Certainly I know about Turing, and I know that the US still has problems which can be blamed, in part, on slavery, so I don't believe that homosexuality will stop being a social issue anytime soon, but that doesn't meant that such opinions should go unanswered. Certainly such opinions should never be censored, and he has every right to make unhelpful comments (as far as I'm concerned, his local laws may say otherwise), but such comments (probably unthinkingly) reinforce anti-homosexual opinion. Indeed, if there wasn't prejudice against non-heterosexuals, my comment would have been entirely redundant.

I think, perhaps, that I forgot how much stigma is attached to homosexuality simply because the CS department at my uni (where I spend much of my time) has so many bisexual and homosexual students (approximately 70% of the male domestic students, mostly bisexual[1][2]), that it is generally assumed that any stranger who says they are heterosexual is probably in the closet and merely haven't spent enough time with sufficiently open people[3] to feel comfortable coming out (this is backed up by the fact that many of those who are completely out at uni are completely in the closet to their families).
In such an environment it is easy to forget what the real world is like, and even that one small department is not representative of the rest of the tech world.[4]

[1] I know this because last year someone posted "do it, faggot" on a departmental discussion board, which raised the question of "Which one?" and so lead to an informal study of students' sexuality. The methodology was simple but reasonably sound, albeit rather too long to put in a footnote.

[2] This, incidentally, made the CS club almost certainly the second-gayest club on campus (after the queer club), and far in excess of the "progressive" clubs who make a political stand on gay rights.

[3]Mild autism-spectrum disorders are fairly common, so there is a reasonable base of students who just don't care much about the social stigma, and a core of already-out students and a fairly small department all help here.

[4] wow that was long:
TL/DR: I know, but I thought it should be said. I forgot the real world, sorry..

It annoys me a little to see homosexuals lumped in with criminals and near criminals (by which I assume you mean grey marketeers, almost-but-not-quite fraudsters, and people who are connected with, but not directly involved in, crime), because homosexuality isn't and shouldn't be a crime, or with whores, because homosexuality/bisexuality is orthogonal to prostitution (and promiscuity).

Certainly there is much in common between honey trapping and prostitution, and there are no doubt homosexual honey traps, bit it seems very unlikely that a significant proportion of homosexual CIA employees are engaged in such work.

In 1999, there was a report within Australia's Howard government (not sure if it was a government report or a party-aligned think-tank's report) which said that the only good reason for keeping copyright for more than a few (as in 5 or so) years on anything other than books was because of WTO sanctions, because most so-called "creative industries" didn't actually rely on long copyright (TV is mostly from Australian content laws or stuff like news, films make most of their money in the first few years, musicians tend to leave the country when they make a significant proportion of their income from recording, and software is mostly bespoke or in-house work), and Australia's balance of trade for copyright royalties was unfavourable. (I haven't managed to find this report, I heard about it from one of a Howard-era Communications Minister's electoral staff, who said (rightly) that they'd have been crucified by News Limited if they'd found out.)

If enough other countries find the same thing, then maybe the WTO rules will change, unless NewsCorp makes politicians unable to do anything about it, of course.

Some friends of mine from uni wrote a shell script to use finger to get a list of users, remove their name from the list, then look up each logged in user's classes (from LDAP, then from the university calendar to convert codes to English), what year they are in, whether domestic or international, and a whole load of other details from LDAP, and present them in an easy to read report. More recent versions try to scrape facebook for mutual friends, interests and so on (and a photo, to prevent name collisions causing embarrassment). When they saw a pretty girl in the labs, they'd ssh into her computer and use the details to provide a conversation starter.

It started out as about 100 characters of bash, and got a little out of hand, but it did work. Personally, I suspect most of the benefit came from the effect of an epic kludge on a CS student than the intended conversation, since it was usually fairly obvious that the suer had a load of her personal information, and explaining that you'd written a script to look them up is a lot better than seeming like a stalker.

I was actually thinking of his later lack of common sense, so perhaps "competent" would have been better than "sane". If he hadn't, for example, forgotten the point of invading the USSR and actually captured the oilfields instead of getting distracted by Stalingrad, or if he had tried to persuade the Japanese to attack Siberia rather than China (they drew up plans for both), or if he had continued the Battle of Britain for a little longer (whether this counts depends on how good his intel was), or if he hadn't declared war on the USA (although it is sometimes said that he thought Japan would declare war on the USSR if he did, so this might not be entirely his fault), then things *might* have gone very differently.

Where I live (a first-world nation) it is very unusual for anyone living outside of a city or large town to have mains water, and most of those people drink rainwater collected from their roofs. Some, but not many, use a reverse osmosis plant to purify their drinking water, and a large minority use a little pool chlorine in their tanks in summer, but generally people don't really think much of drinking virtually unfiltered rainwater (those filter jugs are fairly common, but they don't do anything about small particles), without much in the way of health problems from it.

(I'm not saying that rainwater is as safe as mains, but it isn't really worth worrying about.)

On reflection, it is probably a good think that people like the GGP are useless, because if they were competent, they might actually gain and keep some power. Just imagine how bad a sane Hitler could have been.

It would work, but only in a way which is morally unacceptable to almost everyone: send them back there where there is less infrastructure, and then cut off all non-military aid so they die younger. Only a rabid far-right nutjob would say this is a good idea, but it does reduce the world's population. However, it isn't even a very practical idea: if you didn't care at all about the welfare of these people, it would be more effective to simply enslave or hang them.

Just to make it clear, I think that such a plan is unacceptable, but incompetence irritates me, and the GP was very incompetent.

Octave lacks symbolic calculus, which (apart from general arithmetic and playing a Doom-clone) was what I used my calculator most for in high school. To be fair, though, they have since banned those calculators in final-year high school exams in my state, and in all university maths exams, and only a few schools used them, even though they were very good value-for-money, and fairly cheap.

I think scilab might have a symbolic toolkit, although last time I wanted to use it I gave up trying to translate the documentation from allegedly-English to actual English and sshed into a machine with matlab. The trouble with scilab (at least around 2 years ago) was that while it seems like a pretty good system, it had a gui straight out of 1990 (rather, there was a big edit box with command-line scilab, a few motif widgets for fairly trivial operations, and a pretty minimal editor: they almost needn't have bothered, curses would have served them better) and the documentation was pretty appalling (although the French documentation is probably a lot better)

The simple and obvious solution to that is to require papers to be submitted in PS, PDF, plain unicode text, or hard copy. Any sane document preparation system can produce any of those output formats (well, a minimal POSIX-compliant system might not, but that is hardly "sane" in the sense of high-school students), and every modern OS has readers for all 3 electronic formats.

I'd say a better analogy is trespassing: If you have a garden with no fence and I decide to walk across it, that's perfectly allowed unless you see me and tell me to leave, or put up a keep out sign. If you put up a fence, even if it is one I can just jump over (WEP), then I'm not allowed to wander around, and I'm not allowed to do any damage even if there is no fence.

(IANAL, and I'm not from .US)

He's got some facts, mixed up with a lot of bull. Adelaide does have a few important marginals, but the Family First Party (Protestant right, Australia's version of the Christian lobby) are most popular in safe Labor seats, where they are still far less popular than the Liberals (centre-right to almost FFP, with a very few classical liberals), and the Greens (centre-left to far-left, although the parliamentary party is more moderate than the members) are more popular than the FFP, and tend to get a significant protest vote.

Also, the worst Senator of them all, Sen. Fielding, is a Victorian FFP senator, who has long been in favour f the filter

A 5-way security indicator would be good:

1. HTTPS with an EV certificate - maybe dark green?
2. HTTPS with an ordinary CA certificate - light green
3. HTTPS with a self-signed cert, possibly also a CA certificate for a higher level domain but not valid for that domain (just example.com, not *.example.com) or a CA cert which is expired - yellow
4. HTTP - white
5. HTTPS with a completely invalid key, or a self-signed key which has changed since the last access to that site (perhaps with an exception when the old cert expired) - red, with a warning

(of course, the colours should actually be taken from the OS theme and preferences colours, if there any appropriate colours)

He's unlikely to go, unless his state branch and his faction decide to drop their support of him, since he was fairly high up the Labor list (for foreigners: the Senate uses PR to elect the Senators for each state). However, there is a fair chance that Labor will lose the next election, although even if Andrew Bolt's (a right-wing columnist) comment that all Labor have to spin on is pointing at Abbot (the opposition leader) and going "look at him" is correct, that's still a pretty sound argument in their favour. As one piece of doggerel that I've seen scrawled on many walls around the place ends:

Take them away, both in a hearse,
Rudd's bad, but Abbott's worse

which seems to be a fairly popular opinion.

There was a rumour going around a couple of months back that he had suggested that the Great Barrier Filter should MITM HTTPS traffic. I expect he was told that the banks would be very unhappy if he banned encryption, and someone explained the idea of MITMing secure traffic, and then he forgot the part where they told him that that was almost as bad and the banks wouldn't like that either.

I never managed to find a source for that, but it is unfortunately rather plausible,