erm, "Linus" not "Linux"

I see to have a macro built into my muscle-memory on that one :-)

On one hand, you hear about him flaming out people who break shit in stupid ways.
On the other, you also hear him accepting blame for not checking things properly himself: "Serves me right for not digging all the way down the mess of macros"

Whatever his eccentricities, he sounds quite fair to me.

Where the government is phasing out home mail delivery in favour of "Community Mailboxes"... so now I have to go to the big box in order to collect my frequent junk-mail and occasional important stuff.

I don't want a teleported camshaft that is printed with a 3D printer that uses chocolate for the printing material.

Actually, printing real-world stuff in chocolate via 3d scanning+printing would be *awesome*,and would probably have a decent market. Those scale model cars that you can buy; print those, in chocolate. You can eat your way through the car and see all the intricate parts as you do so.

Get yourself printed...in chocolate. Then eat yourself. Or take a bite outta the boss!

Lots of fun applications there.

And this year, the effectiveness of influenza vaccine in the USA is around 23% or less. For effective vaccines (measles, etc) with severe consequences for infection, it makes sense, but recent research is showing that people who have previously been vaccinated for influenza are actually *more likely* to get sick with a newer strain (again, NOT an issue with the measles vaccine). For flu, I'd guess that people who are exposed to the live virus in small quantities may build more natural immunity than those that a vaccine, but research hasn't shown the cause yet. There are two ways to get immunity after all:
a) An effective vaccine
or
b) Get sick, suffer the consequences, and naturally build immunity

In the case of (b), if you're infectious before showing visible symptoms (and/or you're not willing to become a hermit until you are clear) then the vaccine is still the best route, and more in the community interest. In the US, where sick days are lacking, many people aren't willing (or able) to lose the pay either. You also end up with dipshit parents who deliberately expose their kids to nasty stuff so that they *WILL* get sick and later be immune... which just seems cruel and unnecessary.

There are legitimate reasons for doing it. Businesses which essentially have the telephone equivalent of a NAT (lots of inside lines, only a few incoming numbers), or forwarding etc.

People with VOIP lines may have only an outgoing line with no number to call back. I've had this and used my cellular # for call-display.

That said, there should be a way to authorize or verify numbers for caller-ID purposes, perhaps by sending a text message or confirmation call with a passcode. Then, only those who have registered a number can use it for caller-ID purposes.

As a sysadmin, a lot of the job is doing stuff that *prevents* loss. Unfortunately, bean-counters often don't really understand how properly configured/supported firewalls and security appliances are important, because they don't *MAKE* money.

True enough, but it also called him an inventor, which is misleading.

I've got a bunch of PCI DVB/capture cards that are in the same boat. They *could* be useful if I had drivers for them, but alas, they do not.

My personal disfavorite is software that depends on dongles which have OS-specific drivers. The software *WOULD* work on the newer OS if the dongle had a driver that allowed it to authenticate (of course, dongles suck in general).

where are the iPhone, Android, Symbian, etc versions of BBM!

Uh, well for Google Play, it'd be here, and for iDevices it would be here

I still agree that their argument is dumb though. People develop apps for a platform where it will sell, and that has nothing to do with net neutrality. I find it annoying that I can't run [game/software X] on Linux, but that has nothing to do with my ISP or internet service.

Yes, and they have expensive lawyers, which means that dealing with them costs a lot of time, and money. You may get satisfaction, but it will be many dollars and months if not years away.

Maybe Samsung will partner with ATI/AMD :-)

I can somewhat agree with this. Certainly if you invent something extremely valuable that's directly tied to your work at a company, then that's what you were (already) paid to do.

However, why do often we treat salespersons with a golden spoon - offering bonuses and perks - while treating intellectuals like grunts. I'm not saying that they should buy the guy a mansion, but if somebody makes or saves your company a few million (or billion, even) bucks, perhaps a bonus and a little extra would be in order.

Supposedly, so were the centrifuges targeted by Stuxnet.

Getting insurance isn't the problem.
Getting companies to honor it, is.
Given how difficult it is to track down support from Google for support on some of their current offerings, I'm not sure insurance will be much of an improvement in customer experience.