Most people fall into the average range. That's how normal distributions work. It's also important to remember that 90% of everything is crap.

Damn it, Elwood, the Bluesmobile shouldn't be carrying about Uber fares.

The FCC is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, unless you slow it to modem speeds.

This is the hard way to mess with douchebags who use this app. The easy way is to create a throwaway account, sell a random parking spot outside where you live/work, and then get a good laugh at the buyer who shows up. Watching a hipster asshole circle the block for 15 minutes, frustrated "their" spot isn't open...now that's quality entertainment.

What's that? You'll get a bad rating and not be able to do that again? Yeah, that Uber feedback model works fine when there are a small number of sellers relative to buyers. For this system to be useful on SF streets, you need to capture the one-shot traffic that parks then leaves. Anything you tailor to make it easy for a city visitor to sell a spot will be easy to abuse for fake sales.

$100K for a 4 year degree is a cheap school now. Take a look at college ROI charts. Top schools can easily hit people with a bill over $200K today.

Stallman's refusal to compromise and the way he frames debate have been both hugely influential and downright prophetic in spots. If you don't get that, unfortunately that means you're still one of the suckers. Sorry.

But it's not too late. Try reading his pieces on DRM, trusted computing, and privacy; consider when awareness of those issues crossed into your own life; then compare that against the publication date.

Even a few years ago, it was feasible to make a case Stallman was being a zealot when he said that allowing any non-free software in your life would lead to a world where companies and government were spying on you, controlling your access to content with DRM, and using content blocks to control what political content a group was allowed to see on the Internet. Nowadays, though, it's obvious Stallman was right all along. Anything that's not free does not have your best interests in mind, and there's no question that will be used against you--the only question is when, not if.

People are too busy giving their 110% attention to other causes.

Ah, the tired refrain of the underachiever: everyone who has high standards is an elitist.

The ruby hipsters have to stay very small to fit in their skinny jeans. It should surprise no one they are only 1/8 the size of someone in the neckbeard community.

We don't need no stinkin' badges.

All this guy needs to do is upload a new picture of himself to Facebook, and it will prove his identity to everyone when it asks "would you like to tag X?"

Not difficult? You, sir, have a great deal to learn about animal breeding. I'd suggest Cracked's recent article.

You're confused about the real cause and effect here. The biggest problem with open source QA is that no one wants to fund it. It's straightforward (albeit not easy) to solicit sponsors for building new features. The users of the software who financially benefit from it rarely feel like it's their responsibility to pay for QA across the whole project. And that's how QA normally works; ugly, time consuming bugs to chase down often start with a problem you can't even connect to the responsible code at first.

Developers don't just work on features over bug fixes just for status or personal satisfaction. You're projecting a sort of selfishness on them by saying that, which is a pretty silly attitude to have toward the sort of people who work on open source.

Getting paid to develop new features give you a clear finish line to get some money to support yourself at the end of the day. That's why open development ends up organized in that direction so often. The main thing that's different about commercial development priorities is that paying a person to do QA is recognized as necessary. When I raise money for open source development, I constantly struggle over how to put QA into the budget in a form that it's recognized as necessary.

This is absolutely at the core of the Heartbleed story. The OpenSSL Foundation has dumped large amounts of money toward checkblock compliant features like FIPS compliance. The same amount of money would have funded a lot of source code review, but people don't pay for that. If developers want to eat, they have to prioritize chewing on features.

If Google et. all want to help open source, they should provide a lot more funding. We don't need their QA departments, we need the cash they're making off our backs.

Software that works very differently in debug builds is common. The 1993 edition of Steve McConnell's "Code Complete" was the first thing I remember reading that talked about reducing debug vs. release variance. IIRC, Microsoft was chewing this problem heavily then because the betas of Windows and their development tools going to developers included debug instrumentation, while the released versions did not.

SPARK falls squarely into silver bullet territory. Taking on that idea goes back to at least Fred Brooks's 1986 No Silver Bullet paper.

The "Office of Government Ethics" explicitly authorized the SEC for an accelerated revolving door for regulatory capture back in 1991. Since this collusion has becomes downright transparent recently, they made a change to reverse the situation a bit starting this month. People who are just learning about the problem through "Flash Boys" are too late--you've already been outplayed here. You see, the problem is solved!