I never pressed him for the details of the fight, but my personal experience was that he's one of the most laid-back and funniest people I've ever known, and I've never seen him even come close to losing his temper. I wasn't making any kind of judgment regarding his conviction, just saying that having a felony on one's record doesn't mean one doesn't have legitimately marketable skills.

We need someone in authority to step up, tell the American people what is going on, and take the heat for it.

So Wyden spills the beans, goes to jail, and then we're left with no one on the inside that will let us know that the intelligence community is still overstepping their bounds. As a bonus, after Wyden tells everyone what's going on, the executive branch refuses to take any action and continues to cow the legislature into letting them do what they want because the rest of the Intelligence Committee is largely a stunning exercise in uselessness.

As long as he remains in office and on the Committee, Wyden is doing more good being on the inside - certainly more good than those like Dianne Feinstein, Barbara Mikulski, or my own state's elected dickhead Marco Rubio. Only in the event Wyden loses his place on the Committee or fails to get re-elected would coming out and telling everything he knows be potentially useful.

Remember - by law, you can't discriminate against them.

True in some cases, but not as a blanket statement. The EEOC says an employer's policies regarding one's criminal history cannot be used as an employment criteria if:

They significantly disadvantage Title VII-protected individuals such as African Americans and Hispanics; AND
They do not help the employer accurately decide if the person is likely to be a responsible, reliable, or safe employee.

I had a former co-worker that was convicted of felony battery years prior to the current job. The employer would have been well within their rights to deny him a job based solely on the second criteria.

There is only one reason to hire a criminal, and that is planning to do something criminal.

Well, there's also the situation where the ex-con is actually good at what he does. Back in 2010 I did some contract work for a large and established company (big/old enough to have a pre-ARIN /16 netblock), and I shared a cubicle with a guy that had a third-degree felony battery conviction after putting a guy in the hospital during a bar fight years earlier, and happened to be a wicked sharp Java coder with great customer interaction skills. Even with the clearly disclosed felony on his record, he was eventually extended quite a nice offer to go onboard as a permanent employee.

Who knows. In any event, it's kind of silly for AT&T to complain about regulation cutting into their profits when they aren't offering the kinds of services that people might actually want. Especially when I've had two outages over the last 18 months that were the result of them accidentally cancelling the authorization for the MAC address of the outside DSL hardware and taking four days to figure that out the first time it happened.

Quoting almost 170 years' worth of service fees for an install? I think I might have laid into the sales guy with a variation of the "does Marsellus Wallace look like a bitch?" speech after that. That's just insane.

AT&T has been laying fiber for their U-Verse rollout. They dug up a whole bunch of land in town here a few years ago, and when they were done, the salesman came by to ask if we wanted to sign up for the newly available U-Verse.

The AT&T sales guy came around a couple of weeks ago to tout the new fiber rollout in my area. Here's how it went:

AT&T guy: "Did you know that AT&T is laying fiber in your area?"
Me: "No, that's great. How fast is the fastest speed you'll be offering when it's in?"
AT&T: "Let me look...[rifles through papers]...says here it will be 18 Mbps."
Me: "That's already available here now over your copper lines."
AT&T: "Really? What do you have now?"
Me: "I've got a 12 Mbps U-verse business account with five static IPs. The 18 Mbps service is already too expensive for such a small bump, and it doesn't sound like the fiber offering is otherwise going to make any difference at all for me. The *only* reason I'm with AT&T is that Comcast has a ridiculous installation fee for business accounts."

The guy hemmed and hawed a little bit more, and eventually left looking rather dejected. Seriously, only 18 Mbps over fiber?

Well the FCC cannot create a tax, sorry but that actually takes Congress.

That doesn't mean that AT&T won't hit all their customers with some bogus "net neutrality compliance fee" or other such nonsense.

I suspect that we could persuade those caches to flush to RAM, simply by exhausting the number of possible lines for that address - if the cache is set-associative. Of course modern processors have multiple levels of cache, so that makes it harder.

You can abuse the C pre-processor as well. The early versions of the Bourne Shell are, essentially, written in Bourne Shell through the use of a mess of C macros. When I was working at a Unix vendor I was assigned to track down a bug in the shell and that was just...wrong. Some time around Sys V somebody un-macro'ized the code.

Hi AC,

This is sort of self-contradictory, so I don't really need to respond to it directly. I just want to point one thing out. I can't afford to work for any company as less than a C-level employee. It would be a salary cut from my current business.

Not to mention that I'd not like it.

An AC talking about balls. Pathetic.

Right. I didn't even bother responding to the taunts.

Coward really means coward. I am sorry for the folks who are afraid that their employer will take a dislike of what they post, but for them we have handles.

I can't say I'm happy about what's happened to Debian. Having Ubuntu as a commercial derivative really has been the kiss of death for it, not that there were not other problems. It strikes me that the kernel team has done better for its lack of a constitution and elections, and Linus' ability to tell someone to screw off. I even got to tell him to screw off when he was dumping on 'Tridge over Bitkeeper. Somehow, that stuff works.

IMO, don't create a happy inclusive project team full of respect for each other. Hand-pick the geniuses and let them fight. You get better code in the end.

This actually has something to do with why so many people hate Systemd. It turns out that Systemd is professional-quality work done by competent salaried engineers. Our problem with it is that we're used to beautiful code made by geniuses. Going all of the way back to DMR.

It really does look like Jomo did post this article, and it refers to another article of his.

What isn't to like about Ubuntu is that it's a commercial project with a significant unpaid staff. Once in a while I make a point of telling the unpaid staff that there really are better ways that they could be helping Free Software.

It's just that I object folks who would be good community contributors being lured into being unpaid employees instead.

Say how do feel about idiots working for corporations contractually enmeshed with the US military-industrial-surveillance complex. Why no spittle-laced hate for them?

The GNU Radio project was funded in part by a United States intelligence agency. They paid good money and the result is under GPL. What's not to like?