Actually, after the case was remanded the copyright office said that while they were a CATV system they could not just pay the compulsory licensing fees for some reason, it was a bizarre Catch 22 situation where they were a cable system for purposes of public retransmission under copyright law, but not for licensing purposes. Frankly it struck me as yet more proof of how corrupt and dysfunctional the system is.

Eh? The C++ standard explicitly forbids "void main()". From the standard:

An implementation shall not predefine the main function. This function shall not be overloaded. It shall have a return type of type int, but otherwise its type is implementation-defined. All implementations shall allow both of the following definitions of main:

int main() { /* ... */ }

and

int main(int argc, char* argv[]) { /* ... */ }

It's quite obvious, actually... it's not the default because it doesn't work as well for most people. Verbatim is good when you're searching for fairly specific terms, spelled correctly. If you're asking a more general question, with words that may appear in many variations, or if you don't spell well or are lazy, then the "new" Google works dramatically better.

I think a lot of complaints about Google search today, especially by people who have been around for a while, really boil down to the fact that the old search tricks don't work very well any more. In the early days of search we all learned how to create effective search queries, by picking carefully targeted search terms, combining them in particular ways, omitting any extraneous or "filler" words and lots more that make search queries look very different from natural language. But the search engines (or at least Google) have been changing along with the user base, which is now comprised of almost entirely non-technical people who haven't been using the web for long enough or heavily enough that they learned to compose searches that catered to the engines' weaknesses.

So, today, Google focuses on optimizing for the now-common case of search queries which are most often natural language questions, typed quickly and carelessly. The search engine tries hard to figure out what the user meant, rather than what they said. To those accustomed to being very precise and saying exactly what they mean, this is somewhat infuriating, because they don't want the machine to guess at what they meant, they told it what they meant. For the average user, though, who is more accustomed to dealing with people, who are good at guessing what is meant, the new system works much better.

Personally, I've adapted to the new reality. I tend to type complete sentences for my search queries, framed as questions, including typing the question mark (not because I think it's useful but just because I'm thinking a question sentence, so my fingers emit a question mark). I also don't worry much about typos. I find it works very well, often much better than what I can get with an "old-style" query, with or without "verbatim".

(Disclaimer: I work for Google, but on Android, not search. All of the above is just my personal experience plus speculation, not inside information.)

Would governments be the only clients that private clouds truly make sense for?

Nah, we're on the small side of the S&P 500 and our "private cloud" has enough spare capacity to bring entire new projects online, spin up testing instances, provide an entire parallel Citrix farm (we're upgrading and want to have the old farm available for fallback in case we hit a critical bug), and still provide for the failure of up to two hosts without any overprovisioning. Infrastructure hardware and operating costs are less than 5% of our annual IT budget. For most companies that aren't doing massive public websites people and software costs will dominate over the cost of infrastructure.

Why is this important to you? Serious question. I don't really have an opinion on it, myself, but it seems to me that all of the arguments against systemd are based on factual errors (e.g., that it's monolithic, and therefore not UNIXy) and inertia, or on defects that are clearly just packaging/configuration bugs. I found Russ Allberry's analysis pretty compelling. Why do you disagree?

I'm really wondering what I'm missing here, because this seems like much ado about nothing, and I haven't been able to get anyone who is really concerned about it to explain why it's really a big problem.

Your comment confuses me.

You start by saying that the proposal, that packagers be required to maintain support for systems without systemd, is untenable. Then you point out that Debian should realize that users can code rc-init support for packages if they want to. I agree with all of that: Debian is going systemd, and shouldn't burden package maintainers with supporting non-systemd initialization, and users who don't like that can code rc-init scripts for the packages.

But then you say that Debian should give users the choice. Did you just finish pointing out the users do have the choice, since they can code it themselves if they want, and that the burden for this shouldn't be placed on maintainers?

Also, I think you meant to say "wealth", rather than "dearth" (which means a lack, not an abundance). But maybe you did mean dearth and I'm just not understanding what you're trying to say.

I installed it last night on all domain controllers after testing it in my isolated testing network. It's not really optional since it allows any domain user to become domain admin and the only resolution to that is a domain rebuild or authoritative restore. It's also already been seen in attacks in the wild so you can assume the next client to get driveby malware will be going for domain admin.

Interesting, this page is the one I went on for the 13th by metro area. I guess you'd have to look into the links and figure out what stats they're each basing their rankings on.

It's the 4th largest by city proper population after mexico city, new York, and LA, but 13th largest by metro area.

No, the TLS flaw was MS14-066 and it affects XP as well but there is no generally available fix for it since XP is out of extended support. If you care at all about security you're no longer using XP so the fact that there is another critical flaw isn't going to significantly change the situation.

Chrome not properly handling some TLS1.2 cyphers is hardly an MS bug, though they do have a workaround for compatibility if you need it.

It's not a question of technology... many states don't have toll roads.

Which is why Uber now provides a $1M policy covering all of their drivers. Does that address that issue?

Okay, but is there any evidence that actually accomplishes anything? Assuming that there is, and that it's useful, then why not just require a background check?

Is there any evidence their screening is inadequate?

And what about a medallion? Bonding? And is race discrimination a problem at Uber or Lyft (or in any cab company these days)?

I do have to give you that you're the first to even attempt to dig into the underlying issues, though. Kudos for that.

Check out this map for an idea of minimum safe frost depths across the country, plenty of populated places are well below 4', and even those that are close to 4' probably have competing uses for that space just below the frost line. Then again with a horizontal bore cable layer it doesn't really matter whether it's 2' or 8' deep, the impact at the surface is all in the weight of the machine and the footprint of its treads.