Of course, y'all have significantly more accidents than us mollycoddled city slickers, so you may want to reconsider the use of "fine" in this context.

Are you kidding me? Without electronics and industry, all performance arts are live and local. There's no high-quality music on demand from iTunes or YouTube, no recorded music playing at restaurants, parties, or festivals, no constant background music in television and movies. Maybe you can get crappy records made out of wax if you're lucky.

During the day, when most people are doing grunt work, the gymel expert might not be anything special. (Or they might -- people are not solely defined by their profession.) But at night, when everyone's sitting around a fire relaxing? I bet someone who can make strange and beautiful music would be very popular indeed.

Dang. Typo broke the first, more-punchline-worthy, Schlock link.

I'm really begining to hate the keyboard on this new laptop.

This actually looks good to me. Most helicopters can be shot down with a rifle. They are huge engines with large fuel tanks and large, whirling blades, and it is not that difficult to get them to destroy themselves with their own momentum, height, or fuel.

I concur. Helicopters are a collection of single-points-of-failure, disasters waiting to happen. (Particularly the pilot - they have to be continuously controlled and crash almost instantly if anything incapacitates him.) Their vulnerability is justified only because their extreme usefulness oughtweighs it. With eight rotors I'd be surprised if this vehicle couldn't at least come to ground safely with at least two of them destroyed, and the multicopter approach has been under autonomous computer control from the start - made practical only by the automation.

I envision this thing's missions as being primarily extreme rough-country ground transport, with short hops to bypass otherwise impassible terrain, reach otherwise inaccessible destinations or targets, attack from above, or put on a burst of speed when time is of the essence. Think a truck-sized "super jeep" ala Superman. Being primarily a ground vehicle lets it perform longer missions and reduces its visibility and vulnerability compared to a helicopter.

Just because you CAN fly doesn't mean you DO fly all the time. As is pointed out in the webcomic Schlock Mercenary: "Do you know what they call flying soldiers on the battlefield?" ... "Skeet!"

Which is more officially the Doctrine of Constitutional Avoidance: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

A lot of that hardware does not have Linux drivers either.

So write one!

(Ba-dah-bing! Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.)

Seriously, though. If you're buying hardware with an embedded Windows OS as a necessary component, that's what you signed up for. Take that into account when negotiating with vendors for the replacement.

I never thought I'd see the day that anyone would claim Windows Vista was the pinnacle of OS innovation...

Looks to me like the claim was that XP was the pinacle of OS innovation AT MICROSOFT.

After that they jumped the shark with creeping featureitis and failure to support (or provide an adequte, clean, easy upgrade path for) important functionality.

Nothing was said about OS innovation OUTSIDE of Microsoft.

There's also the issue of whether OS innovation was even a Good Thing (TM) for the users of the functionality of the time. (It can still be enabling and yet be a net loss if its costs outweigh its benefits.)

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.