There have been solutions for this for ages.
The latest seem to be terminal servers (e.g. Oracle Secure Global Desktop) with time managed access to certain services.
Vendor calls customer, customer grants access for a specific user and system for a limited time, all on screen actions are recorded.

In the past more funny things existed. Some vendor support was by modem dial in only (e.g. EMC), so the customers had a switch that connected/disconnected the physical phone lines to prevent unwanted access.

Firefox and Chrome need to fit. Maybe that works for another 5 years and I need to re-install after 20 years. Would be okay, I guess.

I'm not re-installing to upgrade to amd64. As long as there is PAE, I'll stay with my x86 installation.

I re-installed my desktop end of 1996 and have only done in-place updates/upgrades since then.

Or maybe there is a way to do an in-place upgrade to amd64 or a mixture.

Many VWs have this standard or available as an option, too.
E.g for the Passat you get the tiredness detection, lane assistance (keeping you in the lane) and front assistance (keeping distance or doing emergency braking at city speeds).
It's probably more basic than the MIT stuff, but always expect next years models to have more and more advanced versions of those.
Commercial systems evading obstacles should be available in 2-3 years (e.g. from Continental).

China will never bomb anything in the USA. Think about it, why would they want to bomb their own property?

Of course they have. On anything that might allow copyright infringement (yes, printers, scanners, etc.). It's not a real tax, though, as it's unavailable to the government to use it for other stuff.

Maybe your 386 had its brakes on, not running at 25Mhz?
Booting Linux on a 25Mhz 68030 didn't take more than a few minutes and one of these small Linux distributions I recently tried on a 75Mhz 486 also booted within a couple of minutes.
So I guess you were doing something wrong. It's not like nobody was using UNIX on 386 productively.

One thing one needs to understand when using the value of a "nice lunch" is that the definition of that will change over time.

After the war in Europe a "nice lunch" was probably more simple then it is now. Then, a "nice lunch" during the dot com boom might have meant something different for some of us then what it means now.

If you're into meat/beef you could just look at that which may have gone from "any meat" to "best filet" to "a nice burger".

Bullet trains started off at 200 mph 30 years ago and now reach 350+ mph on test runs. If we're now talking about a bullet train whose tracks will be built in 10 or 15 years and trains that will run in 20 years, there will be some room for improvement. 500+ is still a bit off, but I would expect 350+ mph if money is not a problem.

The the next generation of German bullet trains will actually top out at 143mph and 155mph for German and EU regulations allow the trains to be much cheaper built then.

You're right.

You would not be able to whitelist any command that may execute a third command, change file bits, change (i.e. specify output files) any script or command that IS in the whitelist, etc.

It's only really useful if you attach a company policy to it saying "we use this to log the commands you run, if you misuse it, you're a bad boy and will be reported".

Looks like they got it from people who got their computers back after they were busted?

Einstein traveling back in time to kill Hitler in 1924? You can read all about that scenario here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_%26_Conquer:_Red_Alert#Setting_and_story

This is interesting. So if the terrorist is on the soil of a nation that corporates with you, you ask to arrest him and ask for extradition.
So is Yemen a country that corporates with you or not? If not, then this seems to render some other arguments mood.

There seems to be a lot of cherry picking going on.

So if (in your country) suspected terrorists hide abroad it's okay to send drones to kill them? I wonder what the U.S.A. will have to say when the first Russian drones kill some suspected Russian "terrorists" hiding in New York. I'm sure those terrorists want Russia to crumble and I'm sure they would not try to turn themselves in at the Russian embassy.
But I guess that would be different because local Police forces in Yemen, Pakistan and other somehow always had been voluntarily leading the effort, while the US was only providing some technical help.

Germany to invest over the next 10 years in research of dealing with dismantling of nuclear power plants, safer final disposal of nuclear waste and also technology to transmute nuclear waste with long half-life periods to those with shorter ones.

We'll see who made the smarter move in 10 months or 10 years (depending on who you talk to).