In the UK, unmarried couples who live as a married couple would can in most cases get the same benefits as if they were married. It does vary somewhat but for government services and most private ones it would potentially infringe the rights of those who don't wish to marry fit religious reasons if they were treated differently. Essentially the law views the relationship as the important part, not the marriage.

Any reasonable bug bounty programme should pay out if you report a bug while it's live. It's only fair, especially if the goal is to stop bugs being sold as zero day.

You have to give them the benefit if the doubt. If they refuse to pay up you go public with your complaint and maybe threaten legal action. In the UK you can use the small claims system that only costs about $50, no lawyer needed.

And next time you sell the vulnerably on the open market, as does everyone else who read your warning.

Your "quote marks" are around something I never actually said. I don't know if you just confused me with someone else or didn't read my post properly, but anyway...

Giving your partner a covert medical test in this way is likely to be illegal in many jurisdictions. If you feel the need to perform such tests on every new partner, your relationships are unlikely to last.

You can buy laptops without Windows, but yeah it does kinda suck. At least you can get a refund.

I'm not sure either Snowden or Assange could live in France in safety anyway. France is subject to European Arrest Warrants. Snowden might be safe from those but if I were him I'd prefer a country like Iceland.

I'm surprised you don't have issues with people using Bluetooth, wireless headphones and other devices on 2.4GHz, or setting up their own APs. There was an Apple demo a few years back where they had to ask everyone to turn off AP mode on their phones because they were killing the demo wifi with 200+ networks in a room. People just turn it on and forget to turn it off.

I don't know how we can ever get devices to really share the 2.4GHz space now. In crowded areas with lots of mixed devices owned by different people no amount of individual management is going to help. Where I live a lot of bandwidth on 2.4GHz is wasted just by old 802.11b and g beacon packets. Routers provided by ISPs, with the TX power turned up to 11 and 802.11b mode enabled in case the customer has an old Nintendo DS or something.

What we need is a new band just for wifi, heavy regulated and with a new protocol that shares nicely and does away with bandwidth wasting crap like beacons. Much smaller channels and many more of them, non-overlapping, lower bandwidth but with the ability to bond when bandwidth is available and won't kill the base rate for everyone. Some solution to the hidden transmitter problem would be nice too, like maybe a mesh network protocol for reporting conflicts.

Excellent question. In the past Linus has stated that despite other architectures having some nice features or ideas, in the end the fact that x86 is so popular and has had so much effort put into optimizing it makes it the best currently available.

Now ARM is very popular in consumer computing devices (and Android is the most popular consumer OS, built on Linux) it will be interesting to hear what he has to say about it. These days raw performance is traded off against battery life.

Sure, I'm not saying people don't want Linux on a laptop, I'm questioning if it is important that you can buy a laptop with Linux pre-installed.

What do most geeks and companies do with laptops immediately after buying them? They wipe them and install their own OS, be it Linux or Windows. Clear out all the shovelware and other random crap that comes pre-installed, get everything set up the way they want. So I don't think the lack of Linux based laptops at retail is a problem, as long as manufacturers don't prevent you from installing your own OS or be dicks about the warranty if you do.

If the hiring process involved some kind of online form filling or the interview is a barrage of tests, I know that job isn't for me and I don't want to work at that company.

It's a bit of an odd prize, because all they did was suggest an idea. No working prototype or anything like that, just "wouldn't it be good if..."

In fact the idea might be a bit half-bakes because by the time the antibodies have reacted (and BTW how do you keep them alive for months or even years in the packet?) the condom will probably have been discarded. It's also rather anti-social and possibly illegal to perform medical tests on someone without their consent, which seems to be the point of this thing otherwise why not just provide a more traditional testing kit.

I'm surprised there are not more programming questions.

Q: Is sizeof() *really* a function?

Also, was defining tabs as 8 spaces just an attempt to drive adoption of widescreen monitor technology?

Does it even matter that you can't easily buy a laptop with Linux pre-installed?