There are possibilities that don't require an external infrastructure: just use NFC (or, if possible, a more secure equivalent) on the smartphone to exchange keys. This is what Threema does, and it isn't any more complicated than exchanging email addresses. Most people communicate mostly with people they know in the real world, after all.

A doubling every n years yields an exponential function, not a parabola.

Not everyone has a domain - what about my home network? Do I need to reserve a domain specifically for that?

It seems to me that a widespread deployment of SNI is a lot easier than a widespread deployment of IPv6. Note that IPv6 isn't enabled by default on Windows XP, so as an XP user you are out of luck either way.

The Swiss Franc? Unless you count things like exchange rate manipulation by the central bank, but that isn't really a collapse.

It's mainly a problem for Linux distributors: they stopped providing things like regression tests and security advisories. Source: https://mailman.archlinux.org/pipermail/arch-dev-public/2013-February/024478.html

Nothing particularly new.

No, Chrome's store is called Chrome Web Store and doesn't appear to be affected, Adblock et al. are still available.

You can already write your USB driver in Lua (or most other popular language out there) if you want to, completely in userspace: http://www.libusb.org/#Bindings. No need for it to be in the kernel.

I don't know if it's more or less clean to use environment variables, but it certainly is easier. The official Gentoo wiki recommends it to set the locale, anyway. And, well, in Gentoo you need to do stuff manually anyway, so no big difference there. :) Btw, it should read LANG=de_CH.UTF-8, of course. Anyway, I agree that it works much better on Linux than Windows or even Android. It's so annoying that having the language set to English makes it show American news in the Google News app.

For me, having LANGUAGE=de_CH.UTF-8 and LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8 works pretty well on Gentoo, without me having to create my own locale. Of course, occasionally I get a sentence which is half German, half English, especially in KDE, but I don't care much.

Consider me unimpressed. The Swiss military spent 750 Million Dollar on a similar system called "Führungsinformationssystem Heer" that also spectacularly failed to fulfill its intended purpose (or any other purpose, for that matter). While, in absoulte terms, this may not be quite as much as the US Air Force spent, you have to keep in mind that this is the equivalent of a seventh of the annual budget of the Swiss military. Also, they have not stopped this project yet, so there is no saying they won't exceed the US Air Force project.

Yeah, effortlessly navigating streets that don't exist...