he hasn't updated Flash in years and got hit by malvertising.

You don't have to be that bad, even. My parents' PC had Flash 12 on it and Flash 9 on it. Where did Flash 9 come from? It was installed at the same time as the updater software for their GPS device.

The whole ecosystem is toxic and hateful towards the user.

Humanity moved beyond pictogram-based languages for a reason, and now the internet - that paragon of human achievement - is moving us back to pictograms again. WTF?

It's about the limbic system. Alphabets are a good invention for low-bandwidth communication (including fingertips) but also "a picture is worth a thousand words".

A jury might find that a reasonable argument, but state legislatures have decided that youths need to be protected from sex so much that, like the gp said, it's a 'strict liability' law, even if the minor wants sex so bad they're willing to lie and obtain forgeries to help assist with their lies.

This is why jury nullification is so important - to keep psychopathic legislatures from incarcerating the entire population. A jury has two jobs - to judge the facts and to judge the law. Lawyers and judges try to diminish the second for their own benefit.

On the other hand ... this isn't some trifling matter of stealing trillions of dollars, lying to Congress, or starting wars based on lies - this is consensual sex! So, off to the gallows with him.

They needed access to everyone's researchers who are working on solving this problem

Researchers in industry can't shut up, talking about their basic research. It's a well-studied effect, and, in fact, industry employers count on this - they pay their researchers, their researchers get to work on their pet projects, and by doing so they stay plugged into the broader industry, and both they and their employers benefit from this arrangement. It's a non-zero-sum game.

And even though it's been economically validated, it just makes sense - to pay a researcher to wall himself off from his industry (thereby making him forever unemployable beyond the current employer) would be _far_ too expensive.

Sure, there are a few trade secrets that get kept, but that's the exception, not the rule.

Uber apparently thinks they need to own patents on self driving technology rather than just mass produced self driving cars ASAP.

No argument that the patent system screws everything up. But call the CMU licensing and commercialization department and ask them what they think. Live by the sword, die by the sword.

If CMU were championing the abolition of patents, I'd feel sorry for them.

If anyone is bored and looking for a place to lure my 30s year old self. Redo slashdot, allow markdown, bbedit, html, LaTeX.. editing.

If this is where your interests are, Soylent has forked an re-opened Slash, so people can contribute to it. There's been tremendous cleanup/ and some refactoring, to make Slash a more sane/maintainable project.

They're very picky on submissions, though, so the variety and community aspects aren't what Slashdot is.

yeah, but then they'd have to wait for something bad to happen to "re-justify" it. It sure would look bad for Rand and good for Jeb if that kind of thing happened a week before the NH Primary.

Just keep moving it between agencies every six months to keep investigations worthless. Create some new agencies if necessary.

Most kids are never taught to write well enough to later write a novel. That requires much more dedication and skill building. Heck, most people have trouble composing a cogent comment on Facebook.

  It would be great if we taught all school children to think logically and in an ordered manner such that coding were the next practical step. But ... have you ever been outside your own home? As it is now, coders self-select. We should not make the mistake to assume that a high level of success among a self-selected population would translate into a high level of success among the general population. And I can see why government schools may not be keen on teaching everybody critical thinking skills.

So you're not privvy to what goes on upstairs. Go find somebody in the know, get them drunk, and ask them about massive scaling and Google's patents on map/reduce.

In the meantime this seems like a good idiological fit. The surveillance-funded corporations will be taken care of while the USG destroys the software industry, which is too wildly successful for a completely unregulated market. Nimble big-name companies have already fled or are in the process of fleeing the jurisdiction, leaving work-a-day programmers to manage the leavings or find a different line of work.

Russia would like for us to continue gifting them with cash for 40-year-old missle motors, it's our own government that doesn't want them any longer. For good reason. That did not cause SpaceX to enter the competitive process, they want the U.S. military as a customer. But it probably did make it go faster.

Also, ULA is flying 1960 technology, stuff that Mercury astronauts used, and only recently came up with concept drawings for something new due to competitive pressure from SpaceX. So, I am sure that folks within the Air Force wished for a better vendor but had no choice.

Don't worry - it runs in kernel space for performance.

Thank you both for putting some actual discussion in this otherwise really noisy pile of ... comments. Not sure where the moderators are.

This ends a situation in which two companies that would otherwise have been competitive bidders decided that it would cost them less to be a monopoly, and created their own cartel. Since they were a sole provider, they persuaded the government to pay them a Billion dollars a year simply so that they would retain the capability to manufacture rockets to government requirements.

Yes, there will be at least that Billion in savings and SpaceX so far seems more than competitive with the prices United Launch Alliance was charging. There will be other bidders eventually, as well.

Usually it's simple confusion between 'decimation' and 'devastation'.

" 'Decimation' means the same thing as 'devastation' except it sounds cooler."

Signed,
The Committee to Reduce the Number of Useful Words in the English Language

Just suppose that following Snowden a large percentage of the population decided to significantly increase the security of the internet use. This would force the NSA et al to increase power of their automated collection systems to compensate and those of us already taking enhanced security measures would lose out. If the populous does nothing then the NSA can just continue as they were.
Of course, one could argue that this lack of popular action simply makes security concious users stand out in the eyes of the NSA and attracts special attention. But perhaps this is also a good thing. Allow me to explain:
I start with the precept that the NSA will be able to gain access to practically everything I do online (and probably offline) no matter what I do. Given this, I would far rather be a special case. Imagine somone at NSA HQ clicking the "Collect and analyse all internet traffic from the UK" icon. Their computers hoover up some vast number of terabytes including mine and finds little of interest. The operative takes another bite from his apple and clicks the next icon "Collect and analyse all.....". My data has been spied on and I am iritated, but unless he finds a rotten bit of apple he isn't.
Now imagine that my security is rather better than most. The operative clicks the icon, but gets an error saying "Data from Huskydog not available". Gosh, thinks the operative, someone hiding their information, I must have stumbled upon an Al-Qaeda sleeper cell. He puts down his apple and starts to dig deeper. Eventually, after some time and effort he breaks in and ..... Nothing! (or at least nothing interesting to the NSA). He has wasted considerable time, his apple has gone brown and he has nothing to show for it. I am just as iritated as before, but now he is iritated as well.
So, given that we wish to iritate the NSA (and that is probably we worst we can hope to do to them) perhaps the best solution is to have a significant number of special cases which stand out from the easy to access heard and thus require special time consuming efforts to spy on but with nothing to show for it in the end.