So what you're saying is they secretly reached a secret agreement to keep secret the terms of the not-quite-secret agreements.

I was thinking that, too. They could install a second cable, tying the bottom of the elevator to the bottom of the counterweights and looping it through a pulley at the bottom of the shaft. That way they could fully control acceleration unbounded by gravity. They could accelerate the elevator slightly faster than the speed of gravity for the first fraction of a second, leaving the occupants floating about the cabin in mid-air, and then match the acceleration of gravity until it's at the end of the free-fall period. It would truly be the fastest elevator possible.

Apart from the spilled coffee, dropped laptops, tumbled wheelchairs, shrieking, cursing, rushed prayers, and the several heart attacks induced each day, I can see no downside to this elevator!

The problem isn't specific to OpenSSL or libssl or libcrypto, it's the overall idea in info security that "This is the One True Solution, thou shalt not Roll Thine Own crypto, lest thou livest in a state of Sin."

It's important to keep in mind this paranoia is completely justified. I've seen some really poor home-grown crypto implementations, written by well intentioned but completely inept developers. And I know most older libraries never defended against side channel attacks. OpenSSL is a product people trust to keep current defending against the latest cryptanalytic attacks. And after this little gaffe, I suspect people will keep a much closer eye on it.

The reason heartbleed made the news was that of scale. All this paranoia led to a monoculture. And the monoculture enabled B.O.R.E. - Break Once, Rob Everyone.

Sure an end user only sees that part, but something like KDE is far more than that and there is a whole lot of stuff going on underneath.

At some point you are simply drowning in wheels, and cant move.

I like Canada a lot, have a lot of relatives there (hence the Canadian citizenship). I wouldn't mind living there, other than the cold.

However what with all that, I understand some of the downsides. There are things which aren't as good there as in the US (Internet is one of them in general, cellphone service another). There are some that are better. There are others that are kinda a wash, in that the problems are different than the problems in the US.

I find that people who have never been there, only been there only briefly, have a much rosier opinion of the situation in Canada than I do, or than my family that lives there does.

I can picture a "fabricator" which is loaded up with strips of resistors, capacitors, transistors, LEDs, diodes, ICs, and mechanical items, such as spring wire, soft wire, hard wire, screws, and a roll of thin sheet metal. It could 3D print the housing, cut and bend wire as needed to create hinges, closures, battery terminals, etc., and print a circuit board. A pick-and-place tool could grab the chips, solder them to the printed circuit board, and then close it up with a sheet metal cover.

Such machines would not be cheap (to start with), and would be really expensive to stock with an adequate supply of components. An appliance repair shop might invest in one, but Joe Sixpack won't. At least not this year.

Pro tip: be sure to fax the original signature, or the contract isn't valid. :-)

My list is really close to zero, too, which is why I haven't bothered getting one. My friend has a veritable rainbow of little ABS geckos littering his desk. He's printed a few useful things, but for the most part he's only printed decorative items (and that's taking a few liberties with the word "decorate".) I don't need little plastic tchotchkes to make my day complete.

Where I think it may eventually shine is instant repair parts: a new door for the DVD-RW drive, a new button for the mouse, etc. But I don't want to own a $1000 printer to produce a replacement printed from $0.10 worth of plastic. I'd rather go to the local Office $(VAR), look up the part in a catalog, and ask them to print me the part for a dollar or two.

It isn't quite as good as people think with regards to money and politics, and certainly not with regards to the Internet. Canada's 'net speeds vs costs do not compare all that well to the US's.

Canada is a very nice (if cold) country that I visit every summer (I'm a dual citizen) but it isn't the utopia some Americans seem to think it is.

Which is why they've stopped making iPhones now that the market is flooded with cheap Android devi... oh, wait, they didn't.

Apple continues to improve its products, and it also makes fairly high quality stuff. My next desktop computer will be a Mac in part because I happen to prefer OS X over the abomination that is windows and the amateurish copycat that is the Linux desktop (not talking about servers here, all my servers run Linux), but also because of all the desktop computers I've ever owned, only my old C64 was more reliable and lasted longer.

Why not? Whether or not its true, there are other companies and even entire industries that work the same way, for example the fashion industry, and plenty of people have had a lifetime of employment from that.

Yes, pretty much. Monsanto and other developers, anyway.

It's based on somebody else posting a journal about current genetic research that pins Chili Pepper domestication down to the Mayans. Therefore, European cookbooks from *before* the voyages of exploration, wouldn't have them.

It's not just games. A number of the iOS productivity apps I've been using over the last couple of years have been progressively degraded in recent months by compulsory updates, such that I have to fork out for IAPs or even subscription fees if I want to continue having access to the features I had before. And these weren't free apps to begin with.

I ditched my Windows laptop for an iPad a couple of years ago (sticking with a Windows desktop), because it was both convenient and practical to do so. If MS really are giving me the option of sticking with my old workflow in a Windows 8 update, then I'll be looking to make the switch back soon.

I think the bigger problem is that everything about encryption software encourages a monoculture. Anyone who understands security will tell you "don't roll your own encryption code, you risk making a mistake." I would still rather have OpenSSL than Joe Schmoe's Encryption Library, simply because at this time I trust them a bit more. Just not as much as I did.

Another problem is that the "jump on it and fix it" approach is fine for servers and workstations. It's not so fine for embedded devices that can't easily be updated. I'm thinking door locks, motor controllers, alarm panels, car keys, etc. Look at all the furor over the hotel card key system a few years back, when some guy published "how to make an Arduino open any hotel door in the world in 0.23 seconds". Fixing those required replacing the circuit boards - how many broke hotels could afford to fix them, or even bothered to?

The existence of a "reference implementation" of security module means that any engineer would be seriously questioned for using anything else, and that leads to monoculture. And in that world, Proprietary or Open doesn't matter nearly as much as "embedded" vs "network updatable".