I know it's silly and old-fashioned to bring up the Constitution when discussing the creation of yet another sclerotic Federal Bureaucratic behemoth, but this proposal is ridiculous on its face. Even the absurdly over-stretched interstate commerce clause and general welfare clause do not even come close to justifying this sort of overreach by the Feds.

IF (and that's a *big* if) this kind of regulation is needed at all (personally, I can't think of one good reason for it), then I see no reason why it can't be handled by the states. Centralizing policy and regulations for what amounts to the convenience and increased power of "bureaucrats armed and clerical" (in the immortal phrase of Dabney) is NOT allowed by the Constitution.

I'd vote in a heartbeat for any Presidential candidate, regardless of party, who would carry out Goldwater's pledge: "I will not attempt to discover whether legislation is "needed" before I have first determined whether it is constitutionally permissible. And if I should later be attacked for neglecting my constituents' "interests," I shall reply that I was informed that their main interest is liberty and that in that cause I am doing the very best I can."

Sounds to me like every aspect of a Federal Robotics Commission would be the triumph of special interests over liberty...

The argument is that, if pid 1 dies, everything dies. Also a big pid 1 presents a big attack surface for nasty people.

Of course the exact same argument applies to a kernel: if something goes wrong in the kernel, everything dies and a big kernel presents a big attack surface to nasty people. However, I observe Linux is not a microkernel but it has a reputation for both reliability and being relatively secure. On the other hand, the quality of the people developing the kernel seems to be higher than those developing systemd, or at least that is the perception I get from reading all the hate on the Internet.

You can't unwind the tentacles of the military-industrial complex all at once. You also can't ignore SpaceX and how well they have been doing.

This award is simply acknowledging reality. Boeing has to get some pork to keep the lobbyists happy, SpaceX has to get some money to keep them in the running. It will be a slow shift over time as SpaceX continues to deliver for less money.

SpaceX is playing the game... why do you think they are opening a spaceport in Texas? Gotta spread those jobs around to keep Congress happy.

The funny thing is, you can play that government game and get rich while still delivering an excellent product (SpaceX). It takes several generations of bloated military contracts to teach people to stop working so hard (e.g. Boeing, Lockheed Martin, etc).

Most of the land that Scotland controls is mountains and other wilderness which isn't economically productive. Sure, it would get a lot of the oil, but that is a finite resource and when that's gone, what's left? I suppose they can turn themselves into a giant Highland Theme Park.

No it isn't. The UK is part of the EU. If Scotland leaves the UK, it leaves the EU. Yes, it will cause some practical difficulties but these would be only a few of the many practical difficulties that need to be resolved in the transition period.

Can you give some examples in which England has treated Scotland badly in the last twenty years? Or two hundred years?

Actually, it is the UK that is harvesting British oil. Except it's not the UK, it's oil companies who then pay taxes to the UK. The taxes then get used all over the UK according to need. This is the way most Western countries operate.

The UK's nuclear submarines are based in Scotland.

All of the jobs at the naval base in Faslane will be gone along with the nuclear weapons. A future Scottish government might, therefore, decide to allow the UK to continue to keep its submarines there.

It's a decade to an order of magnitude.

Err, no.

OS X uses the XNU kernel from NextStep which is a hybrid of the Mach microkernel, some components from BSD (the network stack and the virtual file system) and a device driver architecture which was completely new for OS X. Over the years, a lot of the BSD code has been rewritten with the introduction of more granular locking and better abstractions for the file system and networking APIs.

OS 9 had nothing to do with NextStep.

However, there could be something in the summary on Slashdot, quite easily. The first word is "KDevelop". That could easily have been a link to the project front page, or it could have been expanded to "The KDevelop IDE" and everybody would be happy.

From the KDevelop Front Page.

That seems fairly self explanatory to me.

When he made the promise, the development team consisted only of himself. Now there is a whole company with a number of employees who depend on Minecraft licence sales for their salaries. If Notch open sources Minecraft, all these people will lose their jobs.

So it's probably greed, but not necessarily. In any case, sales haven't tailed off yet, so he hasn't broken his promise.

You think 1m AUD is big? A couple of years back I was on a project for the British government where they burned nearly that much every week. In the end they had literally burned it, they would have got better value because at least it would have kept the building warm.

You can't pave the earth with detectors

Can too.

Well of course you'd be absolutely insane to try to put sendmail and Apache in the same address space. In fact, sendmail forks (or at least used to fork when I last looked at it 10 years ago) to serve each incoming connection, so it's insane to try to restrict sendmail on its own to only one address space.

I thought my mention of kdaemonhostd (sendmail in the kernel, yay!) plus the fact that daemonhostd is derived from svchost(.exe) would be enough to show the post is not entirely serious.