...how many of those ships are US-registered? A quick guess would be way less than 10%, if even that. Hell, much (if not most) US-owned ships are often flagged in Liberia (or some similar country) for tax/inspection/regulation purposes.

We may yet find out... most of the smarter escapees tend to wait until their deathbed to let something like that slip out.

I suspect that prison makes you learn a few things rather quickly...

They'd have to have kept those crimes to extremely petty ones at the most. Even though the 1960's didn't have facial recognition, the TSA (for what that's worth), instant background checks, widespread Social Security Number checking mechanisms, or any of the stuff we have today? They definitely had fingerprinting, and at least some semblance of a national fingerprint database of sorts to check against (the FBI would have had these guys' fingerprints after the break.)

They could have eventually slipped through the cracks even if they re-offended (e.g. it wasn't uncommon for, say, truck drivers to have multiple drivers' licenses from multiple states), but any crime beyond a misdemeanor would have had the local PD looking at some stranger (stranger in their town that is) and doing at least a cursory check, if only to build a rap sheet for the prosecution.

IMHO, if they made it, they likely hoofed it to Canada or Mexico (or perhaps further South) and built an assumed identity from which to live out the rest of their lives in as obscure a manner as possible. Over time, that new identity would become reinforced.

It wouldn't be the first time either... I recall a few instances in the '80s and even the '90s where some schlub or other escaped prison in that era (or before), got himself a new identity, and decades later did something stupid (IIRC, in one case the dumbass ran for a local public office, and a local reporter researching his background found the inconsistencies).

And, well, fuck the non-disparagement agreement. It's not disparagement to post factual information.

Wait, WTF?

From your first link:

But while Isaac is a Joyent employee, Ben is not—and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

That's some rather petty bullshit, truth be told - by all parties involved, including the author of that blog entry. Now if they were fighting over something, you know, *technical*, I'd be more sympathetic, but really - ideological bullshit like that? Call me when the dude added some actual code to the damn thing and got rude treatment.

No. If an open source project's leadership accepts monetary or other sponsorship, then the leadership of that project has to do the corporation's bidding. The other contributors can still do whatever the fuck they want.

To be honest, unless there's a contract (with a term) involved, the project's leadership can change or reject the terms at any time, and can definitely negotiate or even reject any changes (proposed or actual in their relationship with the sponsor.

Finally, this is a two-way street - the sponsor must accept that the project they took on simply is what it is.

I disagree over the degree of which this would be a problem - think of it more like the free market. Under ideal conditions, the best ideas with the broadest appeal tend to win, grow and evolve, while the worst ideas with little appeal tend to fade away relatively quickly.

It also provides a very useful ejection seat of sorts in case of corporate asshattery (see also OpenOffice/Libre Office), patent follies, or worse. Also, consider this: Closed-Source/proprietary software can be just as prone to this kind of internal dissent as OSS, but you the end-user will never have a say in the results.

Forking is awesome to have as an option - either as a threat or as an actuality. A company who knows that their shit could be forked will either behave themselves, or they will lose control of their product. IMHO that's a damned good thing.

Agreed, though it brings up a bigger (albeit personal) bitch-n-moan on my part...

We went from zero to Moon in about 24 years (1945-1969), but then did approximately bupkis in the realm of manned exploration for 45 years after that (okay, Space Shuttle, ISS, etc - but we're talking manned planetary exploration here, not just repeating the same shit we've done over and over again with only trivial increments.)

I remember as a kid anticipating a shot of going to distant worlds as an adult, but damn - by the time they *finally* get around to putting someone on Mars, I'll be damned near retired (and definitely too old for consideration of such a thing.) I just wish NASA would have gotten their shit straight and kept pushing, instead of dropping it in the early 1970s and deciding 'hey, let's make this shuttle thingy!'

Some of us would have wanted to see things happen faster, and sooner - I know I'm not alone in thinking this...

Fair call, but consider that it costs a pretty penny to get an app into any of those marketplaces, and they're almost orders of magnitude smaller than even Blackberry's App store...

No - it's Microsoft's incarnation of Apple's AppNap feature.
(think of it as an aggressive and automatic version of the *nix renice function with a suspend feature latched onto it.)

A handful out of several million ain't half bad, considering.

I think the only other app store that could do better would be Blackberry, but only due to the fact that nobody uses it anymore (or at least not enough to have found and purchased a scam app).

Quoted for visibility: Most folks, when not given a sufficient reason for something, will come up with one of their own. A child isn't going to know (much less comprehend) all the (let's face it, oftentimes dumb) nuances of ideology or politics, so they'll often come up with and go for the simplest explanation they can contrive given what they know.

Depends, really. When my ex-wife first began nursing school, the only guys you saw in her class were considered to be homosexual (even by many of the female classmates). This stemmed from the perception of nursing as a caring and nurturing profession, more akin to motherhood than to traditional male traits.

I suspect that aside form what other guys think, there's also the 'ick' factor among male patients who have a male nurse, especially when it comes to things involving the more intimate bits of the human body; it's one thing to have a woman shaving your nether regions in preparation for a surgery or giving you an enema (or similar), but some dude doing it to you introduces a bit of mental discomfort in guys. I suspect the biggest reason stems from nearly everyone having had their mother bathe them and care for them when they were kids, so it's easier to overcome if a woman does it. Mind you this isn't sexism, but the result of conditioning.

No, no you wouldn't. You would only know what the prosecution and defense could find and present. Nothing more, nothing less.

As it so happens, the DA promised to release all the evidence they have to the public shortly. When, how, and in what format I do not know, but nonetheless, that's what they intend to do according to their statement.

Agreed. The reason for having one in the first place is to determine whether there is enough credible evidence and testimony to be worth a trial.