Yet again, C's non-existent bounds checking and completely unprotected memory access lets an attacker compromise the system with data.

But hey, it's faster.

Despite car companies complaining loudly that if people just drove better there would be no accidents, laws were eventually changed to require seatbelts and airbags because humans are humans and accidents are inevitable.

Because C makes it trivially easy to stomp all over memory we are guaranteed that even the best programmers using the best practices and tools will still churn out the occasional buffer overflow, information disclosure, stack smash, or etc.

Only the smallest core of the OS should use unmanaged code with direct memory access. Everything else, including the vast majority of the kernel, all drivers, all libraries, all user programs should use managed memory. Singularity proved that was perfectly workable. I don't care if the language is C#, Rust, or whatever else. How many more times do we have to get burned before we make the move?

As long as all our personal information relies on really smart people who never make mistakes, we're doomed.

... making further distribution by Sony

or their agents (i.e. YouTube, with Sony still on the hook for the money)

subject to the $150,000 statutory damages penalty.

That is an explicit claim associated with Sony Pictures Movies & Shows. To get that, Sony had to upload content to the YouTube content system saying "I own this content. Anyone matching it is in copyright violation."

This is a very important legal argument to make in court. By submitting content to the system - or to YouTube in a way that would be interpreted as being "Copyright Sony, rights reserved" by the system - Sony knowingly made a claim of ownership.

This both disparaged BlenderFoudation's title and voided their license to distribute the content, making further distribution by Sony subject to the $150,000 statutory damages penalty.

And I've heard a LOT of REALLY BAD ideas.

Most of what has gotten worse in Unix/Linux over the last couple decades has been the progressive hiding of the system admimistration mechanisms - previously built on human-readable text configuratin files - behind GUI configuration interfaces and excessive complexity. (See upstart and systemd for examples of the latter.)

Now they want to bury the kernel error messages in a QR code? That REALLY takes the cake.

Eich was not fired. He chose to resign. Maybe he did so because he cares about the foundation and didn't want to be a distraction. Maybe he was told he'd better resign or they would lose their funding and have to lay everyone off. We don't know, but the insinuations of the original story are out of line for implying so. The truth is we just don't know.

This isn't some free speech issue or some form of inquisition trying to purge the unbelievers.

Eich chose to wade into a controversial issue by making political donations (after all, a conservative majority of SCOTUS claims money == speech). Those "free speech" statements offended a bunch of people and he chose to resign rather than drag the non-profit Mozilla foundation through an ordeal over it.

Anyone in a leadership position is certainly free to make any statements or support any political cause they want. Employees, customers/donors, etc are also free to loudly complain or refuse to associate with the organization if they disagree. That comes with the territory. We wouldn't give Eich a pass if he were sending checks to neo-Nazi organizations. A leader always takes a risk that they'll piss people off by taking a stance. He was CTO of Mozilla at the time, he knew what the consequences could be and made the donation anyway.

A few decades ago it was accepted that blacks and whites shouldn't intermarry. Even some people who campaigned for civil rights still held such a view. If Eich were donating to a group promoting a constitutional amendment to outlaw interracial marriages almost none of you would be wringing your hands over free speech. Everyone would laugh at him for being a dumbass and move on with their lives.

Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. Even if someone faces no offical sanctions for speaking out, they can certainly be excluded socially, even to the point of being driven out of the organization. That's how human group dynamics have always worked since we were grunting at each other and throwing pointy sticks.

Furthermore, technology has always been intertwined with personalities, politics, and the like. Only very rarely is it always 100% about the pure technology. You can write the best code in the world but if you can't play nice with others you run the risk of your code languishing in obscurity.

Social norms are changing; you can change with them, you can keep your mouth shut about it, or you can fight for the status quo. Each of those courses of action has risk associated with them. Eich chose to fight for the status quo, then chose to stick by his guns when it pissed a lot of people off, including a lot of the very people his organization depends on to contribute money and code from their own good will! That has consequences and it always has.

I do not see why TCP and IP could not have been created as single layer.

That was one of the major divergences from other networking schemes of the time that gave TCP/IP an advantage.

IP is a lower layer than TCP. It's about getting the packet from router to router, and is as deep into the packet that core routers have to look to do their jobs. Core routers are supposed to be "as dumb as rocks", putting as little effort as practical into forwarding each packet, in order to get as many of these "hot potatoes" moved on as quickly as possible and keep the cost of the routers down (and to drop any given packet if there's any problem forwarding it).

TCP is one of several choices for the next layer up. It runs only at the endpoints of a link. It does several things, which are all about building a reliable, persistent, end-to-end connection out of the UNreliable, "best effort", IP transport mechanism. Among these things are:
  - Breaking a stream up into packet-sized chunks.
  - Creating reliability by hanging error detection on packets and saving a copy of the data until the far end acknowledges successful reception, retransmitting if necessary to replace lost or corrupted packets.
  - Scheduling the launching of the packets so that the available bandwidth at bottlenecks is fairly divided among many TCP sessions, while as much of it is used as practical.
  - Adding an out-of-band "urgent data", channel to the connection (for things like sending interrupts and control information).
Some other networking schemes of the time did this on a hop-by-hop basis, requiring much more work by the routers. TCP put it at the endpoints only.

If TCP/IP had included crypto, we'd all be using IPX now days...

The reason TCP/IP proliferated was because it was light-weight and easy to implement. Crypto would have killed that.

There would have been more resistance to adopting it, too.

As it was, there was substantial resistance among people and institutions sited outside the US, because the Internet was a DARPA project, i.e. U.S. Military. Other countries, organizations within them, and even some people in the US, were concerned about things like what the US might be building in - like interception and backdoors for espionage and sabotage - or just because "Military! Bad!". Including encryption from the then officially nonexistent, deepest secret, communications spy agency would have boosted that resistance substantially.

That map is so much better and more informative than the tube map that I don't know why the latter exists at all. I know it's supposed to be a simplification, but if you condense that many cables into one route you end up with a map of countries that border the sea, not network routes. For example, there's nothing on the tube map to indicate that the UK is only one or two hops from Japan, or that the Seychelles are at the end of a line, even though it's clearly visible in both your map and the tube map's questionably accurate source material.

Linus is generally fair from what I can tell, and does not except himself from criticism. In that very thread:

Someone proposed a better idea and Linus immediately admits his idea was worse and moves on. That was also one of Steve Jobs' greatest talents, even though it's in a completely different sphere. He originally said "no" to iPods for Windows and the iOS app store. People presented their case and he changed his mind.

We should all be so willing to admit when someone else has a better idea or we were wrong.

.... the only group I can actively imagine making use of [2nd amendment] against the government is also the group I least want to see use it against the government.

Then perhaps you should read a little history and see who has actually used privately-owned guns against their own govrernments - and what has happened when privately owned weapons were banned and confiscated.

You should also consider that privately owned guns are "used" against governments by simply being there, rather than fired.

Example: Richard Nixon is on record, during the Vietnam conflict, as having asked a think tank what would happen if the elections were canceled and being told that this would be a likely trigger for an armed uprising to overthrow him.

You should also know that there is a certain amount of posturing involved. With using nukes to prevent nuclear war via the Mutually Assured Distruction doctrine, Presidents had to put on a show of being just crazy enough to actually USE them - whether they were or not. In the case of individuals with small arms it may not be "crazy" (as in "blow up the world") - just "dedicated". But for the threat to be effective at averting conflict it must appear to be real.

Think of gun in private hands as paying an insurance premium.

Five years after it was passed, yes. And the Supreme Court case was resolved on a technicality about Article III standing.

No, they most certainly were not. The full text of Prop 8 was:

There is no grandfather clause in there. The California Supreme Court did the grandfathering the year after Prop 8 passed. And the same sort of people Brendan Eich donated money to showed up to defend Prop 8 there, too.

This was not a small thing for the people affected by it, nor were the resulting court trials insignificant. If you'd like to understand this better, I recommend reading the transcripts of Perry v. Schwarzenegger.

Seconded. 2-4 GB is enough to turn off your page file in Windows, and that's where performance improvements for normal desktop apps ends for me. I have 16 GB for gaming, but I'm not sure I've ever used more than 8.

You know Prop 8 passed, right? Plunging thousands of gay and lesbian couples who had already married into years of legal limbo? Which was part of an ongoing movement to continue denying gay and lesbian couples legal recognition forever? And you're aware that that movement springs directly from millennia of unjustified prejudice and violent persecution that still lingers today, right? And that all of this deeply affects the lives of many Mozilla employees and Firefox developers? There's a larger context here, and none of that disappears just because a federal court throws out a law.

Nobody has a right to a specific job. Especially a job that makes them the public face of an organization that relies on a large and diverse group of outside developers. Eich chose to be an oppressive bigot, and chooses not to apologize for it. That's his choice, but he doesn't get to dodge the consequences just because he's a good coder or manager.

The Mozilla Foundation board should have known better. This isn't a new criticism.

They also open-sourced their new C# compiler:

http://roslyn.codeplex.com/

Also:

  - Give him a title that would go for $40k and actual job responsibilities that would go for $130k.

  - See what's on his resume and write a req that requires ALL of it and NOTHING ELSE, regardless of what the job actually entails.