From what I understand about .NET is they only open sourced the server side parts. Not the stuff desktop apps would use. Obviously this is because Microsoft is most challenged for market share on servers so has less to lose by doing this, it hopes to cut into the share of other platforms. Microsoft is not giving up much and doing little or nothing to advance cross platform application support on the desktop, mostly maintaining the Windows vendor lockin where it has its monopoly, on desktops.

There is no systematic barrier to women becoming programmers. They are free to do it and have equal opportunity to do so by law. In fact, I know some, and am glad that they did it. If there are not as many women programmers as men programmers, its due to the fact that no as many women want to do it. If more woman would rather do something else than program than men, why force them to, let them do what they are most predisposed to. We should have the same standards and educational program for men and women, that way everyone has equal opportunity and is free to choose their field without some sort of barrier being set up. If you make things EASIER for one group what you do is you disadvantage another group by creating all sorts of benefits they cannot access. This is wrong. It is a sick, disturbed mentality that we should discourage people who WANT to program from doing so, to try to shoehorn people who are not inclined to program into doing that.

Part of what is going on is mentally ill liberals who are unwilling to let go of victimization and guilt complexes that seems to be such a part of the Liberal mental complex that they cannot live without it, even though for the most part their original grievances have long been properly addressed. This is why well after we have created extensive legal gaurantees for equal opportunity, it is never enough for these people, which is why their agenda becomes ever more insane and shrill, they ran out of legitimate causes long ago. The mentality is that they are addicted to conflict just for the sake of it, that they have to pick new fights, since the legitimate issues are gone, they have gone beserk now demanding retribution and discrimination of their own against men, white people, American citizens, etc. They are unwilling to let go of the victimization complex even though for the most part in reality it is long past, with decades of equal opportunity legislation. In the process they have become what they claim to be against, they have become monsters who are out for blood and who have a hatred of and a malicious intent against men, and in some cases what approaches genocidal ambitions, for demonized majority groups. You can see this behaviour everywhere, by creating controversies and crisis where there is none, such as in Ferguson, just to keep the conflict alive when its legitimate beef has long been addressed and laid to rest.

Another fact which relates to this and to H1B Visas, is that numerous studies have shown that there is NO IT labor shortage in the US and that in fact we have large numbers of American college graduates who cannot find jobs becuase these jobs are being stolen by the H1B Visas. The H1B program is about suppressing wages and trying to replace american computer programmers with foreigners, this will actually discourage ALL americans, Men and Women, from going through the trouble of the CS degree when they are constantly being undermined by the corporate cronies. Microsoft would love to pay CS people minimum wage if they could, all they are concerned about is profits and are willing to ruin the lives of American CS degree holders by pulling the rug out from under them. Its not only CS but its also the Medical field as well.

  You have American doctors who did the right thing by taking on the debt to spend $100,000 on a medical degree only to have their wages suppressed to where they are pushed into poverty, making far too little after they pay their loans to make it all worth the trouble, by third world educated labor who spent 1/9th of what an American has to on a medical degree. I know doctors who have watched the profession and the reward for the effort for american graduates destroyed by the third world H1B visa labor, it is killing them, the third world labor is poorly educated and did not have to obtain the same level of training as an American medical student and yet they are given medical licenses and allowed to basically steal jobs right out from under better educated American doctors. Add to this the Obamacare nightmare and it is disaster for American doctors. Kill the H1B program, all of it, remove it from the immigration code completely, then have equal education standards regardless of someone is a Man or a Woman. Women should be welcome into the profession if this is what they are inclined to do. This is fair and respectful to Americans and respects the individuals right to determine their own career path and our right to secure borders and to our countries well paying jobs which belong to American citizens, by stopping our government from allowing foreigners to steal our jobs.

Still, better to have bad code run in a sandbox than to have access to C level capabilities where it can do buffer overruns. Firefox drops the ball on not allowing people to enable some things only when necessary. Its sort of sad that IE's security zones are actually better than anything Firefox has. The idea behind security zones is you can put a site into a security zone, and then the settings of that security zone are applied whenever the site is loaded. You can disable scripts, cookies, plugins and such in a security zone. The important thing is the zones all work in the same browser process, you dont need to use seperate instances of the browser, when you go to a site the security zone settings for the site are automatically applied. There is a default security zone whose settings apply to all sites no added explicitely to another zone. So your default zone can disallow cookies, scripts, flash plugins and so on, and then when you come to a site that you trust and needs these things, you can then put that site into a security zone that enables these features.

I know firefox has NoScript, but this falls short because you want one solution that can do it all, because you really want to stop cookies and plugins too, so its a good idea to be able to use the same zones feature to control all of this.

I actually think Javascript is a prime plugin platform, its an automatic memory management language that rules out memory handling errors such as buffer overruns, thus safely eliminating a class of serious programming errors. The use cases where NPAPI were once used can be fulfilled by Javascript in nearly all cases, and the built in Video and audio capabilities in current browsers, and the proposals for 3D Javascript APIs that can be used safely from Javascript. It is possible that Javascript programs could be accelerated safely with a Just In Time Compiler and caching native object code, which can be done while maintaining the same security features of Javascript interpreter, native machine code would be heavily managed, using the Javascript runtime for memory management and so on, giving it the same safety features as interpreted Javascript. The JIT and caching feature should be able to be disabled by the user forcing the interpreter to be used but if done right JIT should be as safe as the interpreter.

NPAPI needed to go. It encouraged developers to write code in a non portable way and to distribute non machine portable code that could only run on a few platforms. RIP.

Will this give us some higher resolution photos of the surface to ogle over? It is true that we have yet not had high resolution photography of pluto? What is currently known about Plutos composition and is this mission planned to refine knowledge on that?

Great idea. This will allow the plastic to be chewed up into smaller pieces so it can be more easily digested by marine organisms and so many other things. A plastic water bottle is a bit too large to enter the food chain so I am glad that researchers are finding to ways to make sure all plastics can be broken into small enough pieces that they can be easily ingested by marine creatures who mistake them for sea life. *Hits hand on forehead*. Remember the success already achieved with "biodegradable" plastics which have assured that the mid oceanic garbage patch is heavily populated with small fragments of plastic just the right size for ingestion.

You could replace your init system with your own in any distro. So yes, you could. Nothing is stopping you. thats what makes the antisystemd arguments absurd, you can replace it if you want.

That is wrong. Systemd complies with POSIX. POSIX mandates a minimum level of functionality, it does not mean you cannot add additional APIs and functionality that goes beyond what POSIX requires. The arguments of this vile systemd crowd wastes everyones time, at least now they can go off into their own little fork and stop bothering everyone else with their insane babbling. The systemd people are make a mountain out of a molehill because systemd doesnt take away any functionality, if you want your programs to start from a shell script or from a system V init type set up, you can configure it that way because systemd supports the sys v init system in full. Systemd is fully backward compatable with the traditional init system. This is why they are full of it.

Its interesting that a patch on privelege seperation escalation, while be ranked serious, would have so little effect on most users because most computer illiterate users do not know how to use them, the OS contains what is a major problem in that it does not encourage these users to use the feature.

Most of your common windows users do not use any kind of privilege seperation, they go right in as a superuser account, because, they don't even know what any of this stuff is. Windows ironically seems designed in such a way that it assumes that every user is a very literate on how to properly setup and use an operating system. To get the situation with viruses under control would require having a model whereby the system comes default in a secure, recommended state but also allows expert users to override that if necessary. Most common users will not do this, they can barely understand anything in the control panel anyway. The resulting situation would not be perfect but better than now but also would not prohibit customization by experts.

This initial state would put the user in a non-priveleged account by default and would not offer a login choice for an administrator account. It would also include a prohibition on executing any user downloaded programs in the users directories, only programs which are root writeable only in the main system directory would be executable, this makes it much harder to download and execute viruses. Programs could only be installed via an app store, or via a physical distribution that has been registered, approved and cryptographically signed by OS vendor. Program installers would be given the minimum permissions they need to install themselves and would install into an file system overlay environment, allowing any effects of the installer to be easily tracked and reversed, they would not have direct access to a large number of system files which they have no need to touch, and would be restricted to their own subfolder in the registry.

I find it ironic that Mandatory access control, which is more badly needed on newbie computers to stop these users from downloading EXEs to their home folder and executing them, is unavailable in Home Premium, where the feature is most badly needed.

The restrictions could be disabled from the control panel if needed but the idea is that most users use the default configuration that they are given so this would be a vast improvement over how things work now. The proliferation of viruses would be drastically reduced from all of this.

These ideas are good ones for any operating system which are for illiterate computer users.

I dont see an issue with systemd, since it allows for sys V style init to be used. Why not ship a set of script type initialization scripts and let people who do not want systemd simply configure their system either so that systemd will start regular sys v init or bsd type scripts, or let them change /bin/init to point to the alternatifve init system of their choice. Most people complaining about systemd are system administrators who have the skills needed to change the configuration of the init system to whatever they need. So why dont they just change their own systems to use whatever init system they think should be used? The answer to this is not that this elite crowd doesnt have a choice, its that this elite crowd insists on trying to force on EVERYONE ELSE what they think is the right way. That ties into what the mentality of this elite crowd is. For years this elite crowd has fought at every turn any attempt to make Linux easier to use for common, everyday users as a Windows alternative. Why do they do this? its because the reason that they use Linux is to prove to them selves that they are elites because they can use an operating system that is nearly impossible to use and thus they have proven their eliteness. Therefore, Linux must be nearly impossible to use except for a very small elite few and must be made as difficult, convoloted to configure and use as it possibly can be. This explains their behaviour.

You imply that .NET is not used widely and that something like Qt is. .NET is pretty widely used in companies, much more than Qt is. Yes, it is due to brand recognition, marketing and due to companies buying support contracts from Microsoft. Its also due to the labor pipeline, more people are trained for .NET due to Microsofts certification programs and marketing of learning materials to colleges which encourages colleges to teach it. Microsoft is good at marketing and knows to get uptake you need to market to the labor supply and as well to businesses and this means creating off the shelf materials and support systems which makes your product look like a safe, well documented, well supported solution with a large company behind it that won't leave you hanging and require all sorts of unexpected expenses. Microsoft knows you have to get into the colleges where the CS grads are coming from and that by CS grads being exposed to .NET in college they will carry that over into their jobs and as well companies know there is a large supply of .NET labor when they buy into the platform.

This is where open source fails, they have not been able, Red Hat for instance, been able to penetrate the colleges to create a supply of labor for their stuff as well as Microsoft has. They have not created the certification programs that businesses like and which creates confidence in there being a labor supply that is fairly consistent.

I for one welcome our new cyber-roach overlords.

Does this mean that RF cable television systems will be able to expand their bandwidth?

Did you ignore the first paragraph? I mentioned many positive attributes about systemd. There are capabilities there that would allow for much greater capability than before, such as if we wanted to start a program on of many system events, such as a filesystem event.

There are features in systemd that conceptually make sense, such as being able to tie the starting of a program to a system event, such as the insertion of a USB device or a file event, or any other system event, including the starting of another program. The concept and the implementation are two things, the concept can be good but the implementation may not be. It may also be that while the included concepts are a good base, they would benefit from additional refinement. The implementation in systemd may need some improvement, some more features and customizability ought to be added, but the general concepts are sound.

My view on systemd is that for most users it is fine and suitable. People who don't want it can configure systemd to start up a traditional BSD type script from which they can start their daemons, at which point that the presence of systemd would be imperceptible. Given that its high powered system administrators who want a traditional init model are knowledgeable enough to take an off the shelf distro with systemd and modify the system to their own liking, they really dont have any excuse as to why they cannot configure systemd to start their own init script and use that to start their daemons rather than directly from systemd.

Its probably even possible for these sysadmins to replace the /bin/init program with their own init program, whatever they want that to be. If they don't like systemd, being such experts, why don't they just configure their own systems not to use it?

So this whole uproar about systemd is NOT about whats best for or what common users want, what its really about is a few sysadmins forcing their own way on everyone else, and actually about making Linux difficult to use for common users. This elite group regularly opposes anything that would make Linux more useable for common people. Its as if they actually want to make sure that open source software never really becomes something that is common and ubiqitious by making the learning curve for Linux so steep that it keeps people on Windows. Many of these sysadmins actually do not want common users to use Linux or for Linux to be a desktop OS, they consider to be Linux an elite club and that Linux should be almost impossible to use without a degree in computer science, because it gives them a feeling of elitism to be able to use an OS that is almost impossible to use.