You insensitive clod!

But there is no reason why I should make it easy for my ISP, upstream providers and the NSA to eavesdrop on communication with a webserver. Encrypting my communication plugs a big privacy hole: so, why not use it?

I have a program that generates CSV output, for import into a spreadsheet. Open Office Calc creates the sheet I expect (slowly but correct). However, Excel sees it fit to mess op the data; it arbitrarily breaks long lines mid-field, creating a mess that requires more time to clean up than waiting for OOo to import correctly.

N.B. OOo suffices for most of my business correspondence; I prefer (La)TeX/LyX for the more scientific documents.

They say that some oil companies are heavy into alternative energy, buying start-ups and shelving their products. For them, "Never" is the answer to your question!

I assume the consumer does not have to pay to be part of a beta test program. Consumer protection law in my country (.nl) takes the price paid for the product into account when determining how much quality a "reasonable consumer" might expect. There is no need for a computer game to be perfect, as long as it is playable. Our judges are likely to handle "paid beta" software as any other paid for software: It should work, for reasonable definitions of work.

Most of the storage media in common use (disks, tapes, CD/DVD-R) already do use ECC at sector of block level and will fix "single bit" errors at firmware level transparently. What is more of an issue at application level are "missing block" errors; when the low-level ECC fails and the storage device signals "unreadable sector" and one or more blocks of data are lost.

Off course this can be fixed by "block redundancy" (like RAID does), "block recovery checksums" or old-fashioned backups.

Agile works for software because it is cheap to redesign software and also cheap to do a few test runs. Building a rocket, filling it with fuel and then see whether it flies or explodes is expensive when you talk about the size needed for manned spacecraft. It is more or less the same for Boeing and Airbus who spend years and years designing before they start building their first full scale planes for test flights. We're talking planes that cost over $100 million each, not something you like to throw away on a test.

It could make a short-circuit very painful!

No, 2^43,112,610-1 can be divided by 3.

If it would be hard for you to find the $50.000 to patent it, you won't have the $5.000.000 to enforce your patent in court.

It is just a reminder to programmers of public forum software how important input sanitation is.

Apparently the damage was limited to only one site... But similar hacks could be done on other vulnerable sites.

How do you upgrade Android? Do you get a single firmware image from Google containing both the Linux kernel and the Google apps? If it is a single firmware image the GPL says that the full image should be distributable under the GPL. Denying someone the right to remix it would be a GPL violation!

What I heard from a Coverity employee doing a presentation is that the best closed source/commercial projects score as good as the best Open Source projects; bad commercial projects do as bad as bad Open Source projects.

In other words, the variation in both categories is so big (more than a factor 10!) that one can not say either side is better with statistical relevance.

Doesn't look like it captures the OSS development spirit, to me...

But it almost perfectly captures Microsoft's view on the software market.

http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x1467270710/Police-say-irate-car-dealership-customer-recorded-altercation