> As a result, coming up with something small that shows your "value" (or often rather just a "cultural/attitude fit" with the project) is likely to work much better.

That sounds very much like initiation to a cult to me...

"You have to bring three chickens for sacrifice to join us."

And this is exactly the problem why people don't contribute to open source.

"What kind of a fucking idiot are you - you can't even write a decent bug report." is not the correct response to the average contributor.

In Google Voice it was free to call US numbers, but only while you were in the US. From abroad, you still had to pay for US calls. Google Voice had a lot of potential, but it never quite realised it. I hope this works better .

What I would like to know if there is some "call in" feature, too? Maybe not a phone number, but a way to call and then be connected to Google Hangouts.

Mushrooms used to be grown on horse manure, and I doubt they are very "selective". So this is no surprise.

However, it is well known to be a bad idea. You do not grow food for human consumption on human feces, because the risk of contamination is too high. Horse manure is ok, as is growing animal fodder on human feces.

And there are better schemes to get rid of old diapers - since they are rich in high quality cellulose that can be used after a good clean.

It is a bit borderline, but I don't think it is illegal. The difference is that car pooling is not for profit. Even if you are nice and pay for it, it is typically just a contribution to the cost.

Actually in Germany the insurance *will* cover any damages, but it may try to recover the payment from the driver. Which seems perfectly reasonable to me. Of course drivers should pick the right insurance, just like I pay a bit extra to be able to use my car for normal business travel (not transportation).

The first part is also pragmatic. Releasing a security fix is a lot of work, not just for the developers, but also for everybody else. So you only do that if you have reasonable suspicion that the bug is a security risk. They were good reasons to believe that it is not the case here, although in the end they did not apply in every situation.

If you treat every bug as a security issue, you end up with the Google situation where only one version, the latest, is ever supported. And for libc that is not an acceptable option.

I had some pre-1.0 versions, but no internet connection. The first version I really used was 1.0.8 -nli one via the university 128kBit link. Luckily that got better soon afterwards.

And later I was really excited about KDE 1.0. I think it had many good ideas and was quite nice to use, if a bit RAM hungry. Unfortunately many of those nice ideas got removed in KDE 2.0 :-(

>All hardware is prone to not coming back up after the power was cut (or turned off in the case of a laptop I have), SSD is not special in this.

But OCZ SSDs were. The failure of OCZ drives doubled the industry average failure rate, that is how bad they were. Returns were in the double digit percents.

And still I hear your statement that this could happen to any company. Which is true. But OCZ ignored the problem and pretended it did not exist, instead of showing a bit of generosity towards the (rightly) disappointed customers. This I will not forget, and like me many others.

run anywhere.

Unless you have the wrong Java version. Or it turns out to be not quite as portable as promised. Or there is an issue with security settings. Or you are in Russia.

Yes, but that is a well known problem. In every core meltdown, lack of information has been a serious issue. Guess why? Because the sensors melt, too. An expert may be able to guess what is going on, but it is beyond the skill of a typical operator.

Non-nuclear power has well known consequences. An important one for coal is the release of mercury, lead and radon (!) into the atmosphere. Of course industry has downplayed it, but it is very easy to verify.

As for state owned power - it depends on whether you trust the system. If it is totalitarian, so is the management of power plants.

In case of a nuclear accident, the industry will always downplay and deny everything that is not perfectly obvious. Has always been, and probably will always be. This is the main reason I do not trust nuclear power that is run for profit.

Which is exactly why politicians cannot touch the NSA. It is a typical problem when the secret service gets too powerful. Nothing new here.

I have both, and the Kindle has an easy of use about it that more flexible Nook cannot match.

Easy of use can be much more important than most geeks think.