I feel like this is a sort of oblique reference to The Girl From Monday. Either that or you're serious, which is disturbing.

I so wish for mod points. Western Union/Moneygram are the "Banks" for people without the ability to now meet new Federal Standards for State Issued ID. The paperwork required today in many states just to get a new "Secure ID" are ridiculously bad if you've done anything other than be born in the last 60 or so years, gotten married, receive physical bills & bank statements, and had those items delivered to your physical address (which assumes you can receive mail at your physical address).

So it isn't just "illegal" immigrants using these services, anymore. It's a large segment of the lower end of society that is being forced to utilize these services so they can pay utility bills with cash, money orders, and move money about to relatives. You're actually causing severe harm getting rid of the cash-based services.

Off topic: Lucky me, I've bypassed the "chain of name changes" requirement by having a Passport. My adoption papers don't even exist anymore thanks to a house fire and an flooded court house basement. I'd be so screwed if it weren't for the fact my employer required me to get a passport 3 years ago.

Are you in the US? Because I think we're talking Chip & Pin here, and <sarcasm> we Americans decided that was just stupid. Mostly because Europe could never come up with something so innovative.</sarcasm>

Allegedly, it's even more complicated than that. It's in the Data Detector, which several apps will use on inactive text fields and other strings. You can actually send an iMessage from an iOS device to someone and it will crash the Messages app on OS X. Furthermore, you will be unable to re-open messages until you eliminate the message from your history database at the command line. (It's a sqlite database...I think.) Next, I managed to open a crash report from Mail in Console.app and said string crashed Console and then crashed the crash reporter. It was pretty wicked.

Flatline is used commonly in business speak to refer to a market that no longer sees growth. It isn't misleading, you're just using a different context.

However, the connotation you've brought from the medical field is purposely intended. Under the current Commandments of United States Capitalism, failure to grow over last year is a precursor to a long drawn out death spiral that will cost investors a lot. Whether this should be the way of things or not, is beyond the scope of whether or not this term is valid.

TL;DR: This is an actual term in finance and business.

Yes please.

One of the reasons I don't buy concessions is because if I do, I'll want a drink. If I drink something, I'll have to use the restroom during the movie.

I there were an intermission, I would buy those overpriced snacks.

Herp derp. Rafael had a post earlier in the thread and I got mixed up. Thanks for the correction.

s/had been doing all along/had been doing wrong all along/

Sorry.

No. He clearly stated that he saw this, "at first glance," as something that Pulseaudio had been doing all along. The patch made a function not only return a different error code, but an error code that was never possible before the patch. The change was not documented, at all.

The submitter really set him up, though. If you look further up in the thread, the "rollback" was a simple one line change from ret = -ENOENT; to ret = -ENVAL;. I'm fairly certain that it was just overlooked in the code review for the entire patch.

What got him was that instead of going back and saying, "Huh. Why did we change this error code? Oh my, ENOENT was never even possible before this. This'll break all sorts of crap!" he blamed Pulseaudio. That's a serious no-no that's been covered several times in the history of the kernel.

That was my reading exactly. As a programmer, I've had to condition my responses to bug reports to move from, "What?! It's totally your fault!" to, "Let me investigate this on my end." It became fairly obvious from the get go that the patch made some changes that were overlooked in the patch. The patch commit message failed to give any reason or justification for the change (which was a 1 line change, possibly in a sea of other changes). Furthermore, the automated testing application that the patch submitter was using had a bug in it.

It's likely the testing apparatus said, "OMG! THIS ERROR VALUE IS WRONG!" Then, the submitter corrected it to fit the bad test. Honestly, while Rafael signed off on it, it would appear the submitter set him up the bomb, so to speak. Who would make a change like that without further investigation and then submit it is a serious question. I would hope the patch submitter is placed under some additional scrutiny.

All in all, Rafael took it in stride in his response. He also explained further, but appears to have capitulated that his initial reaction was wrong and that he should have fixed first, asked "Why are you using that, anyway?" later. Also, he should have never stated that, "So, on a first glance, this doesn't sound like a regression, but, instead, it looks that pulseaudio/tumbleweed has some serious bugs and/or regressions." It's quite obvious that changing not only what error code is returned but returning one that was literally impossible without telling anyone is a Bad Thing(TM).

As for Linus's style of management, I don't know. I mean, Rafael was way, way, way out of line with that statement I quoted. He really failed to grasp the situation, even after it was clearly spelled out for him.

All in all, I think he's learned his lesson and will be better for it. He seems to have taken it well enough, at least publicly. :-)

Blarg, hit reply too soon. :-)

However, I think an injunction is a bit on the incompetent side. While you may lose some "otherwise cheap" customers, I don't think it validates blocking the Tab for import. Besides, at this point, the Tab is too old to really matter and will likely be replaced very soon. The judge should've merely awarded damages and moved on.

The whole thing is noise at this point. Damage has been done, an injunction doesn't change anything, and it's over. All that remains is recompense for past transgressions. Hence, I feel the judge is suffering a pretty extreme loss of perspective.

Then again, IANAL and case law is always dangerous territory where you must always think of how a decision will set a precedence. Regardless, it's felt more like she was extremely wishy-washy during the case and finally flipped a coin and just so happened to get the right answer.

I can see where you would get that. :-)

Where the Galaxy Tab 10.1 is concerned, I'm on Apple's side, at least in technical interpretation of the law. The way the case law for design patents and the "tests" a court applies work, a lot of what most people call common sense is thrown out the window, legally. It's less about if Joe Blow Customer can differentiate the two and more about if I throw these two items into a market are people going to buy the cheaper one because they're "about the same thing anyway".

Everyone knows an iPad form a Galaxy Tab. The issue is, are people going to buy the Tab because it's cheaper and pretty much has the same design points that made them want an iPad to begin with. Thus, you throw out logos, branding, and other things that people say "make a difference".

Apple has played this case underhanded in other courts. I honestly think that they should lose based on the modification of evidence and unusual leveraging in other cases, but that's just wishful thinking. The fact is, despite Apple's idiotic attempt to stack the deck, they should get this anyway. The Galaxy Tab, especially the way they "skinned" the Android installation, is fairly obviously on the wrong side. I suspect even if the casing were neon lime green, they could be considered infringing. This is a lot more than "rectangles with rounded corners." That design element is merely a single straw on the camel's back. In my opinion, the 10.1 N should've never passed muster in Germany.

I hate Apple, own a Galaxy Nexus, will probably buy a Nexus 7 (or whatever they call it today), and run Arch Linux at home on 2 desktops and a laptop. I do hobby development for Android. I still have to hand this one to Apple.