If you want to talk overall economic health, taxation does not really impact it since all those tax dollars just go strait back into the economy anyway.

Please remove this falsehood from your economic system. If you take productive money and piss it away on boondoggle projects instead of useful purposes then it's a complete loss for the economy. The entire premise of capitalism is that money that gets invested into useful purposes (production equipment, invention, entropy-reducing services) multiplies the value of that money over time. All spending is not created equal (so far from it)! Hanging fiber optics on poles and getting drunk are not equally beneficial!

it tends to skew who pays and who does not

Everybody pays. The producers add their tax burden to the cost of goods. The study from Harvard econ. sets the price of goods as 22% higher (average) than they would otherwise be without the income tax. When that single mother is buying a $3 loaf of bread for her kids' school lunch, more than fifty cents of that is going straight to pay the income taxes of the people in the supply chain. That's why it's the most regressive tax possible. People can only pretend that it's progressive if they completely ignore second order effects and beyond.

I'm thinking the author has zero clue as to what he is talking about in tech

It said right in the summary that he wrote this for TIME magazine. Don't pretend like you didn't get fair warning!

$30,949 is how much the OpenBSD Foundation received in donations in 2013. That has to get fixed as their expenses were $54,914 and only a one-time transfer from an old account covered the deficit.

The community that depends on OpenSSH, OpenNTPD and the like needs to figure out how to support these projects.

Personally I'd like to see the Foundation offer targeted donations to specific projects with a percentage (~20% perhaps) going into the general operations fund. I bet there are a bunch of people who would throw a hundred bucks at OpenSSH but would be concerned that a general donation would go to some odd thing Theo is doing (whether that be fair or not).

And if "Fixing OpenSSL" were one of the donation options, then hold on to your hats - I think we're all in agreement on this. We do know that the folks currently working on the projects are paid by others but if the Foundation can get enough money to offset expenses then it could actually do some development work and possibly finally take care of some sorely-neglected tasks on a few of these codebases.

They cancelled this policy [nytimes.com] almost immediately after it was brought to light.

Here's the thing: the data mining apparatus and amount of data entry required to get to this point must be enormous. Finding all of the information required to get to the point of issuing seizures of refunds would require complete integration of all SSI payment history, all tax payment history, family histories, movement pattern tracking, etc.

There might even be a tie in to NSA/"not-TIA" to enable this, since the scope is so large. They probably started putting out bids for the work shortly after the law changed in 2008 and have only recently yielded results.

It's not going to be turned off just like that.

They cancelled this policy [nytimes.com] almost immediately after it was brought to light.

Here's the thing: the data mining apparatus and amount of data entry required to get to this point must be enormous. Finding all of the information required to get to the point of issuing seizures of refunds would require complete integration of all SSI payment history, all tax payment history, family histories, movement pattern tracking, etc.

There might even be a tie in to NSA/"not-TIA" to enable this, since the scope is so large. They probably started putting out bids for the work shortly after the law changed in 2008 and have only recently yielded results.

It's not going to be turned off just like that.

this adds to light pollution

Assuming street lights are removed, does the upward light from these strips exceed the reflected light from the streetlights?

your car is not oriented so as to illuminate it.

That's a good point - I tend to rely on my navigation device to get some forewarning of the curve and slope of the road ahead just because on a dark and winding road there's no way to see very far ahead.

Then again, glowing roads won't work to entirely replace this when the road winds around a hill or mountain. But more passive safety devices are still a good idea if they can help a little bit. It seems like rumble strips - they don't do anything for most people most of the time, but they do a great job for a few people every once in a while.

a whole lot of work had to be done to revise the tooling

Ah, so we need to name the machinists too! Charge the whole lot with a conspiracy to embarrass management!

Somehow Harry Tuttle is probably involved.

This was a failure in the Open Source process.

Indeed. People have been saying for years that the OpenSSL code leaves much to be desired but nobody dares fix it because it might break something (needed: comprehensive unit tests).

There's been a bug filed for years saying that the code won't build with the system malloc, which in turn prevents code analysis tools from finding use-after-free conditions. The need here is less clear - leadership of the project has not made such a thing a priority. It's not clear that funding was the sole gating factor - commit by commit the code stopped working with the system malloc and nobody knew or cared.

Sure, a pile of money would help pick up the pieces, but lack of testing, continuous integration, blame culture, etc. might well have prevented it in the first place.

We still have sites like Sourceforge that are solving 1997 problems, like offering download space and mailing lists when what we need today is to be able to have continuous integration systems, the ability to deploy a vm with a complex project already configured and running for somebody to hack on, etc.

This creates the appearance that, if you do not buy the membership, you'll be stopped and shown absolutely no mercy

we give these people a monopoly on violence and expect what, exactly, Andy Taylor and Barney Fife?

but the failure of challenges to overturn them highly implies constitutionality.

Naw, fewer than 1% of challenges are overturned on Constitutional grounds and many fewer laws than that are challenged. There's no chance 99.9+% of laws passed are in compliance with Madison's Constitution - it's just that the battle is highly asymmetrical in resource allocation.

There was a legal challenge to the ACA already, and it was defeated in court. In other words: your views on the constitutionality of the ACA aren't shared by the current Supreme Court, and therefore they are pretty much irrelevant

You seem to not understand how the Supreme Court works. That's OK, it's arcane.

The particular ACA challenge you refer to was over the Constitutionality of the ACA as a fine. The Court said, "it's not a fine, it's a tax, and FedGov can levy taxes." The challenge was defeated.

Now other lawyers are back before the Court arguing that taxes must originate in the House, per the Constitution, while ACA is a Senate bill (with gut-and-replace not being a valid technique to avoid germaneness via-a-vis the Origination Clause). The Court will rule on that narrow point and then the next challenge will be heard.

SCOTUS will never come out and say, "All aspects of ACA are Constitutional".

That being said, I assumed dropbox already was infiltrated by the NSA.

And now it's confirmed. Freaking astute move by the board members with gag orders and National Security Letters if you ask me.

Heck, I'm considering buying one of these 'VR' headsets for use for business purposes. If you've ever taken an 8-hour bus or train ride and tried to use a small laptop screen the whole way, it can be frustrating.

This thing has twice as many eye views as I need (future patent: slightly cross your eyes and interleave double resolution by shifting each pixel off by one for each eye), but the resolution is good enough.

My real preference would be for a bluetooth keyboard and to run my desktop off a cell phone form factor. Good thing the buses and trains have AC mains now.

I haven't heard any other excuses from anybody

We've had a few threads going here about the principled objection to State-regulated marriage.. Here's one. If you want to search we also had a discussion about the polyamorous folks who will probably never have their marriages permitted.

As far as I've been able to find, Eich has never stated why he was opposed, even now. Which is fine, that's his business.

By the sheer odds, it's more likely that he's a bible-thumper than a strategically-donating uber-libertarian trying to build coalitions to dismantle State management of loving relationships. It's also worth noting that by the odds he didn't invent JavaScript too, so who knows.

It does sound like by California law, you can't offer a CEO the job of housekeeper and then claim to have not fired him (apologies in advance for veering back on topic).