You might be surprised at where FreeBSD code ends up. A lot of cheap home routers that run 'Linux' strip out the Linux 802.11 stack and graft on the FreeBSD one.

LLVM started as a university project. It wasn't until after Apple hired Chris Lattner and shipped a GLSL stack that other people started contributing in significant amounts. Chris offered LLVM to the FSF before Apple hired him, but they didn't want it. Clang (the C/C++/Objective-C front end, which is the bit most people think of as LLVM) was created in-house at Apple and open sourced, as was libc++. Now, there are about as many Google employees working on LLVM and Clang and a lot of people from elsewhere, so if Apple decided to take their ball and go home we'd still have an actively developed UIUC-licensed compiler.

But if you want to look at other work Apple has financed, take a look at the MAC framework in FreeBSD. There are a few other examples, but that's a nice big subsystem that was entirely developed with funding from Apple.

Juniper was a silver sponsor last year, but that doesn't tell the entire story. They've also been upstreaming a lot of the JUNOS code over the last couple of years. Most recently, they've started to push their code signing infrastructure (built on top of the MAC framework that was financed by Apple) to FreeBSD. The code is still under review, but should be landing quite soon. They've also spent quite a bit of manpower on some really tedious things, like improving the FreeBSD build process, which makes lots of developers happy but no one wants to do.

Apple strips out the GPL stuff because they don't like having to contribute everything back. They like being able to release things on their own schedule. FreeBSD has benefitted quite a lot from Apple (for example, the MAC framework was jointly developed for FreeBSD and Darwin, funded by Apple), but they generally contribute developer time rather than money. The FreeBSD Foundation is on their list for matched donations though, so if Apple employees donate then Apple will also add to the contribution. The donors page is a little bit misleading, because it only counts no-strings donations in money. Yahoo and New York Internet, for example, donate a huge amount in hardware and datacenter space, but don't appear in the list. Juniper was only in the Silver category last year, but if you counted the salaries of the people they paid to work on FreeBSD and upstream changes they'd easily be in the Uranium category.

Two hours? I've flown to and from (and within) the US quite a few times over the past year, and I don't think security has taken more than 10 minutes at any airport. Immigration took far longer on the way into the US, because the fingerprint scan and photo plus the passport check and the sequence of questions all take a long time per person.

More importantly: there have been simulator tests of inexperienced pilots (people with no flying experience and people who have private licenses for small planes) trying to land a commercial airliner, being talked through what to do by people over the radio. In no cases did the plane land in a way that would have resulted in most of the passengers surviving. I don't find this surprising. Having flown light aircraft and gliders, landing one is sufficiently different from the other that you have to remember what you're flying, and big jets are a lot different from both.

In contrast, while autoland isn't perfect, if a plane is coming in with an incapacitated pilot then ATC is going to clear a simple approach path and ensure that there's a lot of space around the runway and emergency vehicles on standby. You've got a much higher chance of autoland getting you safely down than a random passenger, unless there happens to be an off-duty airline pilot in the back, or an air force pilot who's used to flying large bombers or transport planes.

Was Borders a bookstore? They seemed to have about as many books as a newsagent. I'd always thought that their business model was selling coffee to people who liked to be near books, but didn't actually want to read them...

Stay in, order a pizza, and let one of them season his with anthrax and broken glass. The problem in the USA is that the story is more like one says 'Italian is the only food that people should be allowed to eat' and the other says 'no, everyone should be force-fed broken glass'.

They may not still be criminals, but there's a pretty high chance that they'll still be Americans...

This assumes that you have a separate dryer, which assumes that you have space for a washer and a dryer...

And if you're going to quote a $500 refrigerator (with a link that doesn't work) as a 'basic refrigerator', then I know that we're living in completely different worlds. When I moved house 3 years ago, I bought a new fridge and spent about 15% of that, including delivery.

I like OSMAnd for mapping on Android. It uses OSM data and lets me download entire country (or, in the US, state) map sets. Most of the time when I want a map, I'm in another country, where data roaming charges are insane, and so being able to stick the maps for an entire country on the SD card before I leave is great. Most are only a couple of hundred MBs, so downloading over WiFi is very fast. Near where I live, the OSM data is a lot better than either Google or Apple Maps (it has cycle paths in the correct places, for example, and doesn't have pubs by the names that they haven't had for 20 years).

I recently switched to 3 for their 3-2-1 plan (pay as you go, 3p/min for calls, 2p/text, 1p/MB of data, with 150MB free [expires after a month] when you top up). I've actually started using the data facilities on my phone while mobile since then. I used to only use it when I was near WiFi, because most of the stuff I'd want to do while mobile is only 1-2MB and my previous carrier had a flat rate per day for data up to a cap. Now, using 2MB of data is only 2p, which is expensive in comparison to doing it at home, but not enough money to actually care about, even if I did it every day.

Most of the time when I run the washing machine, I want the clothes clean today, I don't care particularly when. I'd be happy for the machine to wait until there was a bit of extra supply. With the fridge, to maintain a constant temperature you have a feedback system which has some dampening to prevent oscillation - you can either advance or delay the chilling by quite a bit without affecting the temperature. You can also run the compressor and chill the coolant a bit in advance of needing it, if it were economically sensible to do so - the extra insulation would only add a small amount to the cost, and you'd likely recoup that in a year if electricity prices fluctuated by 10% during the day.

NiFe batteries self discharge at a rate of 20-30% per month. If they're fully charged, during the day, they'll lose under 0.5% of their charge by the time you start charging them again, which seems a pretty adequate loss - you'll lose more than that in the charging and discharging of pretty much any battery type. Remember, we're talking about very short-term energy storage here.

That is not backing. Backing requires responsibility. If all of the people who accept bitcoin today suddenly stop tomorrow, who will enforce their guarantee? No one has made legally binding promises to exchange Bitcoins for anything in the future.

The US Dollar is backed by two guarantees in US law, deriving from Constitution. One is that the US Government will accept them in payment for taxes. The other is that the US Government will, via its legal apparatus, allow any debts held between US citizens to be settled by US Dollars.

This is what gives the US Dollar its value. A large organisation (a government, with a big military) promises to accept them as payment. They can print more, but the rate at which they can do this is limited because they need to maintain the value of new treasury bonds. Since 1960, the rate of inflation of US Dollars has mostly stayed in the 3-5% range (two big peaks over 10%, in the mid '70s and early '80s) and so someone accepting US dollars can be fairly confident that if they spend them again in a few weeks they'll have approximately the same value and even if they keep them for a year or two without investing them they won't lose much.

In contrast, bitcoins can gain or lose 50% of their value overnight. This makes them irrelevant as a currency. How do I price my goods or services in bitcoins when the value is totally unpredictable? It's popular among speculators, because they can make a lot of money if they make good guesses, and the increasing number of speculators keeps driving the price up. If a better game comes out, the value of bitcoins will plummet. And the lower limit on their value is 0, because there is nothing backing them.

You appear not to understand the concept of backing a currency.