It would be helpful if there were a (high-level is OK) product plan for Firefox, Thunderbird, and Seamonkey. A quick glance/search did not reveal such a plan. What are the driving factors influencing development?

Personally, I think any substantive change should come with a migration strategy. I.e., if you are going to change the way plugins are handled, then also provide a way for me to migrate all of my plugins to the new format. (I shudder to think of all the coding and testing hours which were simply discarded when Firefox made the old plugin model obsolete. I'll bet no developer has added those hours up when implementing a change.)

I also think that users should be given choices: If I like a capability and you don't, that's fine. But rather than shoving a change down my throat, give me (and you) the option of turning it on or off. That way we're both happy.

One final comment: I agree with the general sentiment that the Firefox/Thunderbird/Seamonkey development team is arrogant and out of touch with the needs of many users. A little more of, "What do you think of this?" would be enormously helpful.

I wonder. Are all proteins capable of being misfolded in a prion-like way?

My first month was last month and I spent less than one half of what I used to spend, so I'd say that it's a deal. And I got free tethering and no AT&T or Samsung bloatware and the ability to unlock my boot loader. So, all in all, 5 stars out of 5 ... so far.

I've been using Arch now for over 5 years now and Linux (Unix) for decades, and I recall only one instance of Arch breakage after an update. I run (or ran) Arch on an ancient i686 dual PIII file server, a Gateway netbook, a Lenovo T420i laptop, and now a (wonderful!) ASUS UX305F ultrabook. Your experience does not match mine, and certainly doesn't match the experience of the Window 10 user who comments later.

Linux is not for everyone. Just like (La)TeX or Emacs are not for everyone. I've forgotten who said it, but Unix gives you many "words" and a "grammar" with which you can build sentences, and from these sentences, paragraphs. Windows and OS X give you many sentences that you can re-arrange to form paragraphs, but the sentences have been chosen for you beforehand. Carefully chosen to be useful, but nonetheless chosen for you.

It takes more effort to learn the vocabulary and the grammar, and the sentences you first come up with are near nonsense. But patience, a certain tolerance for error, grit, a desire to be your own master, and a willingness to experiment allow you to have a computer system (editor, publishing system) that does what you want it to do.

But, as I said, Linux is not for everyone.

http://robwhess.github.io/open...

Is software (algorithms) patentable in Europe? Asia outside of China & Russia? (Effectively, nothing is patentable in China or Russia.)

It's more complicated that you make it sound. They were suddenly in the middle of a violent and unexpected thunderstorm. Their pitot tubes froze up and stopped working. That caused all the computers to shut down because the computers could no longer calculate anything (not knowing the plane's airspeed). That forced the pilots to fly "manually" (Airbus' are fly-by-wire), Yes, the pilots failed to follow procedure; yes, they are (or should be) trained to deal with sudden, potentially fatal emergencies; but your description doesn't do justice to the events.

Oh, BTW, I would rather have my pilots fresh and rested after a long trans-Atlantic flight using an auto-pilot, than have them fly the plane "manually" the whole flight. AF447 was in the middle of the Atlantic, for crying out loud.