Emacs scripting is better than that in vim. Vim's scripting language is an abomination, and although it has some scripting bridges to other languages, they are not always installed and bring in big external dependencies. On the other hand, emacs' user interface works on the assumption that a 105-key keyboard means a 105-fingered user. Being able to use emacs' scripting facilities with vim's interface might be quite tempting.

I think you're confusing vim with nvi. Vim is the one that has a load of features not present in the original vi (e.g. syntax highlighting and persistent undo).

Did they benefit? How many other companies went out of business because they couldn't compete with a big company that had a tax exemption? How much did they actually pay per job (some tax breaks for datacentres have worked out to about $1m of tax exemption per job - even over a decade that's unlikely to be a good deal).

A widescreen 27" monitor is fine for portrait windows. I typically have some terminal windows, web browsers, and PDF windows open, and most of them are portrait. The advantage of the landscape monitor is that I can fit them side by side easily. There's easily space for a couple of portrait-A4 windows on the screen for documentation / procrastination and for my terminals floating either below or between them.

The main reason for landscape monitors is that most humans have two eyes that are next to each other. This means that they have a field of view that is much wider than it is tall. You need fewer eye (and head) movements to see all of a wide monitor than a tall one.

Coffee is black. Milk with a hint of coffee bean is an entirely different drink. Places like Starbucks put a lot of milk and sugar into their drinks to disguise how bad the coffee is, but if you get a decent blend (I'm particularly partial to 50:50 mocha and mysore) then you have a rich - and not too bitter - drink that you can sip enjoyably.

It varies a lot from person to person. If I forget to drink coffee for a couple of days, I spend a day or two with a splitting headache, no energy, and a sick feeling all over. I'm then fine. Some people have the same symptoms for longer, others just have mild lethargy.

The difference tends to be that Apple violates your privacy because they're not very competent, Google does it because it's part of their business model. It seems more likely that Apple will eventually learn how to hire competent people than that Google will completely change its business model.

Not sure about the USA, but on this side of the pond it's illegal to have a speedometer that is more than a 10% error (I think, possibly 7%), and the bias must be in towards higher speeds. If they gave him a car with a speedometer that inaccurate, then that's a much bigger story.

Because they understand economics. A good strategy for any industry is to commoditise complementary markets. If you make films, you want the equipment required to watch films to be cheap so that people wanting to spend money on films give the majority of it to you, and the best way of making this happen is ensuring that there are a lot of competing manufacturers of film-playing equipment able to play the recordings you produce. DRM can only work by restricting access to keys that are shipped to clients, so you artificially limit the number of people creating the playback hardware or software. The artificial scarcity reduces competition and pushes the cost up. Worse, it makes the holder of the authoritative keys more powerful. Remember when the iTunes store had DRM for music? Anyone wanting to sell music had to agree to Apple's conditions. The reason the music labels ditched DRM was that it was the only way of breaking Apple's monopoly. The movie studios, with their insistence on Silverlight DRM, are trying to put Microsoft in the same position.

More importantly, it prevents the creation of new and innovative players by anyone other than the existing manufacturers. In under 20 years saw the normal way of playing back music shift from shiny disks to tracks on a large storage device. We haven't seen the same shift for movies, because they had tighter DRM and so there was nothing like iTunes for DVDs (open source tools exist, but any time they are shipped in something that looks like a commercial product the studios sue the manufacturer out of existence).

And then what? My browser gets a key, it decrypts the media, and it dumps it to a file. What has the DRM accomplished, other than to burn some cycles (and, hence, battery life) on my mobile device?

SPARC64 used to be great for that. i386 was little-endian, had loose alignment requirements, and was 32-bit. SPARCv9 was big-endian, had strict alignment requirements, and was 64-bit. If your code ran on both, it would run pretty much anywhere. Now, it's a bit less clear. MIPS32 is a pretty good alternative, and is still shipping in a fair number of machines (although mostly embedded and especially NAS type systems). Between x86-64 and MIPS32, you have the same pairings, just slightly different (32-bit, strict, big endian, vs 64-bit, loose, little endian).

Not just the SMP support. Linux does completely braindead things with the MMU. I was shocked at how much faster NetBSD was on our SPARCstation 2s. Not just benchmarks-run-faster, but users-easily-notice-the-difference speed increases. They made pretty good X terminals, the main limitation was that the framebuffers could only handle 256 colours.

15W is still quite a lot, for what it does. A vaguely modern mobile phone or even something like a Raspberry Pi can emulate a C64 with under 1W of power draw, and will have HDMI so you can drive a TFT without having to power an ADC to generate the digital picture.

I'm not sure where the OP was from, but in the UK you also get much bigger constituencies for the Euro elections than the national elections and have multiple MEPs per constituency. This means that smaller parties are much more likely to be represented than in the national elections. The most competent of my elected representatives has been my MEP.

Bribery is only needed by bad lobbyists. The ones that are good at their jobs, like the MPAA and RIAA, appear to be representatives of an industry and therefore experts on a particular subject. Politicians are not expected to be experts on everything, they are expected to be willing to take advice from experts. When they need to draft a new law, the solicit the opinions of experts. The competent lobbyists have already insinuated themselves into the system and so are invited, as experts, to provide opinions to the politicians. Some of them really are experts, others are paid shills. The politicians, not being experts, are usually not able to distinguish the two.