I'm not in favor of forced sterilization, but at least the person would have other reasons to go on living.

But I must be missing something here, because shouldn't the question be:

Is it worth it to cure addiction if you utterly destroy everything that makes life worth living?

How could any rational person think this is a good idea?

They can. (Haven't they done so already?)

The question is will you continue to be able to get hardware that doesn't have those restrictions, at a reasonable price?

I think you will.

Personally, I think the whole issue has been overblown, but...

The fact that they are doing the right thing now doesn't matter to those who are worried that they could change their minds at any time. Asking for a public commitment to continue to do what they are doing and plan on doing has value for those people. Nothing douche-y about that at all.

You feeling alright? :)

You're right. There's no reason why Linux can't work perfectly with (and benefit from) secure boot.

There's also no reason why doing so should require less frequent kernel releases. It doesn't require anything from Torvalds. Whoever builds your kernel just needs to sign it, and the end user just needs a way to say whether or not they trust that signer (e.g. a way to add Canonical's keys to your firmware.)
(Compiling the kernel from sources would require support from the entire toolchain, but that's another issue. That would require something from the kernel maintainers: they would have to sign the 'official' sources. But it would take much more than that...)

You have the right idea, but you're mistaken about the details.

A rootkit doesn't install a modified version of ps, it modifies the system calls that ps uses. That way the rootkit is able to hide its processes from any program that enumerates processes. (There's much more to it of course.)

That also makes it easier to defend against. There's no need to prevent the user from running whatever userland code they want. All you need to do is ensure that the kernel you are running is the one you THINK you're running (as you put it.) Once you've verified the kernel, then you can trust the kernel to verify userland software (if desired).

In fact, you don't have have to protect the entire kernel, just a small portion of it that is responsible for loading and verifying the rest.

That's exactly what Secure Boot does, and it is an idea that is long overdue.

The ONLY issue is who controls the keys.

While I admire your extreme cynicism, you haven't been paying attention to hardware trends. General purpose computers will be expensive relative to the special purpose ones, which is to say they will be dirt cheap (and obscenely powerful by today's standards) .

Until they make it illegal, someone will always be willing to manufacture general-purpose-do-what-you-want machines.

Those numbers aren't that hard to get, and they are pretty good estimates, not "guesses".

But you don't even need to know the manufacture price or markup to know Apple is making a fucking blizzard of cash on these devices.

Here are the first two paragraphs from Apple's own press release regarding their most recent quarterly results. Pretty much speaks for itself:

CUPERTINO, California—October 25, 2012—Apple today announced financial results for its fiscal 2012 fourth quarter ended September 29, 2012. The Company posted quarterly revenue of $36.0 billion and quarterly net profit of $8.2 billion, or $8.67 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $28.3 billion and net profit of $6.6 billion, or $7.05 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 40.0 percent compared to 40.3 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 60 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

The Company sold 26.9 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 58 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 14.0 million iPads during the quarter, a 26 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.9 million Macs during the quarter, a 1 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 5.3 million iPods, a 19 percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter.

Negative. The Mac and *nix versions of IE were completely separate code bases, developed by completely separate teams.

Negative Kelvin does have meaning. I've read that article 6 times and I still don't know what it means, but apparently it means something.

So true. It's a dysfunctional love/hate relationship I have with the C++ standard. And just like most abusive relationships, I refuse to leave her. :)

I wish D would gain some momentum.

Wow, I feel for you. If QA is not testing against the same build the developers are using, they're doing it horribly wrong. Or did you mean QA is doing their own build for their testing tools? That I can understand.

You're a better programmer for assuming it's not a compiler bug and trying harder to figure out what you did wrong.

I've been programming professionally for over 20 years, mostly in C/C++ (MSVC, GCC, and recently CLang (and others back in the olden days)). I've seen maybe two serious compiler bugs in the past 10 years. They used to be common.

On the other hand, I can't count how many times I've seen coders insist there must be a compiler bug when after investigation, the compiler had done exactly what it should according to the standard (or according to the compiler vendor's documentation when the compiler intentionally deviated from the standard).

By "serious", I mean the compiler itself doesn't crash, issues no warnings or errors, but generates incorrect code. Maybe I've just been lucky. (Or maybe QA just never found them ;-)

Oh, and btw, yes I realize you were joking (and I found it funny.)

There are a handful of case-sensitive words in English. "Open Source" isn't one of them.

This kind of defeatist moral nihilism wouldn't be so annoying if it was expressed with a little intellectual humility.

Maybe. You seem to think (with no uncertainty) that it's a foregone conclusion that such evidence is impossible. It isn't.
Mathematical proofs are for math. Science is about weight of evidence, not proof.

You seem to think the only two logical possibilities are moral nihilism or morality from religion. They aren't.

Again, so arrogant, and yet so ignorant.

This stuff has been debated for thousands of years, right up to the present day, in philosophy and science (yes, science.) But never mind that -- AC on Slashdot has it all figured out.

Educate yourself, or STFU. Here's a good place to start:

Science of Morality
Sam Harris: Science can answer moral questions?

Moral relativism, spoken with such conviction! Of course this is a popular point of view, especially among geeks, but rarely do you see anyone willing to go so far as to state that "there is no such thing as an immoral act" out loud (even if they believe that.)

I congratulate you for that, even though you did it anonymously.

Normally I would state something like the following as an opinion, but your matter-of-fact confidence inspired me, so I'll do the same:

Moral relativism is utterly false. Moral questions do have objectively right or wrong answers, founded on empirical evidence. (Or to be a little more precise, the answers to these questions are no less objectively right or wrong than are the answers to 'ordinary science' questions.) The answers don't depend on culture or upbringing any more than answers to physics questions do.

The reason why we codify law is because we don't agree on the answers to moral questions. But we don't agree on the answers to scientific questions either. That doesn't mean the answers don't exist.