qubes-devel/JIpZoQUP6dQ

Since you allow Java to talk to your X server it is trivial to break out of that sandbox. It can just simulate a few key presses to open a terminal and then inject whatever commands it wants. Or am I missing something here?

JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap editor) is not too bad Java application either. It is constantly improved to meet the demands on the mappers but still manages to stay fairly stable.

MySQL documentation was not open source when Sun was in charge either so doing the same with testcases is not very surprising (debian bug 335219).

LLVM and clang are library oriented. An IDE can reason a lot about the code using the API, much more than it could ever do if it just fork()'d and exec()'d "gcc" and parsed its warnings and error messages.

To me a feature phone runs the phone stack and user applications on the same chip. A smart phone has a separate CPU for running user applications.

Hmm, isn't DES actually quite strong? It resisted both differential and linear cryptanalysis. The key size is not enough today but it certainly was in 1977.