Eddie Murphy has had a checkered movie history. For every Norbit, there's the scene from Dreamgirls where he won (rightfully) an Academy Award for a single look.

Now about Tyler Perry though....

"make our jobs easier for us",

This is a fundamental sticking point that I haven't heard any cop talk about.

The US Constitution purposely makes it hard to go after someone. This is not a bug in the system, but a feature. When cops argue (in effect) "you're making it just too hard" realize that they're bashing the Constitution. Maybe they feel times have changed enough the Constitution should be changed, but while it's around, you follow it. Just like us normal folks have to follow laws we may not like.

I always hear that we can't catch anyone if phones are encrypted, or computers are encrypted. Evidently there were no police techniques available before 1995, and all criminals got off easy. All those police shows where people gathered non-cell-phone based evidence must have been something like science fiction, but for cops.

Unless you mean iconic in how they try to make the cheap TVs purposely look bad to sell the expensive ones, and then tack on a $7 HDMI cable that somehow rings up as $89.

What if we get ransomware combined with the firmware level exploits as seen in the "Equation Group" hacks.

Shudder.

You speak as if people have much of a choice.

Witness scott walker. All he talks about is destroying unions, and workers rights. I'm in Chicago (area) where we have a Democrat (a Democrat in theory) talking about destroying unions. Right to work laws, that in some cases are designed to pull money from unions - the unions can organize, but in effect are starved of funding until they die.

We're working on eliminating near minimum wage jobs. A restaurant needs X waiters/waitstaff to wait on N tables. Lets get tablets to convert X waiters to Y (where Y X) servers. Google car, Uber Car, most driving jobs gone. Watson? a bunch of doctor and lawyer jobs gone. So, you spent 100,000 a year to be a doc or a lawyer, and now can't find work. How you gonna pay for loans? Hell, Watson isn't even fully out, and the lawyer thing is RIGHT NOW.

Tech change is happening on Moore's law time, but people don't work on Moore's law, we work on human generational scales, about 20 years or so. Remember that both the Luddites and the original saboteurs, Les Sabot, weren't protesting tech per se, but tech that destroyed jobs.

BSD was free before that. Since the 70's. BSD used to pass tapes around to a lot of Universities. They'd add things, and then pass the tapes back. Sneakernet opensource.

AT&T sued to make it not free. But just because AT&T wanted to shut it down, doesn't mean it wasn't free software in spirit at the time. You can think of the BSD lawsuit as validating BSD, and free software (no capitals) as well.
Linus didn't think it wasn't free, but didn't want to deal with the mess. The original F.U.D.

godfather of the free software movement

But I disagree with the having Stalman as the locus of free software. There was free software before him (BSD, etc) and will be free software after him. Maybe capitalize it right. Yeah, he created the Free Software Foundation. Just call it that.. godfather of the FSF.

Stalman has done a lot, but sometimes his ideas get in the way of actual software. Hurd? after decades still not shipped. gcc? Got out of hand until it got taken over by egcs. Was also the "Cathedral" in "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" as the example of what NOT to do. emacs? Witness the hassle with xemacs and emacs.

Meh. The SCO you remember was old SCO, that actually did something besides sue.

Even then, they weren't THAT great. They helped make Xenix with MS help, then that became SCO OpenServer. (Yeah, MS got some cash from UNIX sales, and now gets cash on every Android sale). I actually worked with it. It wasn't that good of a distro, and got killed in the marketplace when Linux got rolling. Eventually they bought out the UNIX copyright/trademark for SVR4. They did eventually release SVR4.2, and SVR5, but neither set the world on fire.

They were "good" when there weren't too many other alternatives for x86 UNIX (remember *BSD was mired in lawsuits with AT&T). In comparison to a very raw Linux or FreeBSD at the time, OpenServer was just passable. The world quickly passed them by.

They did spin off some web thing called Tarantella. It got decent reviews at the time. But I don't think i've heard any mention of it in the last decade.

Of course i haven't read TFA, but the limiting specifically to the "planned obsolescence" part reminded me of the ink cartridges that guess how much ink should have flowed through them and "runs out of ink" after X number of pages, just to stop people from refilling cartridges. Of course the cartridge makes some random ass guess as to percentage of coverage and percentage of B/W vs full color, so you never get what you actually paid for.

Finally in this case refers to the cleanup after the Heartbleed mess. Yeah, those releases were marked stable, but in this context, the auditors expected massive code shifts immediately post-Heartbleed and decided not worth the time to audit code that was possibly being culled anyway. They still had Win95 code for example, do you audit that? VAX code?

Orange is the new black, C++ is the new Perl.

If i wanted to really know someone, I'd bug the computer in their pocket with the GPS and the microphone.

The big news is, when does the "hey lets go after foreign enemies" change to "well, american, foreign, it's all the same to me"

The hacked compiler is kind of interesting too. Lets insert backdoors into ALL TEH iTHINGs!!!

How's that go? Your freedom to shake your fist ends at my nose.

There are consequences to all actions, even speech. You basically posit that the good actions to the speech sayer and all other speech sayers are always greater than the negative effects of the rest of humanity. I posit that's not always the case.

Didn't we just pass some laws to protect cops from recording (cause they'd never break the law - umm Homan Square), so I'm not sure if this is still the case.