I believe they call that Celebrity Jeopardy.

Forced? No one's saying that. The suggestion was about saving MS money! Instead of spending tens of millions of dollars developing their own browser, they would spend some lesser amount of money to include someone else's. It's not like MS sells copies of IE. The only thing they get for it is searches directed to Bing and headaches (and black eyes) from security vulnerabilities.

Basically, from a purely business standpoint, what is the ROI of MS developing a new browser? Would they ever earn back their investment? I say the same thing about all the resources MS poured into making Windows versions after XP. Windows 7 might be "good", but is it really that much better than XP plus incremental updates? Did Microsoft ever sell enough extra copies of Windows to justify the hundreds of millions or possibly billions of dollars spent on Windows Vista, 7, and 8? It's hard to know, but considering how much corporate customers hated moving from XP to 7, I'd guess they would have kept on buying XP for a long time.

The same argument holds true for IE. Why pour resources into a product that you don't make much, if any, money on? Sure, Windows needs a browser, but if more than half your customers are already going out of their way to install a different browser, why not just work with that browser maker to make it the default? It would (presumably) save money, make most customers happy (because now you're saving them time), and thus increase profit.

It won't happen because of egos and pride involved, and the numbers might not work out anyway (i.e., if Google and Mozilla want more money than it actually costs to make a new IE), but it's a good idea from a business standpoint.

And those of use who just used SW using the API are just SOL. One day I came into work and found that my calendar integration between Thunderbird (Lightening) and Google Calendar was no longer working. And I couldn't upgrade the Google Calendar provider addon because the new version required a new version of Thunderbird, which I cannot install because it doesn't work on RHEL5 (they are slowly upgrading to RHEL6).

I was able to get it to "work" by switching to ICS, but that is read-only (apparently). So at least I can see my personal calendar along side my work calendar, but I cannot edit it. But I'm sure turning off the old interface allowed them to make the rest of the product "better". Like changing the month scroll direction and make it not continuous. Or breaking the calendar widget in Android so that it occasionally gets "stuck" showing events from previous days until you reboot. Google has definitely become the next Microsoft. They have way too many developers for their own (or anyone else's) good.

Your comment got me interested in actual numbers, so I did some Google searches. I expected to find a small but nonzero number of yearly deaths. The results I found indicated that death by starvation in America is so infrequent that it's not even tracked. Occasional cases do occur, but they are often the result of something other than lack of access to food, such as child neglect or mental illness. Even Feeding America only talks about the effects of hunger and food insecurity, not actual starvations. There are lots of programs, both government and private charities that provide food and assistance to those who need it.

That's not to trivialize the very real problems of malnutrition or hunger, which can have serious consequences. But outright death to lack of access to food does seem to be practically non-existent in the U.S.

Check your /bin/sh symlink. The system() function essentially does `/bin/sh -c "PASSED_ARGUMENT"'. On many (all?) Debian based systems, /bin/sh is a link to 'dash', not 'bash'. IIRC, this was done for speed reasons, but it is likely that dash does not happen to have the same bug as bash.

China thinks the big CO2 producers should cut first? So, does that include China itself, as the largest CO2 producer country?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In 2010, China produced much more CO2 than any other country: 8.3 billion tons compared to the US' 5.4 billion tons. Worse, the 2012 estimates show China rising to 9.86 billion tons and the US dropping to 5.19 billion tons. So, which country is worse again?

Where do I go instead of Best Buy? Amazon. NewEgg. Monoprice.

For commonplace electronics you need today: Walmart/Sam's Club or Target (use cash!) or even Staples or Office Max.

For appliances: Home Depot or Lowes.

Unfortunately for Best Buy, there's very little reason to actually go there anymore. And at least for me they have a reputation of high prices.

Of course, any code that requires a patent license to run isn't exactly free software either. And no free software project "with a brain" should accept code that opens up users to legal liability.

If companies like Apple and Google really are rejecting GPL v3 because of patent issues, that makes me think they want to use their patents against users of the software they are purporting to be "free." Are users of the LLVM compiler going to wake up one day to a lawsuit from one of these companies alleging patent infringement? It's all fun and games until your company is the target of a multi-billion dollar lawsuit because you shipped software compiled with a patented optimization technique or something.

Of course, the sooner that happens, the better. Because then everyone pushing non-GPL licenses will remember why those patent protections are there, and switch back. Or we could just get rid of software patents and not have to worry about the whole mess.

btw, Google and Apple probably don't like GPL v3 because of the anti-Tivoization clauses in GPL v3 that would prevent those companies from locking down the hardware they sell and preventing users from replacing the OS with a different one. But that's not really a patent issue. Nor is it a very nice thing for either company to do. At least Google does make it easier to unlock the device, even if it doesn't come that way by default.

I was curious about Pale Moon, so I googled it. Turns out it's a Firefox build optimized for Windows. They disabled some stuff they didn't think most people would need and enabled compiler optimizations that might exclude some older machines. See technical details.

No Linux version, though :(

Scalia's the only one of the nine who is almost guaranteed to strike it down. He has routinely voted against government intrusion such as using IR devices to find grow houses without a warrant or the recent case of the government collecting DNA samples from all people arrested.

Though the most likely outcome is that the Court will not rule on the issue at all, deciding that whoever brings whatever case doesn't have standing because they cannot prove they were spied upon.

You fool! Don't know know how dangerous that stuff is?

Maybe, but even the act of sending the cookie back, even if it seems to have bad data in it, can give information about you -- what sites you visit, how long you spend there, etc.

Now, maybe a script that made random HTTP requests with random cookie data. It still would be tricky, and blocking the stalkers (especially facebook) seems much safer.

I agree with a lot of your points, but regarding recycling, a big thing to consider is that recycled material doesn't take up space in a landfill. If we recycle a cubic meter of glass, we aren't saving ourselves from having to gather a cubic meter of sand, but we are saving a cubic meter of space in a landfill somewhere. And those cubic meters add up.

Your corporate shill quip made me remember a passing comment I once overheard that went something like:

... so what this GNU company has done is license the zip technology to make the gzip format ...

I almost cried.

And there are provisions for revoking signatures. AIUI, they can be even be distributed through something like Windows update (as long as the revocation is signed by MS), and certainly the revocation lists would be on new hardware. That is what people are worried about.