Au contraire.. it's probably one of the few countries where there is a place for this. In Europe, Greenbaum would now face a lawsuit because of privacy violation (I'm sysadmin in Germany, I am well aware that I would probably lose my job if I did what that Greenbaum guy has done).

3 - Cut and Paste really isn't an issue anymore, either.

I beg to differ - it wasn't an issue, but now it is one. Once upon a time, every app supported the standard way of cut and paste (right and middle mouse button).. but now we have apps who do it like this, and others who want me to do Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V because someone thought it would be cool to emulate MS Windows and force me to get my hand from the mouse and to the keyboard. And then there are apps where cut and paste would work one way for some input fields, and the other way for some other input fields...

The Linux manpage (on Ubuntu 8.04) says ldd prints the shared libraries required by each program or shared library specified on the command line. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that the program is executed, and doesn't contain any security warning. If there is no hint of the problem at the primary source of usage information, then the issue IS undocumented.

I offer some of my software for 'pick your price'. I recommend a price, but clearly state that any price is ok. Most buyers buy at the recommended price. Very few pay significantly less (pay is through Paypal, which I think imposes a minimum price of $1). And - not quite unexpectedly - almost nobody ever pays more :-)

They probably don't care that much about MySQL, that isn't why they bought Sun(or why IBM tried to buy Sun earlier). To be honest, I don't think they ever thought that the whole MySQL thing would cause them the dramas it has, especially not during the whole global recession when everyone was approving everything.

Now of course, they probably think that going ahead as is will take them less time than backing out and trying to sell off the MySQL component of Sun, getting that sale approved, and then trying to run the acquisition through again. Sun doesn't really have all that much longer to live, and if Oracle were interested in trying to grab up Sun assets at the bankruptcy fire sale, they'd have just waited for Sun to collapse on its own. If the EC ordered them to sell off MySQL as soon as possible as part of the deal, they'd probably still go through with it. They just don't care that much about MySQL.

Correlation is not causation, anecdotes is not data, etc., but you're not making the case for vaccines with that one.

And look at where the to individual contributors are from.

syslogd on every modern unix is capable of routing to a specific log file for a specific app. If the basic syslogd isn't enough, your loghost can run syslog-ng or any of the other more powerful syslog daemons. You only have to replace the one on the server, the other clients should just be forwarding EVERYTHING to it.

Of course at this sort of level, you'd probably save yourself a metric assload of trouble if you implemented a proper network monitoring/management server.

Myself, having only 15 or so hosts to deal with, most of which aren't chattery just use ssh + a colorizer script I wrote for my purposes. I typically leave it running on a spare monitor all the time.

Spots -do- change line positions. The reason is that the star rotates, so half of the visible surface moves towards us, half of it recedes. Now imagine that part of either the receding or approaching surface is covered by a spot...

However, this also changes the shape of a spectral line, not just the position of the centre. This is why people do a 'bisector analysis' (basically, split line in half, compare right/left side to discover distortions).

Also, spot activity can be measured independently. With sufficiently big spots, the stellar rotation period can be determined photometrically (i.e. by measuring the periodic darkening in the stellar luminosity). Or one can infer the period from the doppler broadening of the lines caused by stellar rotation. Spot activity also shows up by certain emission lines in the spectrum (also for the Sun - these lines vary in intensity during the solar cycle).

Stellar pulsations are another problem, since unlike spots they don't change the line shape, so one can't rule them out with a bisector analysis. However, stellar pulsations would cause the star to periodically change its surface temperature and/or luminosity, which again can be measured independently.

It's the instrumentation that really counts. There are lots of old telescopes which just gather dust, because they have no competitive instruments attached to their focal plane. On the other hand, the success of the HARPS spectrograph clearly shows that even with old telescopes one can do great science.

However, 'ng' is a single phoneme, and 'sch' is also a single phoneme. So 'ngstschr' is 8 letters, but only 5 consonants, both in Dutch and German.

The biggest problem is plausible deniability - if they search your computer and find the software, how do you explain its presence?

There is really only one way to solve this problem: the software must credibly pass as malware. It must have at least some of the traits of malware, and it must be actively used as malware, otherwise it's not credible, and in sufficiently oppressive countries you will likely end in prison for just having it on your machine.

The existence of life can in principle be inferred from the composition of a planets' atmosphere, which could be determined spectroscopically. E.g. earths' atmosphere is oxygen-rich, which would not be possible without life (oxygen is agressive, and would disappear quickly by forming compounds with surface minerals, if it wasn't replenished by photosynthesis).

There is research on ways to do this, and on the kind of instruments that would be required. However, this research focuses on life as we know it, which requires water. 'Hot Jupiters' like this planet are much too hot, and most scientists would not seriously consider them candidates for any kind of life.

Saturns' moon Titan is close to the methane triple point, which is one of the prime reasons scientists are very interested in studying it.

Duh. I have a simple measurement for libc lack of quality: the number of #ifdef's I need to work around library bugs or oddities. *BSD beats all large commercial UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) and Glib combined. In all fairness, FreeBSD is better than OpenBSD, but both show the lack of developer manpower.