More of this, please. Don't demoralize a new programmer who doesn't have the experience to choose well between two similar-sounding options.

Agreed, but with a reminder that "direct and concise" is different from "asshole". You can say "thanks for the patch, but it conflicts with our long-term design goals and we can't accept it" is not the same as "LOL nope".

It gets weird. Some FLOSS projects stop because the work is "done". I have such a project myself that does data conversions from one database to another, and several distro download counters say it has quite a few thousand installations worldwide. And yet, I only touch the code when a bug report comes in. Other than that, it's more or less finished. It does what the label says, quickly and reliably. Many people use it in production. There's just not a whole lot that can be done to improve it other than succumbing to featuritis and adding a lot of bells and whistles.

Few commercial projects would hit this point because most rely on upgrade sales. I don't, so there's no incentive to push ahead. I suspect that's the case with many FLOSS projects which have scratched their itch. Why keep scratching?

You're presuming a symmetrical link, which isn't a reasonable assumption for any nontrivial network setup. Your client may only have one path to the server, but the server may have a hundred load-balanced paths back. Or imagine a very asymmetric link like almost any cable or DSL connection. When you're dealing with milliseconds, these are practical questions and not hypothetical nitpicking.

Well, and those pesky little exceptions like the ACLU and EFF who file a constant stream of FOIA requests so they can verify that officials are obeying their promises and the law. But except for watchdog groups, other politicians, and lobbyists, no one is monitoring politicians. Oh, them and the State Department, who wanted to see both sides of email conversations that former Secretary of State Clinton was involved in.

But yes, other than watchdog groups, other politicians, lobbyists, and cabinet-level government departments, no one is actually checking these things. Well, those guys and...

Ugh. I hate those legacy laptops with a hundred different connectors you have to manage every time you sit down to your desk or leave it, with one invariably falling behind the desk so that you have to go fishing. My favorite work environment was with a MacBook Air and a Thunderbolt Display. The display has one cable with two split ends that you plug into the laptop: one for power, and one for combined video / USB / Ethernet / audio. All of the permanent wiring like USB drives, Ethernet, etc. plugs into the monitor which acts like a hub for everything else.

I'd stake money that the next iteration will combine all of that into a single USB C cable. Get to work, unpack my laptop, plug in a single reversible jack, and sit down to all my wired accessories? Yes please.

I am not an Obama supporter. I did not vote for him, donate to him, or otherwise assist his campaign. And yet, I'd give him a pass if this is the only reason he'd have for knowing that she had a private server. When I email someone, I typically don't have the foggiest idea whether that address is served by Google, Yahoo, the CIA, or a Pentium in their basement. While her email address wasn't @state.gov, I wouldn't put it past a government official to think, "oh, wonder how she got State to set that up for her?" and then never thinking about it again.

No. This was the email address she used for official state business. By law that is owned by the government and not by the individuals involved. This whole thing came up recently because there is evidence "that she has not been forthright in turning over the official e-mails as requested", such as other parties dutifully turning over their emails which were in reply to something she'd sent, but the referenced email not being present in the files she submitted.

That's cute, except that it's not her data. That data is owned by the American people via its government, as are all official communications. When you're an officeholder, you don't "own" your official email.

The biggest difference is that no one gives a shit about your toy server, but they might have a fuckload of interest in the personal server of a US Senator and Secretary of State. Yes, I believe that State Department is likely to have better security than the random dipshit she seems to have hired who snagged a cheap GoDaddy cert. It's almost certainly going to have better availability, backup, and disaster recovery.

It is absolutely, 100% not acceptable to run state secrets through a personally maintained server that seems to exist only for the legal reason of giving the owner 4th amendment privacy rights. An officeholder acting in official capacity should have zero expectation of privacy from the organizations they work for. I'm "picking on poor ol' Hillary" for having every appearance of attempting to circumvent disclosure laws.

That's a bad example because that's almost never my criteria. I could write my own framework almost as quickly as I could suss out the quirks of someone else's, and that's usually a teensy part of the overall project lifetime anyway. Instead, I judge on things like "do I want to spend the rest of my time here maintaining this thing?" and "who's going to own security updates?" and "will it be easier to hire people with experience on this one or on the one I haven't written yet?". Sometimes there's no good framework A to use, or maybe framework A exists and is popular but is unfit for this specific purpose, so we write something in-house. Either way, notice that "time to get started" is a trivial or nonexistent part of the equation.