If he reached the same position as you did in with less effort, chances are he'll continue reaching the targets he has faster and with less effort. Learn from it, or you're going to be angry and resentful the rest of your career, and as the biggest companies in the industry are run by drop outs you may very well end up working for them.

I enjoyed both, but I cringe at the thought of a movie version of either. If you have a description-heavy novel that's about 100 pages long, you can just about cram it into a movie. Anything longer, and you have to be quite aggressive about the cutting. Both Anansi Boys and American Gods have splits that would let them work quite well as a miniseries, but I can't imagine them as films without so much abridgement that they may as well be different stories. I've also not read Sandman, so I can't comment on that.

Is it to do with wanting to reduce emissions? I'd have thought it was a much more pragmatic requirement. Fossil fuel extraction costs are going to keep increasing. The costs of alternatives are going to keep decreasing. At some point, they will cross over and at this point the value of stocks in a fossil fuels will suddenly drop. Currently, they are quite high and probably will be for quite a few more years (although increased difficulty in extraction is going to make expensive accidents more common, which won't help). Harvard expects endowments to last a period measured in hundreds of years. Now is probably a good time to start selling off the shares in fossil fuel companies, while there are still people who want to buy them at a high price.

I was thinking about this the other day. The core problem is not lobbying, because it's perfectly sensible that people with an interest in a particular topic would want to talk to their elected representatives about it. The problem is unequal access to lobbying, and that comes from the massive wealth inequality in the USA and the fact that lobbying is expensive. Perhaps a better solution would be for each member of the electorate to have allocated a certain amount of their representatives' time.

For example, each member of the House of Representatives is responsible for approximately 500,000 people. Assume that they spend on average two hours a day talking to their constituents and the rest is spent in committees, or on holidays (since we're talking about an average). That's 2628000 seconds per year, or around 5 seconds per constituent per year (10 seconds per term). If you want to have a five minute conversation with a representative, then you must find 60 people all willing to give you their time allocations. Or 300 all willing to give you 20% of their allocation. If you want to have an hour-long meeting, then that's 720 people who must give up all of their allowance, or 3600 who must give up 20% (or any breakdown).

She was an integral part in shaping the disastrous foreign policy that led up to the war. In an interview before the inauguration (maybe even before the election itself) on CNN she was telling the interviewer that when in power she and the rest of the team would make an end to the 'Clinton multilateralism'.

In other words, she was pushing for the disastrous 'our way or the highway' policies of the Bush Administration since before she even got to the State Department.

I'm not sure what testing OpenSSL does, but most protocol tests include a fuzzing component, and if the fuzzer didn't generate heartbeat packets with an invalid length then it's not doing a good job. This sort of code is routinely run by people outside the OpenSSL team to look for vulnerabilities, so I'd hope that they'd do it themselves. Generally, any field that contains a length is used in guided fuzzing, because it's easy to get wrong.

The date that it was added to the OpenSSL codebase is very close to the time when the leaked NSA documents claim that they had a 'major breakthrough' in decrypting SSL. I would imagine that they are not responsible for introducing it, but do have people doing very careful code review and fuzzing on all changes to common crypto libraries, so I wouldn't be surprised if they'd known about it (and been exploiting it) since it was originally released.

In fact, by placing the requirement that someone agrees to the license before using a derived work of the GPL'd software, they are violating the GPL...

The FSF requires copyright assignment for all of their projects, so they do have some quite valuable assets. They provide the original author with a license to sublicense their contributed code under whatever license they choose, but they are the only ones that can relicense the whole. For example, if someone else managed to gain control of the GNU assets then they could legally relicense GCC under an MIT license, allowing its code to be used anywhere.

The point is not that a general malloc() would catch it, but that there are security-focussed malloc() implementations that will. Even valgrind will - it knows that malloc() has special properties and so will object if you derive a valid pointer to the wrong allocation by running off the end of another one. You don't need to use the security-focussed malloc() in deployment (unless you're really paranoid), you just need to support testing with it. Running this code with a malloc() that did aggressive bounds checking would have caught it immediately. That's something a continuous integration system and a test suite ought to have caught.

Maybe it wouldn't be so underresourced if the developers weren't such arrogant jackasses. This and the Debian disaster a few years back show that OpenSSL is hopelessly broken at the social level and should be ditched by all parties.

Japanese products were initially low quality too. There have been a few interesting books on the subject of the change. In particular, several Japanese companies focussed very heavily on quality control processes for about a decade, which allowed them to dramatically improve their quality. Over the same time, the Japanese people who had been responsible for copying the designs became sufficiently familiar with them that they were able to initially improve them and then produce better ones.

The main factor stopping Russia or China going through the same transition is institutionalised corruption. It's hard to implement good quality control if you can't trust the people doing the inspections not to take bribes...

XP was unfortunate to come out just before computers became fast enough for the vast majority of users. A 1GHz CPU and a reasonable amount of RAM is enough for a huge proportion of computer users. Before that, you'd buy a computer and it would be too slow, but it would be the fastest that you can afford (or that existed) and you'd upgrade when you could afford a replacement, because there'd be something faster out a few months later. By the early 2000s, the new computer wasn't perceptibly faster than the old one, so there was an increasingly small incentive to switch.

You forgot massive and unnecessarily burdensome documentation of your identity to help make sure college students, the elderly, and the working poor don't vote.

Most likely yes. Well, you could operate them over short distances on unlicensed bands, but to operate a mobile carrier (in most of the world) you need to buy a license for some spectrum. In the US, these didn't come with strings attached, so you ended up with some CDMA carriers and some GSM carriers, with no interoperability. In most of Europe, they came with a requirement to deploy GSM. Similar conditions were applied for 3G frequencies. In the UK, companies had to request regulator approval to repurpose their existing frequencies to new technologies. This was mostly granted (as long as it was for industry standard protocols). I don't know what LTE coverage is like, but I've not had a problem with getting an HPSA in any parts of the UK that I've tried, so I believe that it works and I know that any phone I buy will work with any carrier. Especially now, when spending over £100 on a smartphone is fairly common, knowing that doing so doesn't lock you in to a specific carrier is valuable.