I haven't seen any behavior like that in Debian or Ubuntu, and suspect that PP is referring to the product rather than the means.

I expect that when PP refers to "egomaniac" he has Shuttleworth's comments about Canonical-developed software vs. other software (mostly RedHat, by chance) in mind.
As far as getting along with the maintainers goes, Ubuntu's certainly not bad.
But he doesn't agree with the decisions they make, so he thinks they suck.
[flamebait]
Frankly, I think that unity and gnome-shell are both misconcieved abominations, and KDE, Xfce, and Gnome 2 all seemed somewhat like shovelware.
IceWM is the best window manager, and who needs a desktop? They always end up getting loads of garbage thrown on them.
System init sucks in one way or another, all the time, though I'd rather use * + OpenRC or an LSB-conformant system atop sysvinit or kin than either upstart or systemd.
Those who get annoyed by Canonical working on Upstart have probably forgotten their history by now...
[/flamebait]
(It's good when it's fast, but it's important to be able to see how it works. No, "You can get the source if you want. You'ld better know C well." is not all there is to seeing how it works. Give me a script I can read.)

For "circlejerk committee..." I suspect he means either Debian or Gentoo. And I can't speak about Gentoo.
For Debian though, I'm more pleased with what the Debian developers come up with than with Red Hat.
Now that some of the old Debian developers have moved on and there are several contributors from Canonical, the average seems to be fairly tolerable.
You will really draw fire if you are persistent in disagreeing and not persuasive, or if you phrase things in a provocative way. Debian users and developers all seem to go by the rule "flaming where flaming is due," and are well able to dish it out. But it's quite possible to avoid that.

Now if he meant to refer to Arch, ....

I recall reading it in one of Groklaw's news picks, which as far as I can tell can't be searched.
So it'll be quite a while before I can find it, barring random luck.

Is that "different impression" an impression, or are there statements of fact that say otherwise?

That 2.25% is for quite a few patents; it is per major patent holder.
Garbage in, garbage out.

Background:
Microsoft asked Motorola how much they wanted for their standard-essential patents (which are covered by a FRAND commitment) on H264 and 802.11; Motorola quoted them 2.25% as an initial offer (for context, this is how much Microsoft charges for patents on Android devices). That worked out to $4 billion.
Rather than counter-offer or negotiate, Microsoft filed a lawsuit right away.
(While the lawsuit was in process, Google acquired Motorola. Some people are misrepresenting that bit.)
Outcome:
Microsoft got awarded $14.5 million, on the grounds that 2.25% was not reasonable.

Ahem.
Microsoft sued at least half a year before Google acquired Motorola.

And by the way: that $4 billion is 2.25%-which is the same rate that Microsoft charges.

That would be a problem... ...if $4 billion weren't an initial offer that MS never bothered making a counter offer on.

Motorola requested royalties up to $4 billion, sure.
But "demanded" does not reflect that this was their initial offer.
Standard practice for licensing is
1-owner offers to license for $x
2-potential licensee offers to pay $y
3-owner lowers price
4-potential licensee raises offer
5-haggle over what is covered and what it's worth
The impression given is that this was after step 5.
It actually was after step 1; Microsoft sued before they made a counter-offer.

Agreed.
egrep -F is the same as fgrep, and it uses fixed strings.
If he says "patterns", it's obviously egrep or grep, probably egrep -f.
egrep -f patterns -lr maildir is likely to be faster, because of startup costs.

Here's what I'm referring to, from AMD's press release:

Seattle

"Seattle" will be the industry's only 64-bit ARM-based server SoC from a proven server processor supplier. "Seattle" is an 8- and then 16-core CPU based on the ARM Cortex-A57 core and is expected to run at or greater than 2 GHz. The "Seattle" processor is expected to offer 2-4X the performance of AMD's recently announced AMD Opteron X-Series processor with significant improvement in compute-per-watt. It will deliver 128GB DRAM support, extensive offload engines for better power efficiency and reduced CPU loading, server caliber encryption, and compression and legacy networking including integrated 10GbE. It will be the first processor from AMD to integrate AMD's advanced Freedom(TM) Fabric for dense compute systems directly onto the chip. AMD plans to sample "Seattle" in the first quarter of 2014 with production in the second half of the year.

Note that this is a FULL processor plus peripherals, not a coprocessor. I don't see any resemblance between this and what you describe.

The consoles use a Jaguar core, which is an x86-based chip; and there's an A5 (fairly low-end 32-bit Cortex) included as a coprocessor. So far you are correct, and I've known about it.

But you are completely wrong about the chip I mentioned.
It's a _pure_ ARM chip not a co-processor, and it's an A57, which is currently ARM's top "aarch64" (64-bit ARM) processor.

By the way, could you point me at the Intel chips that you referred to?

You look at what AMD and Intel have cooking and you can see where the wind is blowing, AMD already has a fanless APU that maxes at 6w with all sectors of the chip maxed out, IRL it uses less than 3w under typical loads and that gives you a dual core APU with a Radeon chip capable of running 1080P over HDMI, and Intel has Haswell and the new Atom is supposedly down to a couple of watts under load and less than 1w in "functional standby" where it can still receive messages and calls.

The simple fact is ARM just doesn't scale well and no matter how many millions Samsung and Nvidia sink into it they just can't fix this fundamental flaw.

Odd that AMD is making an ARMv8 server chip next year then.
I'm talking about the Opteron "Seattle", which is supposed to be based on the A57, with SeaMicro Freedom chips on board.

You haven't been paying attention, have you?

The Debian kfreebsd-gnu port has been available for a while.

Looking at Nugent's proposal:

At the end of the bill (before the short title), add the
  following:
SEC. ll. None of funds made available by this Act
may be used by the National Security Agency to--

            (1) conduct an acquisition pursuant to section
  702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of
  1978 for the purpose of targeting a United States
  person; or

            (2) acquire, monitor, or store the contents (as
  such term is defined in section 2510(8) of title 18,
  United States Code) of any electronic communication
  of a United States person from a provider of
  electronic communication services to the public pursuant
  to section 501 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.

Would someone mind explaining where the hole is?
Oh. Nevermind, it's "(8) âoecontentsâ, when used with respect to any wire, oral, or electronic communication, includes any information concerning the substance, purport, or meaning of that communication;"
In other words, the subject line in an email is part of the contents-but not the fact that you emailed or called So-and-So.

I mean... I get that its some type of "CPU card"... or something, and built on the PCMCIA form factor... but ...WHAT is this for? is it a prototyping board, is it meant to micro server clusterable, is it meant for home media pc?

Yes.
It's the main guts of a computer, stuck in something the size of a PCMCIA card, and you can stick that in whatever hardware project you want.
Prototyping board is one (probably the most obvious) potential use.
But that's partly because it's useable for so many uses.