You can if the power you are given is entirely superficial. Like Obamacare.

You mean 1997.

To erase the memory of libertarians.

It is possible to be both evil and incompetent. Most dictators actually are.

But it is. The proof is that a majority of Democrats seem to have applied Affirmative Action to the last two Presidential elections, and promoted a man with no leadership skills whatsoever to the white house.

I suspect you meant that sarcastically, but if system software (meaning OS kernels, network stacks, device drivers, etc.) were written in better languages, our computer systems could be far safer and more robust, quality of life could be better, and the benefit to productivity and the global economy could be substantial.

For the computing industry, it is one of the great tragedies of our time that C and its derivatives have become so entrenched. There is absolutely no reason we can't have a systems programming language that offers the necessary low-level control without the limited programming model, error-prone syntax and weak safety features of C.

Unfortunately, it is momentum and ubiquity that keep most of the industry using C and its brethren, not technical merit. The vast ecosystem surrounding C is hard to beat for scale. There is promising work being done in some places, Rust for example, but I know of no practical alternative that is ready for production use today.

Of course, OpenSSL itself isn't running at the level of an OS kernel, so it doesn't need the same degree of low-level access anyway. But there is a wider point here about much more than just OpenSSL.

Please read what Raymond actually wrote in The Cathedral and the Bazaar. My criticism applies equally to his more formal definition of Linus's Law, and to his extended argument as a whole.

No-one (sensible) claims that any code review process will find absolutely all bugs. But Raymond's article seems to be arguing that having enough developers and testers on a project will inevitably get you very close.

And yet, we are talking about this in a discussion about a severe bug in one of the most widely used OSS projects on the planet that went undiscovered (or at least unreported and unfixed) for years.

But how many FOSS projects really have diligent review of all their code by anything like that many people? For many projects, getting a change accepted requires only the approval of one or two others. Activities like the current detailed review of TrueCrypt are the exception, not the rule.

If you really want a dramatic improvement in catching these kinds of bugs and you've already got a respectable code review process in place, you'd probably do better by considering complementary strategies instead of pursuing ever diminishing returns from throwing more people into the same informal code review process. Choose safer programming languages that don't admit certain kinds of programmer error in the first place. Employ formal methods to make sure the underlying algorithms are sound. Adopt different testing strategies.

Sadly, using safer programming languages is still swimming against the flow of mainstream programming tools, while using formal methods or many testing strategies outside of having an automated unit test suite sounds like heavyweight design to some people, and this upsets all the newbies who think being "agile" and "moving fast and breaking things" are the way you make good software when quality really matters.

Improving software quality is in significant part a social problem, but the solution is not requiring more people to be reviewers, it's getting more people to understand that just having more reviewers is not enough.

No, it isn't. It's nonsense and it always has been.

There is plenty of evidence for the effectiveness of good code reviews, but most of it shows rapidly diminishing returns with the number of reviewers. You get much of the benefit from having even one or two additional people read over something. By the time you've had more than four or five people take a look, the difference in effectiveness from adding more barely even registers, unless one of the additional reviewers has some sort of unique perspective or expertise that makes them not like the others.

Given that almost every major FOSS system software project has had its share of security bugs, there is really very little evidence to support Raymond's claim at all. It's not like it has ever been taken seriously outside the FOSS fan club, but there are a lot of FOSS fans on Slashdot, and so plenty of comments (and positive moderations) reinforce the groupthink as though it's some inherent truth.

As long as you aren't a victim of Tax Identity Fraud. My taxes are rather complex, my wife and I have used TurboTax for years to deal with them, until this year. When we went to file, we go the error "Spouse's Tax Identification Number has already been used". Yes, some idiot had used her SSN to already file before the first week of February.

So we had to file by paper, notify three other agencies, put a hold on her credit, and call the local cops to get a tax refund this year. NEVER tell me that identity theft is a victimless crime.

The best part of Star Trek for me was when Motorola came out with the StarTac, and I realized that in three generations, science fiction could become science fact.

BTW, since I need to give up my keyboard in the next generation anyway, can anybody recommend a hard plastic flip cover for a Samsung S5?

So rather than address the issue linked to, you're just going to slip into typical lefty ad hominem in order to avoid the substance of the matter? Yup, that's what you did.

We'll also assume you're not interested in continuously updated images of empty ocean.
 
I think the families of Malaysian Flight 370 might have something to say about that.

One concept- on station floating wifi.

1939-1945