Maybe all the low hanging fruits are taken?
More likely the field has just moved on to new problems and methods, and the GP doesn't know enough about these new areas to have noticed. In a lot of domains, we've gotten about as far as we can get with deterministic, rule-based algorithms, and the vast majority of research on statistical methods has happened since the beginning of the 90's. Bayesian methods in particular have proliferated only in the last five years or so.
If the thief hadn't stolen it, customs would have confiscated it anyway.
What are you talking about?? Customs only cares about expensive gifts, expensive items you intend to sell (including counterfeits), and items that might introduce invasive species or diseases. I'm an American who has been in and out of the US several times with my laptop, and I've never encountered any problem with customs. "abroad" is not some scary, law-less pit of oppression. Try getting out sometime.
I take Jesus as described in the Bible as basis for my morality.
And how is that any less arbitrary than the GP, particularly in the absence of reliable evidence that there was anything special about Jesus? I agree that metaphysical questions about the origin of morality are hard, but falling back on religion only pushes back the question one more step.
What is being suggested is that someone hid the changes (which would require manual access to the git files). My understanding is this would not be too hard, but apparently it is?
What do you mean by "git files"? If you mean the files tracked by git, then yes, it is very hard. The two links provided in the summary explain how git uses cryptographic hashes to verify the current files and history. Alternatively, you might mean the git program itself. The attackers could conceivably have swapped in a modified git binary to ignore hash mismatches. But this would be discovered when anybody on a non-compromised machine ran git fsck, or recompiled git (using a compiler from a non-compromised machine). So this is hard to do silently as well.
If people want to remove their own foreskins, it's no skin off my "nose", just don't do it to other people.
TFTFY
Also, completely in agreement with everything you said
An Ada exception is when a routine gets in trouble and says 'Beam me up, Scotty'.
