Informed users have any number of plugins to ensure their privacy while browsing. I personally use ghostery (breaks a minimum of sites), Adblock (currently disabled, but doesn't reall break anything) and NoScript (which makes browsing hell, but does a damn good job). Plus I block third party cookies and clear all other cookies on browser restart, clear all flash cookies on restart via Ghostery (and store them in a ramdisk for good measure) and disable HTTP referers (depressingly spelled incorrectly). Nothing's more annoying than sites that use referers as a form of authentication, so I generally just sign on to those services less. Finally, I've started doing sensitive things (logging into email/banking) in a private tab, thanks to LinkedIn's kindly alerting us to how people may like to abuse your sessions on other sites. If I get really paranoid about this, then I'll just start doing this stuff in a VM instead. I'm sure that there's more that can be done, which I'll research in my spare time, but as long as I have control of my device (which you damn well better believe I do... I hope) then tracking is a game that's bent towards those being tracked, and we should be able to adapt to whatever they do.

But for those users who don't know/care, fine with me. Advertisers prey on the ignorant and they are the ones that make the market work. They're also the ones that make the market crash due to vulnerability to idiotic schemes like the sub-prime mortage crisis and ponzi schemes a la Madoff, but it's a valid trade-off.

More likely than not, there are likely components which will have to be entirely rewritten. While many of the bugs are trivial defects, it looks like in many areas, the design is just inherently flawed at the root. Particularly seeing the performance issues, I can't help but believe that it's just fundamentally architected in a very poor way, and while there might be quick hacks to at least get it standing, it won't really be functioning properly without seriously ripping out the internals.

But let's take a wait-and-see approach, now that we're calling the competent engineers in....

Correct. It would take closer to 5...

For some reason, this doesn't seem to be a very coherent argument....

Take a quote out of context? Why I would never!

There's a simple solution: forcing companies to lend their cables to other companies.

But the Supreme Court killed that one.

Excuses. Just fuck the bureaucracy already and get the job done. If America wants to stay relevant, that is.

We're talking about the country that once prided itself on getting shit done. What happened to those folks? Did principles die away with them?

Yes, but what happens to the information in the packet - is it destroyed or not?

Not really. It's as mature as any other operating system, if not, more mature (apt vs whatever you have on Windows or OS X for example, more customizable desktops and better defaults). That doesn't mean that it doesn't take effort to use a new OS - just that people aren't willing to put the effort in, or they're waiting for some program to get ported over. Or they won't learn to use alternatives which often have the same functionality as other programs but once again, aren't interested in learning to use them in a new way (which isn't wrong, so much as it is sad, but really the greater mistake is using platform-restricted programs in the first place).

But the Linux ecosystem is perfectly rich enough for users who are either willing to switch and put the effort in, or already have and are satisfied. And I think the rate of users who are satisfied when they do make the switch is perfectly good, if not remarkably so, and will continue to ensure the livelihood of the environment.

They also have that stop and frisk/abuse/violate law. Hard to imagine one more anti-freedom than that.

Add to the list:

* using a DVR that I can build myself - not some craptastically power-hungry, crippled, lethargic device to which I don't have the source code and root access
* no blackouts. the internet never has blackouts (unless you count ICE's authoritarian intervention).

As long as his friend isn't writing the actual code himself, then a scripting language should be perfectly sufficient. I know C, C++, Java as well as anyone else I know, and do a considerable amount of development in them, but when I was running simulations in graduate school, I didn't touch C++ once - all I used was Scheme the front-end to my simulation package), Python (glue) and bash (a little more glue). Worked great for me, and I'm a fine developer in any maintstream language.

No.

http://googlefiberblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/some-clarification-for-small-businesses.html