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DNS blacklisting is useful and has its place, but I would expect a secure-by-default browser to not load any resources from domains outside the one in the requested URL (like lynx) and to provide a simple way to selectively whitelist external resources for that domain only (like the RequestPolicy Firefox extension). That's one important omission from your otherwise impressive list of features that will probably make me stick with Firefox + Vimperator + RequestPolicy.

Since switching to dwm, I can't even remember what I used a desktop environment for (I went from KDE to Gnome to XFCE to (black|flux)box to dwm). Based on your usage, I'm surprised you'd consider leaving xmonad for something as alien as KDE4. Give me the speed and screen real estate of a tiling window manager any day.

It's a very bad habit to use -p for every invocation of mkdir, and it's not appropriate in any of the examples where it's used. For one thing, it will never complain if you get the path wrong (provided you have the necessary permissions) which is particularly undesirable when doing remote work.

Darcs merits a nod, as well.

File and directory names can contain spaces and require special treatment. This should be addressed up front, before introducing commands with side effects.

Not necessarily. It only takes one bureaucrat to reject code that doesn't pass tests or follow required conventions. For example, a good rule of thumb is that no new code will be accepted without documentation.

Now I understand the reason for the existence of those annoying special-purpose CDN domains that I'm always forced to allow in RequestPolicy. Thanks for the explanation!

Well, then why not just use 1e100.google.com for this purpose? There's a reason it's called a domain, and it seems kind of silly to create and maintain unrelated hierarchies.

"Controversial work of art skyrockets in value."

Starting out with a calculation based on retail price is pretty shrewd and helps fuel the conversation.

Isn't that a false dichotomy? You left out completely free content, which is still abundant and could hold your attention each and every day. It seems most ad-driven sites are fueled by screen scraping or opining on external content without adding much value.

In practice, it seems that advertiser dollars always trump subscriber fees.

I wonder if there will be many winners from these music wars? I've been seeking out music released under Creative Commons licenses via Jamendo and the Internet Archive for a while now, and the quality and selection continues to improve (not just click hop, noise or tracker-based techno anymore). Most artists don't benefit from their relationships with labels, so anything that reduces their exposure can hurt their main sources of income (performances, merchandise, etc.). It will be interesting to see if new artists start ignoring labels because they simply aren't worth the trouble.

I dislike the trend towards light grey text on a white background. Unfortunately, the article itself is guilty of this. It's fine for timestamps and other page noise, but why dim a blockquote?