Where I live, it's a one. Check my photos out.

Turning off lights in cities isn't going to help astronomers much.

Actually, no. City glow is a huge impediment to astronomy for an area hundreds of times the size of the city.

There's a middle ground here. Lighting can be designed so it primarily lights the ground, instead of going every which way. Goes a long way towards reducing problems optical telescope use faces.

Also some moderately recent styles for t-shirts. And hosiery. And.... jeans.

It appears that giving someone scissors is a direct route to dolling out cuts. :)

The whole thrust of ESR's Cathedral and the Bazaar essay...

You're about 30 years late WRT your reference. When I said "back in the day"...

I first saw the term "software priesthood" in print in Byte magazine -- it was 1976, I think. It was already in play among those of us who had already been programming for a while, and even more so among certain sectors of management.

It could, of course, be that they reviewed the benefits and risks and drew their own conclusions which sometimes match the consensus and sometimes don't.

That's exactly what they're doing. But this shows that they don't really believe that scientific consensus is by itself a reason to select a course of action.

I'm always amused by the way science is suborned to political expediency.

Some people strongly tout the consensus regarding global warming/climate change. They commonly disparage and dismiss those who don't fully subscribe as politically-motivated ignoramuses who are anti-science. The doubters view themselves simply as more cautious, unwilling to risk large costs when it is not clear that science can clearly predict there will be benefits.

Other people strongly tout the consensus regarding the safety of GM foods. The opposition claims to be simply cautious, unwilling to risk any unknown dangers of these foods despite the enormous benefits they could provide.

Interestingly enough, very often it's the same people who support massive reductions in CO2 emissions based on a scientific consensus and despite the economic costs and the uncertain climate benefits, and yet would prefer to avoid the benefits of GM foods due to fear of unknown bad results, despite the scientific consensus.

Back in the day, we called this concept the "Software Preisthood"

It wasn't complementary.

1) I am not threatened by "everyone" learning to program

2) don't buy a bunch of stupid apps, and,

3) Apparently, you're a programmer, so write your own apps. :)

Congrats for not understanding almost all of what you read. Stellar.

Videos are 5x slower than reading

Yep. And they're extremely difficult to deal with contextually, unless you take the time to generate a full transcript - ugh. So (a) waste your time watching, (b) waste your time writing up a transcript, (c) take the time to post... and (d) everyone has already moved on.

Most video "stories" are for droolers. If you can't write it up, it often isn't worth saying. Exceptions being movies of Pluto, that sort of science-y goodness. I don't think I've ever seen *anything* on the idiot box that was worth a full page of actual cogent explanation. And "interviews".... ffs, just write it down.

Well said. Yes. I'd mod you up, I have the points, but I've posted, so the broken slashcode won't let me. So kudos, anyway.

Make the slashdot UID the new UID for incoming ex-slashers. New users get numbers beyond the current max.

Perhaps the new owners will finally fix the massively broken and stupid moderation system that the previous and current owners have left bereft of badly needed attention:

o Moderators can't post with ID. Stupid. Utterly, completely, stupid. Pointless. Ridiculous.
o Moderators have zero accountability for what they've done -- only for what they might do later
o Absolutely no effective mechanism to remove bad moderation (and that really screws up threads here)
o AC's unjustly penalized, many of the site's best posts never rise above the noise level
o Trolls go un-handled -- the AC low-runging is a punt at not having to work at moderation. But it doesn't work.
o Perversely limited set of mod types leaves moderators unable to moderate reasonably
o Limits on mod ranges penalize the very best posts (and don't adequately address the trolls, either, because...
o On slashdot, troll is effectively equal to AC with one person disagreeing, and...
o Because we can't attribute the "disagree" to the mod, it can't be remediated except by the...
o Random and future-behavior-only-focused meta moderation system.

And then we have:

o Ridiculous delays between posts for ACs AND for logged-in users. Big convo? Too bad for you.
o Inability STILL to handle many character entities after all these years. Not to mention UTF-*8, omg.
o Retarded signature limits. C'mon. Bad sigs should be moderated. It takes a lot of chars to use HTML.

And of course there are the short-bus elephants in the room:

o "Editors" that know nothing about editing. Or writing. Or what constitutes a "story"
o The "firehose", a way to vote up stuff that won't get posted -- can be a total waste of time
o And the continuous mucking about with the parts that worked, making them NOT work,
      while all of the above, which ACTUALLY needs fixing, goes unfixed.

I'd fire the bloody lot of them, frankly.

So what's your stance on RSA, one of the early software patents, which is still used everywhere?

I didn't try to articulate every problem with software patents, merely those illustrated by the just-overturned patent covering SSL using RC4. Note that RC4 itself is about 30 years old, and was developed by RSA security.

In any case, regarding the RSA cryptosystem itself, it was developed by several academics (independent of its previous, secret, invention GCHQ), and clearly it would have been developed and published even without the extra bonus of patent protection. It's important to remember that patents are a means to an end ("promot[ion] of Progress of Science and useful Arts") -- which is not to make money for inventors but to provide them an incentive to invent for the public good. In other words, a Patent is a way for the public to give up something (the natural possibility of making use of an invention you hear about) in return for a different advantage (getting the invention made in the first place). If inventors would invent even without the extra incentive, there is not need for the incentive.

Since practically all the value of inventiveness in the software business can be captured simply by writing the software (and, in cryptography especially, by ordinary academic incentives such as promotion, tenure and professional recognition), software patents don't help. Instead they hinder.

For a salient example consider the LZW patent. The algorithm was designed by two academics (Lempel and Ziv of the Technion). The main effect of the patent was to end the widespread use of .gif files (the GIF standard specified LZW compression), which dominated the early internet. Rather than knuckle under and pay licensing fees (and end free-software projects like Mozilla), the internet community developed PNG, an equivalent but patent-unencumbered compressed raster image format. Practically the whole internet switched to PNG -- showing that useful technology can be invented without the patent incentive, and that when there is no patent it is much more widely used for everyone's enjoyment.

PS: It is likely that the LZW patent was invalid (patenting an abstract algorithm), but nobody wanted to take the legal risk of going to course to invalidate it. This obnoxious patent has since expired.

Difficult, because these other crimes go "right to the top". You'd need big balls to authorise that.

You exaggerate quite a bit. Courts have actually declared the government's spying illegal based on Snowden revelations. Those arguments are continuing and in higher courts but the point is, it goes well beyond some guy thought maybe some secret should be revealed.