So if you ever encounter any of these, it's worth giving the Konami Code a try, just to see if it will boost your rank. :-)

That's nice and simple and... completely, totally inhumane. Because, technologically speaking, preventing technological intercept of the things that we need to be private (and we do have an innate psychological need for privacy) is impossible for the common man.

(And incidentally, those who want Assange's head aren't motivated by privacy rights. In fact, you'd probably find very little support for privacy among that group. Look to raw authoritarianism and us-vs-them thinking for the source of their bias.)

Yes, everyone has beliefs, biases, and a worldview. But the term religion is a little bit more precise, and atheism in the general sense does not seem to have the dogma, strictures, rites, and communal/identity implications that we normally associate with religion. Perhaps more militant atheists groups would qualify for the label, but your general, everyday I-don't-believe-in-god type would not.

Incidentally, I would argue that your burning-ball-of-nuclear-fire hypothesis regarding the sun is not "faith" in the religious sense. Yes, you extend faith/credit to certain authorities and institutions in choosing to believe that claim, but if the question were ever to come into doubt, you could opt to mentally reexamine the issue without feeling that your identity was being ripped out. In my mind, religious faith implies having a certain feeling that you ought to believe something and resist challenging it, even when your natural mind wants to doubt it.

Every atheist thread seems to degenerates into semantic hair-splitting over the terms atheist and agnostic and what varying degree of confidence/belief/doubt they are suppose to represent. In my experience, this does not yield productive/interesting discussions.

Geeze Hatta, have some faith. If not in the Wayland developers themselves (who are also X developers and have some cred here, IIRC), then in the developers, distributions, and users of the Linux community writ large that will evaluate, integrate, and extend Wayland if it's advantageous over X or ignore if it's not.

Everyone, including the Wayland developers, understands that network transparency is a necessary, compelling feature. It may undergo a shakeup and it may not be fully baked on day 1, but it will happen.

It's not reinventing the wheel so much as reorganizing it to remove legacy cruft from the performance-critical hotpath b/t clients and hardware.

From the Wayland architecture overview:

Believe it or not, the utility and automotive industries are well aware of these issues. A lot of work is being done to anticipate the possible rise of electrical vehicles, integrate them with the smart grid, etc. etc.

Incidentally, winter peaks are going to be more challenging than summer, because they happen later in the evening (compare slides 30 [summer] and 31 [winter], here).

More like late-bound, text-based RPC that doesn't require asking permissions from the firewall gods. Add in some HTML/JS/CSS and you have a universal interface with no client-side deployment headaches and low barrier-to-entry for other developers. RPC was good for systems programming in a homogenous environment; web services (particularly the newer JSON/REST variants) are substantially better for application programming in our very heterogeneous world.

Sure, they're alike in sharing the essential feature of moving a method invocation across the network, but it's not always feature count or performance that makes a technology desirable. The creative potential of a tool is inversely proportional to the amount of setup/integration/deployment/configuration/documentation/coordination/change management needed to use it. Minimize the cost of initial setup and each subsequent version and you've got something that developers and IT departments find exciting.

Wayland has shot itself in the foot by being marketed as a replacement for X. But it's not really meant to be the entire car: this is just a new engine (that exploits low-level features of the Linux kernel). You could retrofit this engine into the old car (X Windows) or you can build entirely new cars with it. You won't see it on the highway tomorrow, but ~10-20 years from now it might be powering everything and putting a lot of exciting new cars on the road.

Um... I doubt the tooling costs for a little rubber coating would be all that significant for an existing cable manufacturer. If you have that idea first, you'd definitely wouldn't sit on it because your competition is going to figure it out sooner or later and snag (heh heh) the opportunity for product differentiation. You see, there is a motivation for R&D other than patents, and it's called market forces. Keeping your R&D at zero is an non-optimal strategy (classic prisoner's dilemma) when you have healthy competition. Heck, even if you had a monopoly on all cable manufacturing, it would still be smart to do the R&D so you can offer products at different price tiers (like how Monster makes a cadillac HDTV cable, cause some folks will always pay more).

Sorry you bought the Hollywood version. In my mind, the magic of science is NOT that it transform us (naturally selfish and biased) people into paragons of impartial objectivity, but that it provides tools and rules for testing our ideas to effect (out of imperfect man) an institution that achieves (or nearly achieves) those ideals over the long term. It has a self-correcting aspect to it that, um, most other human institutions lack.

Never. Security is subtle, complex, and in contention with most other design goals. Oh... you see attempts to build sandboxed hardware, OS'es, runtimes, and languages from the ground up, and these are worthwhile efforts, but as long as people are doing new stuff with computers, other people will finds ways to exploit it.

It opens up some fascinating possibilities... will we have destroyer-sized "micro-carriers" that can rack-and-launch an internal warehouse of drones with minimal crew? Or how about sub-carriers that surface, launch, and dive down again? Could a cargo plane (like the massive C-5 Galaxy) launch an entire squadron?

No. It's not a wild hypothesis... people of lower means are more easily deterred from accomplishing an objective when administrative hurdles are introduced. You seem to assume that these politicians are ignorant of demographics and voting patterns and so forth... that's nonsense.

No, it shouts to the world that lower- and working-class people are part of the Democratic base. I'm sure that includes many of the losers/illegals/trash you mention, but I'm not going to paint 50% of Americans [depending on what definitions of social class you use] with that brush.