We arn't talking about the humanities as an elective, or outside interest. This article is specifically about lack of employment for the humanities at the PhD level.

That is actually an impressive level of bad grammar.

I mean I pride myself on subtle things, like never under any circumstances using "it's" without the apostrophe and even dragging out "irregardless" from time to time, but this is just brilliant.

I think what you've said kind of mirrors why "the humanities" might be exploding.

There is no industry for them to branch into. They are all cramming into one funnel, and the proposed solution seems to be to toss more in. If the only viable career path for a CS student was to become a CS prof, we'd be having the same problem.

Oh I totally agree with this. Relying on the user to "make the decision" is (or should be) the last resort when a programmer can't figure out how to deal with a situation.

In the specific area of certificate verification on web browsers, the problem has been too many false positives. Lots of people are sloppy with their certificates, and users have gotten used to the idea that any error mentioning a certificate is probably no big deal (because the other 100 times they clicked the ok button the world didn't end). This then served only to encourage people to be even more sloppy (the user will just click the warning that comes up, no big deal).

Things are moving in a good direction now, with most of the major browsers making the dialog more menacing and (in the case of firefox at least) requiring several not-so-intuitive steps, and this having the effect of making letting your certificates expire/using incorrect certificates more of a big deal because you will lose traffic. I think we are at least at a point where most users will stop when they get one of these more complicated warnings and they are doing something like banking or buying something online.

The real limiter for your average user is the requirement for man in the middle position.

Even without this flaw, most users will just click through any warning that comes up during a man in the middle attack.

It's still a bad thing that the mechanism designed to protect us from man in the middle is broken, but for the average user, the mechanism is already broken via apathy.

But if you have a man in the middle position, most of those same users would have just clicked "ignore" or typed yes to the "connect anyway" prompt.

So your belief would be:

- kickstarter and their team of lawyers don't understand the law as well as you do?
- kickstarter is pushing some kind of agenda, not just against guns, but against medicine, GMOs, alcohol, tobacco, porn, etc. And this is more important to them than money?

or something else entirely?

Someone still needs to look at every potentially vaguely weapon related thing and make that determination, and that someone is probably going to need to have a law degree. "Some guy on a forum said it was cool" isn't enough for a large business with resources to lose in a lawsuit. Untangling the laws surrounding complex, heavily related areas like weapons and medicine (also prohibited, I imagine for the same reason) is expensive.

And then you get into the stuff that's borderline, and you inevitably have people angry because you allowed one thing and didn't allow another.

It all just turns into a big mess, and for the profit they might get out of it, they've obviously decided it's not worth it.

The time and resources spent deciding what is legally dubious and what isn't plus the risk of getting it wrong probably exceeds the cost of just saying "if it's vaguely related to guns, it's not allowed".

Nothing, but it's kind of the gold standard for tame media.

For some things that's fine, but other things, like this, it just doesn't work.

* Linus

That was painfully tame. Like, PBS levels of tame.

Linux has provided some epic rants... this is just pathetic.

Or try to actually build a community / base of regular customers.

It sounds like they relied on people regularly stumbling onto their site by accident while searching for other things, most of whom probably closed the page and went about their business.

When I look at sites I frequent: slashdot, cracked, newegg... I don't remember the last time any of these showed up in a google search. At some point I stumbled into them or was told about them by someone else, and keep coming back on my own volition.

It's probably opposite.

That is, they wern't a target until they paired up with a company that could pay out massive damages should they win.

Just like many of the current rube goldberg-ish "less-lethal weapons", the tech to make a "smart gun" just isn't there yet. Every entry in this field has it's list of failures and impracticalities.

That's not to say we shouldn't stop trying. We'll probably get there eventually. It's just not something we can do right now. At the very least progress has clearly been made. I remember years ago they'd talk about "smart guns" and they'd involve special clips or holsters which would have been absolutely ridiculous in the kind of scenarios where you'd want a gun. At least now the ideal case seems practical and we are arguing about reliability.