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I've bookmarked GhostText as a potential replacement for It's All Text, though I'm still holding onto FF56 for NoScript, the Debian testing package (it landed in unstable just today), and a few security fixes (like this DOMParser cookie bug). It actually looks better in some regards. Learn more on its GitHub page.

Yes, but factor in the lifetime of those things. I remember that we had our first TV for about 10 years, the second still lasted about 8. Today you're lucky if yours lasts you five. And don't get me started on computers.

The reason for this is that devices were repairable back then. And given the cost, repairing them was actually a GOOD idea.

But when it is simply impossible to repair your electronic devices anymore, you have to replace them. And yes, they got cheaper, at least relatively, but not by the factor 5 they would have to get cheaper to reach the lifetime cost of the old ones.

House prices were nearly stable until the late 1960s when they started to rise, getting a first surge in the late 1980s and again a huge one in the 200s (source). We're looking at prices nearly reaching ten times the 1960s levels. I guess we can agree that this is a wee bit above the income development.

I do remember that my dad, back when I was a kid, managed to get a 20k loan to fix our house. Wasn't easy, because the banks didn't even consider the house worth that much. Today, the same house (with some minor improvements, granted, but that didn't turn a shack into a mansion) could be sold for close to a quarter million.

This is what drives people nuts. They cannot afford moving out. Because they just can't find a place to stay in they could possibly afford.

The OP mentions iftop & resource monitor. I wonder if they're seeing the results of DNS Prefetching? That's something Firefox and Chrome have been doing forever. It doesn't hit the webserver, just resolves the domain name to an IP address in case you hit a link.

Or are they only looking at the new tab page? According to the docs they linked to, the speculative connect API is only used in a few spots in the Firefox UI, not on random webpages.

there are some field monitors for video/film work out there that have fullhd resolution. you'd still need an external battery and they are probably way more expensive than anything you'd want to spend on a monitor (think 1-3 13inch MBPs), but still... maybe - with a little bit of hacking - you could get something like an ipad retina display and hook it up to your computer. have a look at this: http://emerythacks.blogspot.co.at/2013/04/connecting-ipad-retina-lcd-to-pc.html

As usual, this is just a press release full of hype.

They didn't discover dark matter. They measured, with higher precision than ever, the excess in the positron fraction coming from cosmic rays. The existence of this effect, however, was already well-established. The question that was open, and still is, is which is the origin of this effect. One of the possible answers is dark matter. The problem with this answer is that we have to assume a discredited theory -- supersymmetry, and even within this theory a very artificial model of dark matter annihilation. The higher precision of the current measurements does not credence to this answer, nor does it discard more boring answers (i.e. coming from astrophysical processes that do not involve new physics). If you want to understand more about it, please read it from an actual particle physicist. I am a physicist, but not an astrophysicist nor a particle physicist.

Please keep in mind that I'm not criticising the AMS experiment itself: its job was to measure this excess with high precision, and this it did quite well. What I'm criticising is the people who have published this irresponsible press release.

Yes, some people are curious by nature.

This travelogue by a countryman of mine is well worth reading, even though the English is a bit rusty:

http://vienna-pyongyang.blogspot.co.at/2008/04/how-everything-began.html