If ever there was a time for the Americans here to write to their congressman and ask that they support a particular bill, this is the time. I may not be American or know a whole lot about American politics but even I know that this is probably one of the most important bills proposed in Congress in at least a decade.

A few categories tend to be underrepresented in a repository that contains only free software, such as games with substantial production values, players for legit copies of notable movies, software to deposit paper checks through a camera, and software to prepare this year's income tax return.

WhatsApp is exclusive to phones. What sense does not allowing its use on laptops make? Chase Bank's check deposit app is exclusive to phones. What sense does not allowing its use on PCs with a flatbed scanner make?

Unless you pair a Bluetooth keyboard and plug in an external monitor. What sense does forbidding this make, other than to make iPhone users buy more Macs?

This is the dumbest research I've seen in 2015. There was actually no computation involved -- they just wanted to write a long string to disk. They concluded that adding the superfluous step of concatenating strings in memory, then writing to disk, was slower. Well duh! That's not what memory is for!

We have Indian applicants for the web developer jobs we have open at the moment, and invariably they all seem to have achieved degrees with honours in less than 2 years, often more than one degree in the same time. I refuse to believe that any degree achievable in less time than an equivalent UK degree is worth anything, let alone two.

And then, the number of those applicants who then claim to have achieved another major qualification in a London college or university in only a few months... Especially when you can link those London colleges to visa fraud stories in the national media.

It would take a lot for me to take an Indian graduate at face value.

The elephant in the room is the fact that colleges and forced cheap, easy student loans are being used to keep unemployment numbers down in the recession. Many millions of US student are in college because they couldn't find a good job. Many of them would stop attending immediately if a good job were offered.

It's not education, it's welfare.

"Verifiability not truth" is the shelter biased and power-hungry Wikipedia editors hide behind. Post an article or fact they don't like and they'll do their level best to claim it's not a good source using nebulous definitions and intra-Wiki politics. The author of a cited article can himself say, "that's not what I meant" and it will be rejected. One symptom of this source problem is a lack of consistently followed, useful guidelines for source material. Oh, there are guideline, they're just not consistently followed and entrenched interests have allowed their definitions of a good source to slide to support various point of view various editors want to push. NPOV is a religion they follow like a Baptist in his cups.

I would in principle support reigning in on the patriot act, and possibly this bill. However, something tells me "This bill might be a trap", an item with no chance of passing; but either they want to figure out who will support the bill, so they can start investigating these people, or they will bury some Trojan horses in the bill itself in order to kill.

A congressperson votes for the bill, then they will be immediately under investigation as 'an enemy of the state' and attempts by the executive in response to undermine that person's support.

Will folks be shipped off to Guantanamo, for petitioning their representative in support?

Haha. Anyone who has been to a South East Asian country knows all about this. You get a cheap price for the taxi and then spend half the day at the driver's cousin's Gem store on Silom Road trying to convince them to take you to see the real Giant Buddha. It's funny how you add a splash of paint and some suits to a scam and everyone thinks the western world is 'advanced'.

When can we go back to text-based browsing and work on aggressively killing this Javascript and graphic Images stuff?

could be copied and hosted elsewhere, how could Adobe reasonably claim to have corrected the vulnerability at all?

Think of it the same as if GCC had a bug that caused it to generate machine language code containing a vulnerability, when you were compiling a project. The bug was fixed, but all binaries previously compiled are vulnerable until rebuilt using a version of the compiler after the bugfix was made.

The vulnerability is a same-origin policy violation affecting only the site that hosts the SWF file; I guess it's not a RCE or other vulnerability in the Flash player itself; the binary code placed into the SWF file is executed faithfully, but in fact there's an issue in the particular bytecodes that were being generated when you compiled your project, so the compiled SWF file contained the vulnerability when correctly interpreted by the Flash player, if that makes sense.

Or update Flash to detect and just refuse to load the applet.... if it was indeed the SWF file creator's responsibility to patch. This would help encourage them to patch and not leave users of older versions of flash vulnerable to this particular issue.

Nice

Wireless? I see nothing on Alamo's site indicates that they are a wireless broadband provider. If they are wireless, much of this entire discussion goes out the window. :-)

I can only guess that you are using the word "franchise" to mean something different. The word doesn't mean the same thing in this context as it does with fast food restaurants.

In this context, "franchise" means "license." A local public service commission grants a "franchise license" to a company like Verizon. It's one company: Verizon in Maryland is the same Verizon that is in Ohio and Virginia. That franchise license means that the company receiving it is a monopoly, and is subject to monopoly regulation. That one monopoly company provides both ISP and telecom service. Each "franchise" isn't a separate company like a McDonald's "franchise" where each one is independently owned. And the ISP and the telco aren't separate companies.

If it were that easy, there would be several countries who would have already tested them, but haven't yet.