I wish I could believe he was serious.

What else is there to say. When I've been lied to enough I stop believing. Sometimes cynical is just realistic.

I'm sure that you're right, but perhaps you're ignoring one fact. Projects has an optimum number of contributors. Getting more than the optimum number is an actual hindrance to success. What that optimum number is varies with the project and with the management system. Sometimes the important thing is do get reasonable decisions made quickly. Sometimes it's important to smooth over people's feelings.

Linux has done well enough that I suspect that Linus has made nearly optimal choices given the available resources including his available time and energy, but also including the organizational structure, the management tools (both code and personnel), etc. I do feel that he might do a bit better if he had to make a few fewer personal decisions, but then some people would feel snubbed. I know that frequently things have gone back and forth several times before Linus acted in such a way as to close off debate (temporarily).

Guido manages. I'm not sure about Larry Wall, but I suspect so. Walter Bright manages.

Different people have different management styles. Linus' style *is* rather abrasive at times, but he gets the job done. (As do Guido and Walter Bright. Perl, however, seems to have stagnated.)

P.S.: I'm not a user of Perl, so someone more familiar with the community may well correct my opinions as an outside observer.

It's not an arbitrary point of "divergence", it's a retrospective one. You can't know that these two individuals who are siblings are members of a different species until considerably later you observe that their descendants can no longer interbreed (or never choose to do so). Picking those two individuals as the fork isn't arbitrary, but it's also impossible to do at the time, you can only do it by looking at their descendants.

It's not so much the generation time, as that rodents generally have a faster mutation rate than primates. Generation time is also significant, though as it allows less-viable variations to be more quickly weeded out.

I would like to see *some* evidence that "directed evolution" occurs without human intervention. Mind you, we don't usually try to create new species. At one time we couldn't, these days we occasionally do. (For an exception, Corn [Maize] is a different species from Teotsine, but I'm not sure you could say people created it rather than merely preserved it.)

Various 3rd parties bought both of them. The media have been purchased by non-media companies over the last 5 decades. Prior to that they were mainly small, and most of them were always on the edge of failure, so it wasn't that expensive. (Actually, the three major media networks of the time, NBC, CBS, and ABC were already controlled by people whose interest was not in the news, except in a minor way. But at that time most cities had two daily newspapers, one of which was still independent. And most radio stations were independent.)

My suspicion is that the network coverage of the Vietnam War caused those interested in power to notice that this was a way of pushing their views effectively. I'm sure they already knew it, since Hearst created the Spanish-American war, but people know lots of things they don't pay attention to. Still, the only evidence I have for the link is some suspicious timing.

And no president has been elected in the last century without the support of the major players. The last relatively independent one was FDR, Teddy Rooseveldt tried to break away and failed. Chester A. Arthur was elected with the support of one of the major players, but then reneged. (Once a president gets into office, he becomes partially immune to the players, and occasionally breaks free. Getting re-elected requires not only popular support, but regaining support of a major player. [See Teddy Rooseveldt, Bull-Moose Party.])

There were lots of records that were either destroyed, or conveyed at low price to parties hiding behind "cutouts" (possibly an incorrect usage). It's true these were company records, but they also included things of interest to, e.g., IBM, and which IBM would have paid more for than did the actual recipient. (I'd need to check over the names, but I believe that there were some that Novel would have greatly desire to see, also.)

Well, making it directional can be a problem. So can loss of containment. So it all depends...and it depends on things that we don't know.

One problem predicted for most designs of fusion reactor is that the materials used to build it become damaged by radiation until they are too fragile to work. This can take years, but when it does happen the entire core is high level radioactive waste. (That should be recycleable as a source of low grade heat, but you need the infrastructure in place to handle it. And as it decays the amount of heat produced naturally decays also. But it remains dangerous for quite awhile. Still, you'd think that a heat exchanger could safely extract the heat.)

Too much is unknown about this project to derive ANY conclusions. Some people are more cynical than others, but it's not as if there haven't been many reasons recently to inspire cynicism.

Not in the last several decades. Go back 60 years, though, and it's a different story.

Actually in my experience doctors rarely ask that. OTOH, the doctor I usually see knows me, and knows I rarely travel.

The problem here is that the initial symptoms are non-specific.

OTOH, I expect doctors will very soon start ASKING if you have travelled recently. (And maybe they usually do for new patients.)

If you've ever followed a bankruptcy, it must have been a very gentele one. I followed the SCO bankruptcy, which I hope was an exceptionally corrupt one, but I've no real basis for that hope. But I can gauarntee that you can't depend on anything being preserved.

Actually, I can see real advantages to "the cloud". I just don't see them making up for the vulnerabilities it creates. So if you have thorough backups, and sufficient connections that you could replace the cloud vendor in a day it it disappeared without warning, and sufficient protections that no leak or critical data can happen, then it sounds like a decent choice. But that's a lot of caveats, and few users seem to note them.

In a way it's sort of like outsourcing your IT department. You can't depend on the results as well, and if there are problems, you can't easily fix them. But the promise is that it will save you money. Sometimes it does, at least for awhile. Then the competent people are replaced with jerks, and you can't fix the problem, and you're tied into the contract.

Correction:
PARTS of the Federal Government will be able to get it's data regardless of what happens. But they won't admit it or share it even with other parts of the Federal Government.

The Federal Government is not monolithic. Many parts of it are even trying to do the best job they can. Unfortunately, the parts that are powerful are the parts that scheme at being more powerful.

Microsoft does not publicize all vulnerabilities reported to them; and not every reporter will publicize it either. So how many they actually know about is unknown. This is reported by most people that are writing about the issue, especially those comparing Microsoft's practices to Open Source's and comparing the numbers for the CVE reports between the groups.