I think you just answered the poster's question, by the way. SSH is quite good for what it does, but what it does doesn't cover every conceivable need.

A better question might be,"Why aren't we using SSH *in more situations where it might be useful*?"

The lack of features may be a feature.

The more features something has, the more likely an oversight in the design or implementation will prove to be a liability.

Long distances == lots of CO2.

I've crunched the numbers for various trips I commonly take. My share of CO2 emissions on a trip from my home in Boston to Sacramento California is going to be around 750 kg +/- 50 kg whether I (hypothetically!) drive (in my 34MPG highway car) or fly. Airplane CO2/distance figures overlap automobile considerably (185 - 277 grams/mile for air travel). Air travel CO2/mile is higher for short trips, but lower for longer trips because you amortize the CO2 emitted in takeoff over more miles.

Apples-to-apples comparisons can be tricky. Air itineraries can often take you far out of your way, forcing you to fly through hubs that aren't on a line as the crow flies. If I *did* choose to drive to Sacramento, it turns out the driving distance is astonishingly close to the great circle distance between the cities: 2600 miles vs 3000 miles.

So the answer isn't to avoid air travel. It's to travel wisely. Consolidate long trips. Plan ahead and get non-stop flights where possible, or at least book itineraries that have the minimum time in the air. Don't wait for the last minute and take a "bargain" itinerary that has you flying all over the place. Drive a fuel efficient car and use that for trips less than 250 miles or so. The Chevy Cruz Eco gets 42 mpg highway; if that doesn't appeal to you an Audi A6 gets 38 mpg, and is not exactly wearing a hair shirt.

Naturally. I should have stipulated that I wasn't particularly addressing you personally so if you took it that way I apologize.

You totally missed the point, which that the LP form factor is fun.

I took the original poster's "debatable" to mean "not worth debating", which of course a much more common than the sense you're using ("something worth debating").

I don't think there's any real disagreement here, other than what the thread should be about.

The poster didn't say that people couldn't find/post/send patches for bugs. Only that there weren't enough people doing so.

How many would be "enough"? I suppose enough so that exploits didn't happen before the maintainers were aware of them. Clearly, then, we don't have "enough" eyeballs of the right sort. But we have more than if the libraries were closed-source.

Which of course is somewhat more likely in a global warming scenario, but could happen nonetheless whether the globe was warming OR cooling.

We have to get past this mode of thinking like this: "It's May and we had to put the air conditioners in already, it must be global warming." Or this: "Temperatures outside are near-record lows. So much for global warming."

Global warming is an increase in the TOTAL kinetic energy of the atmosphere, which is a spherical shell 6371 km in radius and 100km thick. That shell is rotating so that at the equator it's moving roughly 1667 km/h and at the 0 km/h at the poles. As it rotates it is differentially heated in the southern and northern hemispheres by the Sun, and it interacts with oceans, mountains, terrain with various surface albedo, etc. This is responsible for the counterintuitive fact that the average January high for Boston in 37F and the average for Glasgow is 41F, even though Boston sits at 42 degrees north latitude and Glasgow at 56. Nain, Newfoundland and Labrador is at the same latitude as Glasgow and has an average January high of 7F.

We all know this, but somehow this knowledge flies out the window when it comes to our intuitions about what a warming globe means. Our intuitions about global warming treat the atmosphere as a stationary, shallow, well-mixed pool that may be hotter at one end than the other, but distributes heat in a simple and predictable way through diffusion. But if you think about what the atmosphere actually *is* what even a non-specialist knows it behaves like, it shouldn't be surprising to find some place places get colder in a "warming" scenario, somewhat more get warmer, and quite a few get warmer AND colder depending on the season.

The technical term would be 'seigniorage'.

"Inherently worthless" is the salient feature of money. When you trade things of intrinsic value you are bartering. It's only the fact that you were taught to value "dollars" without question that makes you think "$370 million" has any intrinsic value.

Well, we know the Nazi regime asembled ME 262s in an elaborate network of underground tunnels to avoid Allied bombers who late in the war were operating over Germany with near impunity. The tunnels were excavated and ME 262s assembled with Jewish slave labor under horrific conditions.

If you were involved with such a thing you'd have plenty of reason to keep it secret.

Well, putting on the uniform means you can be ordered to take actions that will result in property destruction and loss of life, and (a) you have to do it and (b) you enjoy some protection from legal consequences as a member of a uniformed service.

It's quite common (and legal under international law) for countries to execute "spies" for doing things that "soldiers" do all the time. As a soldier you can drop a bomb on a dam that kills people both directly and indirectly and you are not criminally responsible. But if you drop a "logic bomb" on an installation as a civilian contractor your status isn't so clear. If you travel overseas the target country might well try to extradite you under anti-hacking or anti-terrorism treaties.

Amazon sells books..

I've seen objects like this, multiple times, but I've always been able to explain in mundane terms after watching closely -- I'm the kind of guy who keeps binoculars in the car just in case the night skies are clear. I'd *love* to see an alien spaceship, but being a habitual sky watcher things that occasional sky watcher might take as a spacecraft look like ordinary phenomena to me.

And it's not because I only see what I'm told could be real. Decades ago I experienced something which science said was impossible: meteors shooting overhead with a rocket-like sound. The reason this is impossible is that meteors are fifty or a hundred miles up -- sound could not travel fast enough through the atmosphere. But I knew what I saw and heard, and in 2001 scientists actually observed this phenomenon, electrophonic meteors.

That's what *you* say.

Well, of course Google wants to bring products to market. The problem is that you can't take an organization that's fine tuned to efficiently deliver the same service or product year after year, then suddenly demand it start acting "innovative" when it becomes necessary to move with the times. So a lot depends on how likely you think it is that your business will be disrupted.

Suppose your company makes dog food. If you're forward looking, you might do a little R&D in dog nutrition and taste preferences, but change in your industry is incremental. People don't change dog food brands that often, and they certainly aren't going to stop using dog food altogether and start using something else. So developing products that won't immediately succeed in the market is clearly wasteful if you're in that business.

Technology isn't like that. People sometimes stop using one kind of product and start using others (netbooks to tablets) almost overnight. Wildly successful companies that don't move with the times see their sales dry up and in a few short years are sold for scrap (Digital Equipment, Palm, Compaq etc.). If you don't want to become obsolete faster than you can adapt, you have to be willing to speculate. And one of hardest things about speculation is knowing when the time is right for a product, far enough in advance to hit the mark. This was Steve Jobs' genius. People think he invented the tablet, but companies had been creating tablet like products for years without success -- including Apple. Jobs saw when the combination of processor, battery, display and wireless networking technology converged to make a tablet people would want to use possible.

And since demonstrably very few companies have this knack for hitting the mark, it follows that a company that tries to stay innovative creates quite a few premature products.

Flexibility, innovation and know-how aren't reflected on a company's balance sheet, so from a certain standpoint building those things looks like waste. And truthfully it sometimes *is* waste when a company invests in R&D but for whatever reason the company fails to make use of it to adapt. Nobody can really be sure, until the time comes.