If you like this, you may like "Escher and the Droste effect"[1][2] and the "Lotsa Escher"[3] screensaver as well.

1. http://escherdroste.math.leidenuniv.nl

2. http://www.ams.org/notices/200304/fea-escher.pdf

3. http://wakaba.c3.cx/s/lotsablankers/lotsaescher

The Xen hypervisor relies on a curious mix of Python and OCaml.

Isn't Riak mostly platform-independent Erlang?

It is - the 'ported' keyword in FreeBSD world means added to Ports tree, and that it will be available as a binary package from freebsd.org repositories.

Use a space-filling curve?

this a a cute idea, but i don't know of one (on the surface of a sphere). do you? also, are all space-filling curves uniformly dense in the limit? (presumably it depends on how you transform from a plane to a sphere, and if you get that right, you can just use it directly)

If everyone used Tor they wouldn't stand out individually, and I think it's fair to assume Schneier offered his suggestions in that sense.

But there is still the problem that it offers no anonymity against the NSA and he is suggesting that it does.

Just like the world wide web was nothing special since at the time it was invented

  * tcp/ip and the internet had been around for a good while
  * client/server document browsing had been around for a good while and
  * hypertext documents with clickable links generated from markup
    had been around for while (microsoft help viewer)

The ideas behind the WWW had been floating around for a good while. TBL just went ahead and made it.

Crockford's story [1] behind the genesis of JSON is similar. Everything was already there, but he's the one who formalized it gave it an official home. That helped propel it to its current level of popularity. The fact that he didn't create javascript, the internet, the www, tcp, etc is not relevant.

[1] http://www.yuiblog.com/blog/2009/08/11/video-crockford-json/