So, if I maintain a set of say 20-ish critical accessiblity patches in everything from GTK+ to FireFox, in a git repo, would you pull them when you build Gentoo? An OS compiled from source should make this simpler, though the testing goes out the window.

This is also potentially a huge benefit. I really enjoy working to make GNU/Linux more accessible. I'd do it full time if I could, but I cant afford to. I don't have the time, and companies wont pay me to do it.

People with disabilities, as you suggest, often have no job and little money. They often have lot's of free time that could be spend improving FOSS accessibility. A primary vision of the Accessible Computing Foundation is creating a world where people with disabilities help themselves by creating all of he accessible software they need. There are far more than enough brilliant blind people around the world than would be needed to make Linux virtually 100% accessible to the blind. They just need to come together, learn to code, and make it happen. One of the primary messages for young blind kids is that this is even possible. We seem to live in a world where people with disabilities are encouraged to settle for less than what they can achieve. How cool would it be to organize this unemployed force to make the changes they need? How cool would it be to get young blind kids across the country learning to write code?

Kudos to RMS for believing accessibility is a human right, and taking action personally to promote accessibility in Linux. Fixing accessibility in Linux is a mess, but if we can get enough people involved, it's doable. This is the mission of multiple efforts, and the one I'm involved in is the ACF (Accessible Computing Foundation). The free software movement, and the goal of people with disabilities taking control of their computing environments are well aligned. GNU/Linux provides a platform where at least in theory any and all accessibility issues can be corrected, unlike Windows and Mac OS X.

Unfortunately there are considerable obstacles to "fixing" accessibility in Linux. I believe they can be overcome if enough people come together to make it happen, but there are huge challenges. There are also people who devote a lot of their lives to improving the situation, often for free or very low financial incentive. I spearheaded the 3.0 release of Vinux, which is Linux for the Vision Impaired. I fixed a dozen or so accessibility bugs, but the right fix in many cases would involve major changes to GNU/Linux. I'll list a few.

The accessibility API in GNU/Linux, atk/at-spi, should have shared more functionality with Windows. For typical corporate and FOSS anti-Windows reasons, the accessibility stack was built intentionally in a Windows incompatible way. The result is that accessibility in Firefox and many other major applications never works as well in Linux as it does in Windows. It simply is not reasonable to make every software vendor do all their accessibility coding N times for N operating systems. There is even an effort called Iaccessible2, which is basically a FOSS accessibility stack for Windows, which the creators seemed to hope could also work for Linux. The code was even donated to the Linux Foundation. However, there was never any money or motivation in FOSS land to actually port the software to Linux, SFAIK. Building a single accessibility API that works in Windows, GNU/Linux, Android, and Mac OS X would go a long way towards fixing accessibility in all of those places, but especially in GNU/Linux, since it is usually the OS vendors put the least effort into. As it stands, few GNU/Linux distros are able to keep FireFox and LibreOffice accessibility working.

Then there's the problem of Linux being a multi-headed Hydra monster with no one in charge. At Microsoft, Bill Gates took a personal interest in accessibility, and that's all it took for the entire company to take accessibility seriously. In GNU/Linux land, RMS also takes a strong personal interest in accessibility, but it's not like most of the devs work for the guy. RMS can make his case, but when your boss is asking for prettier GTK+ widgets in Gnome 3 and you're late delivering, accessibility fixes fall by the wayside. When we are lucky enough for a patch to be developed, many times the GNU/Linux authors refuse to include them, because the "fix" is not perfect. For example, I added accessible descriptions to pixmaps in GTK+, which enabled blind users to hear 'star' for a star icon in a table containing pixmaps. The devs could not decide if pixmap was the right place for this accessible description, enabling them to justify doing nothing, and the continued lack of support for accessible icons was the result. It saved them a few hours of work in testing, which was their real priority. Multiply this asinine situation 100X, and you begin to understand why making Linux accessible is hard. GNU/Linux land seems to take pride in making it hard to fix accessibility, because we make it almost impossible to override any given stupid author's decision not to support accessibility. I should be able to patch GTK+, and have that patch automatically distributed to every user of every distro who believes my accessibility patches are something they want. Instead, we've built a system where patches have to be accepted by the authors, and then distributed slowly over years to the stable distros. Stupid, stupid, stupid...

Another major GNU/Linux accessibility problem is the lack of stability and portability between distros. If I write an important Linux accessibility app, like voxin for example, it would be great to compile it once, share it with every person who needs it, and have a way for those people to use that compiled binary as long as they like. This is mostly the case in Windows, and not at all the case in Linux. Voxin, a text-to-speech wrapper for the IBM engine prefered by many vision impaired people, has to be ported to each release of Ubuntu, causing the author considerable effort just to maintain his package for one distro, even though there is no new functionality ever. Pretty much unless you are an ace coder yourself, you wont be able to get voxin working on your prefered distro, and your blind users may avoiding your distro for just that reason. Even if you do go to this effort, that effort will be good for only one version of your distro, and you will have to repeat it forever. As a result, only the espeak TTS package is natively supported in even the most accessible GNU/Linux distros.

GNU/Linux is basically designed to break, and the first thing that breaks is typically accessibility. One problem is that while we can share source code between distros and releases, we cannot share testing, and often we can't even share packaging. If Debian goes the extra mile and insures that the accessibility stack works from boot for each release, that effort does not help RedHat, who must also put in the huge additional testing effort. The result is that only the biggest and most popular distros and applications typically have a working accessibility stack at all. When I looked at what it would take to make Trisquel Linux accessible, I had to let the devs know that they simply didn't have the resources to get there. This was back in 2010, so things may have changed, but this remains the case for most distros.

All of these issues can in theory be fixed. We should stop purposely making GNU/Linux incompatible with any other OS, and instead work for cross-platform accessibility solutions. We should share well tested compiled binaries (which can be verified as matching the source) between distros for critical portions of the accessibility stack, such as TTS, so that it just works. We should make it easy to patch an author's broken accessibility code, compile and test patched binaries, and share them with people on many distros, without making the patch author jump through insane hoops like we do now to get fixes included.

The same problems holding back accessibility in GNU/Linux are also stifling innovation. The fact that we let petty gate-keepers decide what packages can be shared easily is a crime. It is insanely hard to get a new accessibility package in to RedHat, Debian, etc. Accessibility just isn't cool enough. Most good ideas aren't cool enough. That's why so few people develop "apps" for GNU/Linux anymore. The fact that we refuse to share critical testing of binaries between distros, and make GNU/Linux APIs incompatible with the rest of the world on purpose... it all has to change. Otherwise, GNU/Linux will continue it's decline.

Scientists need to clean house before complaining about politics?!?

Try googling John Ioannidis and Koch brothers. They do not show up in posts were the Koch brothers give him millions of dollars, but the two show up a ton on conservative blogs. He's clearly going for the money. There's money to fund anti-science, unfortunately. f-ing ignorant billionaires who inherited it all (do you ever wonder why two brothers are so influential?) are the ones who really need to take a better in the mirror.

That said, it's absolutely true that most published research is BS. The same is true of *all* publications. That's the nature of the beast. There is still 100X more truth in average scientific studies than in politics.

Back when my folks moved us back to their native California in 1981, I asked my dad about his favorite city: San Franciso. He said, "Don't tell your friends, or everyone will want to live here." He was right.

I listen at over 600 wpm, and my blind friend is over 1,000. I never enjoyed so many books before. Here's a link to my geek stuff page, one of which is my Sonic speedup program.

The crypto weenies over on metzdowd.com seem to think HTTPS is currently a badly broken security layer that gives users a false sense of security. There are a number of suggested fixes, however.

My own pet peeve is that we don't even protect our passwords properly. My ssh id_rsa password protection is a joke: literally a single round of MD5 by default. My TrueCrypt password is protected a bit better, but with custom ASICs, a thousand rounds or so of SHA-256 runs so fast it's not even a significant part of the password guessing latency. I got so POed over this issue ,that I've submitted my own password hashing entry in the Password Hashing Competition. Fortunately, there are guys way smarter than me working on this specific problem, and in a couple of years we should have a far better password protection solution. In the meantime, someone should do friendly forks of TrueCrypt and OpenSSL and incorporate Scrypt as the default password hash for user-land encryption (as opposed to servers that may have to run thousands of hashes per second).

The advice to use more encryption seems sounds, but most of us geeks here on slashdot don't even know how weak our own password security really is.

Heck, you're right and didn't even have to go into how f-ed up JavaScript is as a language... "dynamic scoping"... really??? That idea sucked in Lisp and I thought we got past it in the 60's after that cock-up. And now we're supposed to take this bastard child serisouly?

Even if they get the batteries working great, which I hope they do, we'll still most likely charge our cars over the grid. Maintaining huge arrays of solar panels is done more efficiently at a utility level than on our rooftops. In the end, solar may revolutionize the energy sector, but I suspect we'll still buy our power from our local utilities.

The crypto email list discussed this at length. People chimed in who remember when this happened. Here's my take away: EMC had just bought RSA, and was looking for profits, and many of the best and brightest at RSA had left. The NSA offered $10M to make their RNG the default in BSAFE, and no one at RSA could offer EMC management any compelling argument as to why they should not take the money. RSA issued a press release about it. There was no secrecy. Competitors thought it was foolish to take money from the NSA, and at the same time wondered how they could get onto this gravy train.

This is a case of typical incompetence. The response RSA published is slimy lawyer crapola. The lawyer sucks as bad as the incompetent EMC management. The good news is that there was no secret deal that RSA agreed to with the NSA to compromise all our security. The NSA did their job well. RSA didn't. I'll just point out that only crypto ignoramuses would accept closed-source un-auditable stuff from anyone when it comes to encryption, IMO. Money corrupts this industry.

I vote hero. This would make in interesting Slashdot poll. I was hoping Snowden's intentions were to help us decide for ourselves how to be governed, rather than just being PO-ed at his boss. This interview convinced me. Definitely hero.

Besides violating our constitutional right to privacy, our government is now in the routine buisiness of lying to us. They're passing secret laws that force companies to help them spy on us, with gag orders preventing these companies from complaining about it. They follow us through our phones, and ignore laws restricting their powers. At what point does the government work for us rather than the other way around? At least in China everyone knows they're being spied on. There's no secrecy about that fact.

I don't want another 9/11 attack to occur, and I'm willing to give up a little privacy to help. I do believe the NSA is primarily focused on protecting Americans. However, I want a vote on just how much privacy to give up.

Speaking of numbers, did anyone else here gag when reading in the post that incandescent bulbs are 10% efficient? Try 2% efficient at creating light we can read by... all that infrared they put out just keeps you warm. The poster must have gotten incandescent efficiencies mixed up with the latest and greatest bulbs - LED bulbs from Cree, which can do 11% efficiency. Still, most of that energy becomes heat. There's still room for a lot of improvement.

For guys my age (I turned 50 last week), the first Moon walk was a pivotal event. July of 1969... I was 6 years old, and my father was a squadron commander in the 318th Fighter Squadron flying F-102s, and I lived on Cherry Hill on the Air Force base in Anchorage Alaska. We all watched the first steps taken on the Moon, and as the son of an Air Force fighter pilot, there were high expectations for me. I remember when pilots where heros. Everyone expected even greater things from my generation.

We totally let them down, at least in terms of space exploration. I blame politics, and to some extent NASA (though mostly because of politics). I also have my hopes pinned on commercial efforts like SpaceX. We were on the Moon in 1969, while people in China were still starving. I'm glad China has revived some of the dream, and I hope they do well. In the meantime, our generation gave birth to personal computers and cell phones, so it's not a total loss, but there never was another OMG moment like the Moon walk.

This is the major problem with the Tor network. I ran a node for a while, but the traffic packet sizes and timing all indicated users watching videos rather than doing something useful like advocating for freedom of speech. I've had Tor users hack my web sites and troll on-line meetings for blind people. As far as I can tell, most Tor users seem to be serious ass holes. So, I stopped running my node.

I have a less secure idea for how to do this that would encourage good behavior, but there's little interest on the Tor forum or Freedombox forum. Basically, instead of trying to hide what you do, only hide who you are. If you engage in behavior acceptable to a significant number of your peers, then they could help sponsor your anonymity. If you think on-line gambling should be allowed, you could sponsor some Americans who aren't allowed. If you think China should let their people speak freely without worrying about their Government locking them up, then you could sponsor Chinese political blogging. Normally, Tor "exit nodes" are run by people who believe strongly in freedom, but to protect themselves, they are careful not to look at any of the network traffic from their nodes. If they looked, and saw a child porn ring, they'd legally have to report it. In the modified network, node operators would be encouraged to monitor traffic, report anything illegal in their location to authorities, and report any activity outside a person's claimed need for anonymity to the network, lowering the number of exit nodes willing to carry their traffic. A web-of-trust network could be used to determine how much you should trust someone requesting an exit node.

This scheme would work very well with electronic money, using the original Ripple protocol. I doubt this would meet RMS's requirements, but I think it would be a fantastic step in the right direction. It's less secure because you're network traffic between sessions is associated with the same secret identity, allowing attackers to determine patterns of behavior far more easily. However, the people we all want to support are already doing this. There are famous political bloggers blogging from inside oppressive countries. If you want to use your right to free speech to make a difference, you have to attract a following, and that means having a public identity that people can follow. The only people this system would really hurt are those who wish to act out of the light of any public scrutiny at all.

As Thomas Jefferson said, when you do a thing, imagine the whole world is watching and act accordingly. I think all we need is a little more reality behind the whole world is watching part, and a little more anonymity. You wouldn't need everyone to support you to remain anonymous, but you couldn't PO the whole world either.

I am sure you just can't wait for the Windows 8.1 update! Just imagine how happy we'll all be! After all the outrage and frustration over Windows 8 losing it's "start" menu, Windows 8.1 is here to save the day! Now, that old start menu that used to do something useless... listing all of your applications so you could find them... has been replaced! Now it takes you directly to the Metro UI, where you can barf all over your keyboard! Happy day!