Funny, I must have missed the part where Hong Kong is an independent country. (Hint: It isn't.)

While Hong Kong does have a high degree of autonomy, they have no control over the political policy regarding foreign affairs, while they have as much control as the mainland feels like allowing over economic affairs. I guarantee the PRC took direct control of the "Snowden Situation".

I'm not sure it's possible to "trick" somebody who fled the U.S. to hang out with the Peace and Freedom Loving Peoples of the PRC. Unless Snowden is a completely gullible idiot, it's beyond ludicrous to think he didn't know that months of intelligence extraction awaited him after a flight to Russia.

Frankly, I don't understand the guy. There are plenty of better options that would have been available to him; I still can't figure why he chose the PRC as a first stop. Once he got stuck there, his options were between slim and none.

In the US anyway, Google/Motorola has been raising the bar on what's possible with inexpensive smartphones. I have a Moto G targeted to the Boost no-contract plan for which I paid $80, out the door. It has a decent (if non-removable) battery, excellent screen of a decent size, runs KitKat/Dual-Core/1GB RAM, and is even waterproof (plenty of YouTube videos showing the phone functioning in a bowl of water.) The next version (coming out soon) will add a much-needed MicroSD slot and LTE. The only significant con is the camera, which is pretty mediocre (but what do you expect for that price?)

The CDMA one I bought was easily flashed over to PagePlus/Verizon (Boost inexplicably did not request Moto permanently lock the bootloader; you can obtain a bootloader unlock code for free from Moto.) The GSM version is sold unlocked directly by Google for all of $180; the 4G will be $220.

And they just announced the Moto E; a slightly lower-spec phone for only a puny $130.

There's rampant speculation if Lenovo will continue this trend of well-spec'd cheap phones. The consensus seems to be no, given how Lenovo actually wants to make money on the purchase, and nobody thinks Google has any kind of usable margin on these superb value-priced phones.

I suspect the volume of the entire world's damable valleys is pretty darn low in relation to the Antarctic and Icelandic ice caps. And the number of sub-sea-level valleys is even lower.

There is a book on exactly this (okay, Death Star I), called, appropriately "Death Star"

Yes, I know that most programmers write internal software where it doesn't actually matter if it's "Free" or not, because it never leaves the company. (Does it even really have a license at all? I know I never have to agree to a license agreement to use software internal to my company.)

But for that software (like OS's and other back-end infrastructure) of a more universal nature it makes the most sense to NOT develop that internally. And writing that software requires a radically different skill set from database apps. How are programmers that write that software supposed to be paid? Answer (from this example, anyway): Not much. Shocker: There's very little money in support contracts for small-ish low-level libraries.

I have no problem whatsoever with the GPL. But I DO have a problem with RMS's insistence that NOT giving away your work to anybody who wants it free of charge is the only ethical means of programming. If you want to give your work away, that's great, and I'll support efforts to fight against anybody that tries to then charge for your efforts. But if I want to write some software and get somebody to pay for it, that should be my option too.

And he's actually quite horrible at predicting problems down the road... if he was better at it, the Hurd would have shipped or been canceled well over a decade ago.

It's not "waterfront property" that anybody is worried about. It's the fact that a very large number of the world's current cities happen to be located near the water for historical reasons (major trading hubs built around ports for oceangoing ships.) The utter annihilation of those cities is a huge economic problem.

And flooding Death Valley with seawater doesn't create a single acre of arable land. You can't farm jack $hit out of soil contaminated with salt. The shores of the Persian gulf (nor, for that matter the shores of southern CA) don't support much in the way of farms, despite the large body of water next door.

When you have a widely-used, yet complex, product that nobody has to pay for, doesn't require tech support (unlike, say, an OS), doesn't have any provisions for proprietary (i.e. non-free) features, and isn't really much fun to work on (unlike, say, a compiler), it should come as no shock that it's somewhat difficult to recruit enough eyeballs to look for all those bugs.

Yep, a patch can be issued quickly, but a project with sufficient access to resource ahead of time breaks less to begin with.

One follows from the other. If your Free license says that anybody that works on your product is required to give away their efforts for free-beer free, it should not be surprising that it's difficult to find companies to spend money on something (like paying a developer) that won't give them a competitive advantage. This, incidentally, is why we have taxes; it forces people (and companies) to pay for the common good. We wouldn't have much in the way of public works if they relied solely on charitable donations and user fees.

This is a persistent weakness of Free software, but you'll never get RMS to admit that money to pay for programmers does not magically fall from the sky. People are cheap, and if they can get something for free, it's no shock that few of them will pay for it.

In my mind, an ideal software license would have the following;

1) Mandatory Code Release (This gives you some software Freedom)
2) Payment required to copy and/or use the software.
3) Some sort of revenue sharing scheme so that any contributors to the code receive a portion of the funds collected.

Think of it like a "software co-op license"

(This, incidentally, is how industry standards commonly work in the hardware business. You want to implement the IEEE 1234.567 standard? You pay up a standard fee per implementation, and that's doled out to the contributing companies.)

Who woulda' thunk it? You Get What You (Collectively) Pay For. It doesn't matter if "payment" is in the form of money or manpower. If software you use is built by labor effort much smaller (in cost and/or size) than is usually needed for a project of a particular size or complexity, it should come as no shock that the product ends up not being the quality it needs to be.

There are several Verizon BYOD pre-paid providers. The oldest, Page Plus, has been around for over a decade. Straight Talk started VzW BYOD about six months ago.

Page Plus will accept any VzW 3G device that is not reported stolen and was not originally sold for VzW "native" pre-paid. Officially, they don't accept iPhones, but this restriction is routinely ignored. They will also unofficially accept "flashed" 4G CDMA devices, and there are plenty of online and B&M retailers that will do this for you for a small fee.

In addition, some Sprint phones can be "flashed" over to VzW/Page Plus. The phone I'm using now, a Boost Moto G, was.

I thought Slashdot was supposed to be a geek site. It's an "out-of-cycle" patch, not an "out-of-band" one, although I assume it could be delivered out-of-band if you really wanted to (USB stick, CD, whatever.) Most users will certainly be receiving the patch in-band.

Submitters are allowed to be ignorant and make stupid mistakes; it's the job of the editors to correct those mistakes before posting a story.

To prevent an EMP from causing the collapse of US civilization, you, at the least, need to protect:

- The power grid
- Every municipal water and sewage system
- The entire petroleum refining and distribution apparatus to a point where you can refine and distribute diesel fuel. (Can't run farm equipment or food transport without it)
- Food distribution and processing
- The public safety system (cars, computers, etc.)
- A decent portion of the telecommunications grid
- Acute medical care
- Military weapons, logistics, computer systems, and transport
- Enough of industry that the US to restart the private sector once nearly much every major employer in the country collapses when their computers get fried

There is No. Way. that can be done for a puny $2B. $2B would probably fund whatever pet project the original article was pushing, but it wouldn't actually do any good when everything else collapsed around it.

So far, the announcements of data center projects I've seen seem to be pretty realistic estimates of the job count and average salary of the workers. It's like the officials hear the word "Microsoft" "Google" "Apple" "Amazon", etc., and shut down all critical thinking skills.

Reminds me of driving down I-81 in rural VA and driving past a sign announcing the "Southwest VA Technology Corridor" or somesuch, just as I entered a cell phone dead zone. Commerce dept. types seem to think that the mere presence of a pile of machines, or a self-proclaimed "innovation zone" will magically bring in hundreds of overpaid engineers to revive a No-where-ville economy.

You cannot predict how "fluffy" a major is simply by looking at the name. There are killer CS programs out there, and killer English or Economics programs. And I am sure there are schools where one or more of those programs are "fluff" instead.

Your best bet in picking a major is to, obviously, pick one related to the field you'd like to go in. That doesn't mean that an English major can't be a successful developer, or that a CS major cannot write literature. But if you have to pick something to major in, why would you pick something completely unrelated?

(And as a side-note Google: In the US anyway, you better not be taking on a career in reading MRI's unless you have a medical degree, unless you want to get thrown in prison for practicing medicine without a license.)