People are too busy giving their 110% attention to other causes.

Ah, the tired refrain of the underachiever: everyone who has high standards is an elitist.

The ruby hipsters have to stay very small to fit in their skinny jeans. It should surprise no one they are only 1/8 the size of someone in the neckbeard community.

We don't need no stinkin' badges.

All this guy needs to do is upload a new picture of himself to Facebook, and it will prove his identity to everyone when it asks "would you like to tag X?"

Not difficult? You, sir, have a great deal to learn about animal breeding. I'd suggest Cracked's recent article.

You're confused about the real cause and effect here. The biggest problem with open source QA is that no one wants to fund it. It's straightforward (albeit not easy) to solicit sponsors for building new features. The users of the software who financially benefit from it rarely feel like it's their responsibility to pay for QA across the whole project. And that's how QA normally works; ugly, time consuming bugs to chase down often start with a problem you can't even connect to the responsible code at first.

Developers don't just work on features over bug fixes just for status or personal satisfaction. You're projecting a sort of selfishness on them by saying that, which is a pretty silly attitude to have toward the sort of people who work on open source.

Getting paid to develop new features give you a clear finish line to get some money to support yourself at the end of the day. That's why open development ends up organized in that direction so often. The main thing that's different about commercial development priorities is that paying a person to do QA is recognized as necessary. When I raise money for open source development, I constantly struggle over how to put QA into the budget in a form that it's recognized as necessary.

This is absolutely at the core of the Heartbleed story. The OpenSSL Foundation has dumped large amounts of money toward checkblock compliant features like FIPS compliance. The same amount of money would have funded a lot of source code review, but people don't pay for that. If developers want to eat, they have to prioritize chewing on features.

If Google et. all want to help open source, they should provide a lot more funding. We don't need their QA departments, we need the cash they're making off our backs.

Software that works very differently in debug builds is common. The 1993 edition of Steve McConnell's "Code Complete" was the first thing I remember reading that talked about reducing debug vs. release variance. IIRC, Microsoft was chewing this problem heavily then because the betas of Windows and their development tools going to developers included debug instrumentation, while the released versions did not.

SPARK falls squarely into silver bullet territory. Taking on that idea goes back to at least Fred Brooks's 1986 No Silver Bullet paper.

The "Office of Government Ethics" explicitly authorized the SEC for an accelerated revolving door for regulatory capture back in 1991. Since this collusion has becomes downright transparent recently, they made a change to reverse the situation a bit starting this month. People who are just learning about the problem through "Flash Boys" are too late--you've already been outplayed here. You see, the problem is solved!

Yeah, the failure of Outbox is barely connected to USPS policy. "their market model needed to scale quickly to become profitable". It didn't. The end. Their big problem was paying for the fleet of vehicles? Wow, no one could ever see that coming.

On my lawn, you are.

Switching the stickers isn't the only way to screw one up. It's also easy to make an unsolvable cube after taking it apart with a screwdriver. The wiki-how guide states 11/12 of randomly assembled cubes aren't solvable.

I could solve a cube in just under a minute. Rather than focus on speeding that up further, I worked on all the other puzzles that came out after the cube's popularity. Missing Link, Pyramid, Rubik's Snake...I still have them all in a big bag o' nostalgia.

Blue Horseshoe, buddy, how you been?

fdisk /dev/sda

Amazon's retail store card situation isn't quite as hands-off for parents as Apple's. You need a credit card to create a new iTunes account, but afterward you can disconnect it and kids can be self-sufficient. They might take some birthday cash, buy an iTunes card just about anywhere, enter the code, they're off. I only get pulled in to help with things like backups and migration between devices.

The tween who uses my Amazon account for her Kindle has hit multiple little headaches I had to resolve for her. Example: Amazon's Kindle gift cards aren't as easy to find as iTunes ones, but she did find one at a local store. It turns out you cannot just redeem them directly on the Kindle and go shopping. You have to visit your account on Amazon's web site, add the gift card there, and then it's available as a credit for Kindle purchases. It was not as smooth of an experience, and I have yet to figure out how to make her self-sufficient on the device. If you give the kids enough account info to add a gift card, they'll get full write access to all the account info. That's a bad plan.