It's always a pleasure to have such pleasant, enriching conversations here.

This is no evolution. Evolution can't show its effects in such a short time span. We're just seeing existing species eating the trash that we're dumping into the ocean.

The problem is that most of the “changes in ecology” that happened in the last two centuries boil down to the human species consistently and predictably expanding into new territories and displacing any other species originally living there. This phenomenon is a complete novelty in the historical record, and the only possible equilibrium it can eventually lead to is the survival of a very limited amount of species: ours, the domestic ones that we need to eat, and the ones that live on our dejections. These bacteria apparently belong to the latter group.

And what did I say? CD-ROM drives were common, burners not so. About the affordability and ubiquity of burnt CDs, I should know too, as I was in high school in those years, piracy was rampant, and burnt CDs were the only kind of CD that a lot of people had at home, for $10 was still quite less than the $100 a pressed CD used to cost here.

Of course, I do not accept, condone or encourage piracy.

I challenge what Wikipedia says; I was there in 1995, and for new computers that shipped with Windows '95 having a CD-ROM drive was the norm and not the exception. Installing Windows '95 from floppy disks required a very tall pile of them, and I know few people who can recount the experience of installing the OS out of them. CD burners were much rarer, but using burnt CDs coming from a third party was commonplace.

Can the drone spy his house from 20km up in the stratosphere? If that's the case, then the fears of Schmidt about non-Google drones spying him are not addressed.

Will Eric Schmidt allow one of those to float over his house? He doesn't like drones. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/apr/21/drones-google-eric-schmidt

In fact, in real socialist states, the idea is that you cannot own real estate. Your house gets assigned to you, and when you leave it you give it back. So everyone would get equal treatment and opportunities. In reality, what happened is that members of the upper bureaucracy were assigned big houses while regular people got anonymous sleep points. So the class structure was there, with bureaucracy replacing aristocracy/bourgeoisie.

The importance of FLAC lies in its storage capabilities, not in its playback ones. With FLAC you can store a sound, then edit, then store it again, an infinite number of times, without the stored sound representation losing one bit of its quality. With MP3s, even high quality ones, it’s not the case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_humour

Huh? Because I think that X is not dead yet? You're reading too much in my comment.

Why, did the machines running X ever outnumber the Macs at any point in history? Also, Windows is not UNIX, and neither is Android, which isn't even a desktop OS, so why would their prosperity be a measure of the "death" of X as a windowing system for UNIX?

First the ribbon, then the user interface formely known as Metro, and now they've taken Firefox, too! I feel trapped into a nightmare, where every application is becoming WinAmp.

I'm confident, however, that sooner or later this will end - and they'll introduce new revolutionary software products with a uniform appearance, and user interfaces exposing consistent and predictable behaviour. Why, Microsoft have already started, they've reintroduced the Windows 3.1 look-and-feel (flat controls, window title in the middle, system-modal dialog boxes taking up the whole screen) and they're selling it as a novelty. I'm less convinced, though, by the Windows 1.0 features they've been introducing as well (windows can't overlap, but hey, with the upcoming improvements you'll be able to run one application and a half at the same time! Conditions apply.)

Do the same people who are responsible for this initiative also get to make choices involving weapons?

You get code without symbol names and types, and that's assuming the authors hadn't outright obfuscated the code, otherwise you also get an entangled code flow.

For comparison we can paste the minified jQuery code into the excellent deminifier that was suggested in your link and compare the outcome with jQuery's open code; I can't directly paste snippets here because slashdot's lameness filter doesn't want me to.

They aren't focusing on "the script that makes text blink on some random website". They're worrying about the rising importance of Javascript in everyday computing, which should matter a lot for the FSF given that free software enthusiasts generally start coding on the software / hardware platforms that they use at home or at the school.

We're quickly heading into a future where personal computers are merely a frame running applications which actually are web sites residing on a remote host. So pushing for the adoption of free Javascript frameworks is getting just as important as promoting free C libraries and binaries has been until now.

The FSF had long seen this happening and they've been advocating for freedom in Javascript for years; while a lot of people laughed at them with straw men such as "meh, Stallman wants free blinking text", once again their position - which once appeared to many as a paranoid's stance - is reavealing itself to be quite insightful.