Maybe there's a hint there? Conservative, experimental, conservative, experimental... As long as people keep arguing if the old or new version of Windows is better, I don't think Microsoft worries. You are free to skip a version you know.

Do a s/MSFT/Linux/g and there's plenty OSS apologists too. Particularly because you got one team saying "Linux is so free and great, it's totally ready for the desktop and you should try it out" but when you have a problem the other team says "Yeah well you got it for free, so STFU and be grateful". I'm on Windows 7 now and I'm guessing sometime soon Microsoft needs to release another "classic" desktop for conservative enterprises so they can plan their migration before the 2020 EoL. Having Linux around as a plan B is nice but for gaming Windows rules supreme, regardless of whether Linux has a Steam client or not.

DoublcClick has such negative value that their servers should be blocked at firewalls, or at least "host.txt". Even if you have AdBlock, blocking them earlier saves bandwidth.

I think Norway is fairly unique in that we actually voted to have a king (12-13th of November 1905) after the end of the union with Sweden. Also our king's power has been reduced to a democratic emergency brake where he can only delay a law being passed until there's been an election. If it is passed again, it becomes law regardless. Formally he's the sovereign though, the one signing all the laws, head of all military branches, the one formally leading the king's council with the prime minister as his first advisor. And his person has a total blanket immunity in Norwegian law, though it was settled that he could be sued in a property dispute.

What I find quite appealing at times is that he's not a politician, not looking for a reelection or to further his own career nor is he trying to represent just the 51% who voted him in. In the US I have the impression that if a Republican is in office all the Democrats hate him and if a Democrat is in office all the Republicans hate him. He represents the nation of Norway and not whatever political party happens to hold the reins at the moment. There are other nations that have a form of ceremonial leader like for example Germany with the Bundespräsident as opposed to the Bundeskanzler, but it's a retirement home for politicians. You have to campaign to win it. It's not forever, so there's self-interest to it.

Our king is pretty relaxed about his right to rule, or rather I feel he thinks it's more of privilege. No blue blood, no divine right to rule and I think he like pretty much all western monarchies knows he sits at the parliament's mercy. Like the US, we do have a constitution and a process to amend it and like I said he couldn't block it. If he was losing the people's support I think he'd resign gracefully though long before it came to that. And apart from at the coronation I don't think I've ever seen him with a crown and all that, it's more a ceremonial rite when you take the job.

You can of course say he's not needed, that the US is a nation independent from the President in office and I suppose that's true, but it's a very abstract and silent existence. For example during WW2 the radio broadcasts from the king in excile in London was gathering the nation. When people use archaic expressions like "for king and country" we're not talking about saving one man's divine ass anymore, but that the king serves the country and we follow him as our leader. It's not a perfect system but honestly speaking I feel it works well. It's good for tourism. Sure they live in a castle with a solid upkeep, but I know we'd keep it for historical reasons anyway. We'd no more tear it down than old churches.

Clearly you didn't use it for your own project, I suppose you had to write it first or it would have suggested HorribleUniqueNameGenerator. Because like the developers of the GNU Image Manipulator Program knows, a catchy acronym never hurt anyone.

First of all, there's very little in a rebranding effort that will be of any significance if they're looking to relicense. The tricky part is that they must replicate the functionality from scratch, without getting derivative - typing it up again or changing the function or variable names won't be enough. That's a job they have to do in parallel, in the background until they're ready to ditch CipherShed 1.x (based on TrueCrypt) and release CipherShed 2.0 based entirely on non-TrueCrypt source code under the new license.

Yes, you might argue that they should do it in bits and pieces to the current source tree with dual licensed code, but that will make it harder to make non-derivative code. If you keep making things that fit into the current project, the internal structure will be very similar which is a bad thing from a legal point of view. I guess if you're interested in making new code for the new version they'll tell you what license they plan to use. Or you could dual license it TrueCrypt/BSD yourself, since that'll work no matter what they pick.

Veracrypt is also a one-man copyright fraud. No, not just infringement but as in actually taking the Truecrypt code and slapping another license on it. That project stinks to high heaven.

It does. There's a Craiglist-type feature on Bloomberg trading info terminals. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing. You can message other people via the Bloomberg system if you see something you like.

There's a paid social network for rich conservatives. This is independent, not a Bloomberg thing. It's only $5/month, which is apparently enough to keep the noise level down.

There's a persistent rumor that there are special news sources for rich people. There are, but they're very narrow. There are lots of newsletters you can buy for $50 to $1000 a month that provide detailed coverage of obscure business subjects. If you really need to know what's going on with bulk carrier leasing, oil drilling equipment activity, or wafer fab capacity shortages, there's a newsletter for that. Offshore Alert, which covers offshore scams, is one of the more readable ones, and you can see the first few lines of each story for free. There are expensive newsletters devoted to security and terrorism, which give the illusion of inside information, but they tend to be marketing tools aimed at rich paranoids.

If you want to know what's going on in the world, read The Economist. After you've been reading it for a year, you'll have a good understanding of how the world works.

Actually, there's quite a lot of history in various parts of the world when parts of a political entity split off. Sometimes this is done peacefully, sometimes it involves serious fighting and wars. An interesting recent case was in Switzerland, where in 1978 the Canton of Bern split, with the northern part forming the new Canton of Jura. You can read a lot about it online, including a couple of wikipedia articles. It's fairly well encoded in Swiss law, where similar votes happen every few years, typically involving a municipality with a large population that wants to secede from its canton and join another. The typical reason for such splits is as in Scotland, where the people in an area feel poorly served by the government, and think they can do better as part of a different county/state/whatever, or perhaps as an independent unit as Jura did.

Here in the US, we had a similar vote in 1863, which resulted in the new state of West Virginia being formed. This is often presented as part of the Civil War split off of the Confederacy. Historians tend to interpret it as more of a case of the western population feeling poorly treated by the remote state government in Richmond, which collect taxes in the mountains, but provided few government services in return. West Virginia did apply to the federal government for statehood, which was ratified after a few years. Unlike the Southern secession, this was done without (further) warfare. A funny aspect of the story is that now, several counties in the northeast of West Virginia have openly discussed seceding and joining either Virginia or Maryland, for pretty much the same reasons. Unlike Switzerland, though, the US doesn't have much in the way of official laws that deal with such political reorganization and redrawing of political boundaries.

The story in Scotland may work out as it often does in Switzerland, where many of the votes for secession fail. The reason is that the referendum functions as a "wake-up call" to the government. It's typical for a lot of public discussion to happen, and the government(s) make promises to fix the problems that triggered the referendum. Sometimes, as people have suggested here, the government reneges on its promises. This will be followed by another vote a few years later, which will often succeed. Or the government may fix many of the problems, which will satisfy the voters and repeated votes will fail.

The Scots would probably do well to continue discussing the issues publicly, and keep the London government aware that they can't continue to get away with everything without repercussions.

More accurately, I've seen it stated as "closer to Bergen than Edinburgh". Or course, some people might not know where Bergen is. In any case, Shetland historically has always been rather remote from either "mainland", and they've pretty much been on their own all along. If they have problems in the middle of their winter, they can't much rely on help from anyone in the rest of the world.

Well, I've always sorta liked the Scottish historians' observation that, strictly speaking, it was Scotland that took over England, not the other way around. That was after the first Queen Liz died, back in 1703. The new king was the fellow who was already King James VI of Scotland, and became King James I of the United Kingdom of Scotland and England; uh, I mean of England and Scotland.

Of course, a more accurate description wouldn't interpret this as either country taking over the other. It was really more a case of the inbred population of royalty, who were really neither Scottish nor English, agreeing among themselves who should be the next monarch over both of those populations, and giving both jobs to the same fellow. He then spent much of the rest of his life trying to merge them into a single "nation" -- and not succeeding all that well. But this wasn't any real benefit to the majority of either the Scottish or English populations. Or the Welsh or Irish or Manx or Cornish or Shetlanders or ..., for that matter. Or those Colonials over across the Pond.

It's not an all-or-nothing situation. There are statistical genetic differences between various groups of people (though superficial features like skin color are often not closely related to ancestral groupings). One of my favorite such statistics was the calculation that some time in the late 1980s, the US population passed the mixing point where more than 50% of Americans now have sub-Saharan African ancestors. Most such people look "white", of course, since they have only a small fraction of African genes.

I recently read that the accumulated DNA data shows that between 20% and 25% of the US population has "Native American" genes, though again in most of that population is primarily "white". I'm part of that population, with an Ojibwa great-grandmother, though nobody would ever guess by looking at me that I'm not of pure European ancestry.

One thing I've found difficult to discover is what fraction of the US is purely European. If you try googling the topic, it mostly teaches you one thing: Most people don't understand even such simple statistics. You find lots of matches for the part of the population that's "white" or "of European ancestry", but the phrasing implies that they're talking about people who are predominantly European. There's data on the small populations that are purely African or purely Asian or whatever, but it's hard to find any information on the (probably small) population that's purely European.

Of course, for most purposes this all qualifies as idle curiosity. But there are at least a few medical reasons for studying it, in addition to general curiosity about where we all came from.

Yeah; if you look back a couple of million years, we're all related to chimpanzees.

While working on a linguistics minor for my CS degree, I heard a number of versions of the quip that a linguist is someone who knows 100 words in each of 100 different languages. Of course, this should be followed with the observation that the main focus of linguistics is understanding the structures of languages, and vocabulary is interesting only in that it shows relations between languages. This doesn't generally require having a large enough vocabulary to be fluent. Most of the actual linguists I've met are fluent in only a few languages. These are often languages that are radically different from each other, though, since radical differences in how to express something would be interesting to a linguist.

And how long is that excuse valid for? It's not like Europe has been very peaceful and tripped Africa up on purpose, we've started two world wars in the last 100 years on our own turf. Yes, I realize problems don't go away in a day or a year or even a decade but look how far Europe has come in the last 70 years. How far has Africa come? How much aid money, emergency relief, how many education and healthcare programs have they gotten for free?

Still trotting out that old excuse and blaming the white man for all their woes is probably going to backfire. It only nourishes the people who think Africa is the way it is because they're primitive deadbeats who can't get anything done on their own. It's not that there's anything wrong with the people as such, take a black man and put him in a different environment and he might end up as President and a Harvard magna cum laude graduate.

My impression is that most of Africa's problems are cultural, like for example the response to Ebola. If they'd just stop touching their dead and seek medical help they'd do fine, but through ignorance and indifference and working against those trying to help them they'll just let it spread. Like HIV, there's a reason it's a huge problem south of Sahara and practically nowhere else and it's because for some cultural reason they just don't seem to value safe sex.

It should be. But history (e.g. the "only sell through registered dealers" laws) says it won't be. It'll be in favor of whoever pays the most bribes to the right officials.