Show me some proof that anyone cares enough to drive GNU/Hurd to a 1.0 release.

If it gets there, you have your proof. If it doesn't, you were right. Let's wait.

Or without waiting - hey, there's a release just now. Someone is obviously working on it. There's your proof!

But it's not at 1.0 yet. Why is 1.0 a magic number? The original question was who is working on it and why do they care. Now you are quantifying how much they have to care. And if you don't get your proof, do they have to stop working on it? And you're at +3 right now, so someone wasted a mod point on your drivel.

You're not helping.

Offsite, or fireproof stuff. Your choice.

Only through inaction on the part of the citizenry. The fact that they have to ask for this shows we are achieving technical parity. It is up to the citizens to protect the citizens, and we can do exactly that.

Ignoring the question of whether they should be reading the mail (that's another topic, don't dilute this thread), we have effectively been sending post cards instead of envelopes.

We would not have switched to encryption everywhere without this, so it's a problem of their own making. And now it's a question of whether big business is run by citizens. Some are, and have switched, so the "all corporations are bad" nonsense is invalid.

It is up to the citizens to restore the balance of power. Should we trust that the spy agencies will do nothing unconstitutional? I know your answer, but what about the courts that write laws that get overturned?

My point by bringing that up is that the citizens have a responsibility to ensure the government is respecting their rights. If dragnet data collection is allowed by the courts, and the citizens disagree, then encrypt everything.

Most of each species means they can bounce back. Most of all species means they are gone and cannot come back. Huge difference, and it takes a long time to recover from the second one.

How often? All the time. Only I constantly wish for improvement, so that "mediocre" can eventually be left out.

How often you look at something and think the same is apparently "same as a person with no concept of the future, with no imagination, and who is dead inside and is best left alone with a unloaded handgun, some bullets, and a bottle of sloe gin."

Luddite.

It presents the best side of the worst.

I have been yelling at the TV since law and order. Each few years brings us a more invasive demonstration of how the police state can infiltrate the bad guys and make life better for the rest of us.

Cyber is, on the whole, more damaging than anything prior.

Person of Interest balances that slightly, but both the good and bad guys are fighting crime. It is actual crime, but that is only true/confirmed in retrospect unless we know from the start, which is not constitutional.

Or you could be a realist and understand that the people who least understand our society are the ones in charge of it.

The whole of government will be reactive and make incredibly stupid decisions until people capable of understanding contemporary history are in charge.

For the record, and quite a few of us will probably agree, I would support research into the ability to stop time.

Even if researched at the super secret level, enough practical stuff would leak out to be really interesting.

First one to push the button turns the universe into a museum piece for hyper-dimensional creatures, but until then physics would have a field day.

I think the problem is rather ignorance. People send a letter and expect to be secure in their persons and papers, but don't understand that e-mail is (and I'm not saying it shouldn't be) neither.

End to end encryption is quite secure. But not for the ignorant. Free markets are fair, but not for the ignorant. Democracy is good, but not for the ignorant.

It's almost like ignorant people are a drain on any system. As the technocrati, we can establish security and privacy. But we can't protect the ignorant without asking them to select particular tools. A read-only OS which reboots in between almost every action, installed behind a router with an open hardware design, behind another open hardware firewall. Rotating external storage which is quarantined like backup tapes are rotated.

It's not impossible, it's just difficult. Ignorance, and mistakes on the side of convenience, are the enemy, if you consider everyone as a suspect.

On the other hand, if I like an author and the same audience chose that and another author, I'm likely to at least not consider the second author a waste of time.

How do you choose your authors? By their cover? By listening to people who do read awards lists? By ignoring popular culture until you're reading leftovers?

I am aware of literary awards, and when I choose between one or another book, I choose because I vaguely recognize the author. If the first chapter stinks I consider it an attempt, not a read.

Do you consider reading the first chapter to be reading? Reading the back cover? About the author? The cover?

I bet you just made the decision subconsciously and were not aware, to be redundant. As for who cares? The people standing to lose or gain - the authors, the publishers, and those readers who feel loyalty to an author. As well as those who might not otherwise have heard of the author - certainly they care?

I read for these fuckers too much to be arsed trying to figure what a notably inflammatory submitter intimates.

Test scores mean shite, and the relation to improving education is obviously null. It persists for the same reason the war on whatever exists. We can solve the problem of drugs, or prostitution, or terrorism, or education, if we understand it. If we refuse to understand and rely on what we believe, we can just expect to spend more money with no results.

This much was obvious to me before 2000. Your post has been said repeatedly by actual teachers since then.

I maintain my objection that theodp remains on the minus side of being informative, precisely because of this context shifting. Wouldn't another cheating scandal have been more appropriate? Because take your pick. In fact, that is probably the actual story here - cheating ongoing after nearly 20 years. But I don't write this shit, don't edit this shit, and only read this shit because most people apparently are incapable of such.

I'm used to theodp putting things into selective context so they sound better or more usually worse than they are, but WTF is up with this one? Would higher teacher salaries somehow have something to do with a culture of fear and retaliation? Do well paid people not feel this kind of pressure?

Would have been a lot more clear to say "the redacted bits are from patents approved by the USPTO." I hate having to go on easter egg hunts to confirm if this is something I should care about.

And for Cassini2 specifically, it's not an issued patent vs. rejected patent. Both were issued, the point being that the new one was issued after the first was invalidated by a district court. And about 5 months after Alice. And the second was a continuation of the first, not a new patent. That's why they are so similar, and probably why they didn't halt the process and re-evaluate it.

USPTO wanted comments on the guidance, not pointing out where they are failing to meet the guidance. This is where the EFF probably overstepped.

I have a problem with this part. The Alice decision was basically "adding a computer doesn't automatically make it novel" - the court did not agree that "adding a computer automatically doesn't make it novel" - those are two distinct ideas. And what the EFF pointed out in the chart was that two allowed patents were basically the same, which is what a continuation patent implies, and has nothing to do with Alice.

It's one thing to have a point, but the EFF was protesting the similarity of two patents, not illustrating how the second fell short of the Alice test, and it really had nothing to do with comments on the guidance itself, which is what the USPTO was asking for. Including protests in consideration of feedback on guidance is not how things work. I won't go into that, but there's a place for such things and this isn't it.

And I agree, EFF has a legitimate point. But this was not the way to point it out.

Legally, this is what I read:

Q: "How can we do our jobs better?"
A: "You aren't even doing your jobs, idiots."

A better version of Linus' Law would be the original one.

So, if rapid releases and leveraging the Internet medium to the hilt were not accidents but integral parts of Linus's engineering-genius insight into the minimum-effort path, what was he maximizing? What was he cranking out of the machinery?

Put that way, the question answers itself. Linus was keeping his hacker/users constantly stimulated and rewardedâ"stimulated by the prospect of having an ego-satisfying piece of the action, rewarded by the sight of constant (even daily) improvement in their work.

Linus was directly aiming to maximize the number of person-hours thrown at debugging and development, even at the possible cost of instability in the code and user-base burnout if any serious bug proved intractable. Linus was behaving as though he believed something like this:

        8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone.

Or, less formally, ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.'' I dub this: ``Linus's Law''.

My original formulation was that every problem ``will be transparent to somebody''. Linus demurred that the person who understands and fixes the problem is not necessarily or even usually the person who first characterizes it. ``Somebody finds the problem,'' he says, ``and somebody else understands it. And I'll go on record as saying that finding it is the bigger challenge.'' That correction is important; we'll see how in the next section, when we examine the practice of debugging in more detail. But the key point is that both parts of the process (finding and fixing) tend to happen rapidly.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writi...

-1 redundant

So we should view bug bounty programs as an additional angle of attack, another aspect of "defense in depth", perhaps optimized a bit more for commercial projects where there is ample money. And that's OK.

That's from the fucking article. You're not helping.