I agree. Of the agencies I want to be extra cautious, FAA is at the top of the list along with the FDA. NHTSA, and other agencies that are responsible for making sure that the products and services we use don't kill us.

It's not like they can pull the plane over until they find out which device is screwing with the avionics, were such a thing to happen..

Ooooh, internet tough guy! Hey, by the way - putting three periods instead of one at the end of all your sentences doesn't make you sound intelligent. And a lack of capital letters doesn't make you e.e. cummings.

Grow up and move out of Mom's basement, kid.

There are a thousand other things wrong with Linux right now and nobody seems interested in fixing them (yes, I'm doing my part, but I only have so much free time to spend fixing random issues and maintaining my own packages). No, instead, we're going to dump all our time and effort into making a device that was NEVER DESIGNED TO RUN LINUX, well, run Linux.

Until relatively recently, no device was *ever* designed to run linux. If the Linux community accepted that approach, Linux wouldn't run on anything.

I think it's important, and sends a message to big companies, that Linux run on everything. It tells them, you will not avoid us. You cannot lock your shit down. No matter what you do, we'll be there.

If I was more clever, I'd do a rendition of a Police song to accentuate the point.

The way this is written is so absurdly biased; if you want to promote Android devices, just come out and say it.

I don't think they're trying to. I'd infer one a few possibilities, possibly more than one:

*Apple has, through a marketing blitz, become synonymous with personal electronic gadget. So a crime wave of electronic gadget theft makes people think Apple.

*Apple devices have a high market share, so their devices probably constitute a high fraction of gadget thefts

*Apple devices may have a better black market value due to ubiquity and appeal.

The quotes come from city officials - I don't think they have any sort of anti-Apple bias

The way the slashdot summary is written is clearly joking, sonic boom *whoosh* sound impending

It's just a kernel patch? That's kind of a big deal if you've made the kernel your life's work. That's kind of a slippery slope to nobody giving a shit about their jobs unless they're life or death.

I'm a firm believer in tailoring management style to whatever is necessary for the employee to get the message. Some employees you would never need to get that way with because they take the message that you proscribed. Some need to eat a dose of humble pie. And I'd say getting hammered publicly on LKML qualifies.

And I hate to say it, but I'm not sure even Linus' barrage did the trick, since the last line of Mario's response to the quoted post was "Sometimes shit happens. Sorry for that."

I don't know about you, but I don't think this is a guy for whom "pretty please" is going to make enough of an impact.

I think most of the disagreement depends on the definition of "society". Binning coarsely, we have group A who wants a libertarian anarchy. Group B wants to pay for shared infrastructure, but not the welfare state. Group C wants a social democracy with a variety of personal, non-infrastructure services guaranteed as rights. Lines blur of course, but that's the general idea.

Choose your own definition of society. I'm not sure exactly who you mean with your comments - I agree with you on the group A nuts who think that private enterprise will develop useful markets, electrical grids, roads, etc. However, I agree with those who dearly want to pay for infrastructure, but don't want to have to pay everybody's personal bills as the cover charge into "society".

It seems to be the rage these days to knock any online review site. Restauranteurs hate yelp, authors hate amazon, etc. Guess what - nothing's perfect, but they're pretty good. Are the Amazon ratings perfect? No, especially for situations with few reviews. But who the hell doesn't already know that and take it into account?

I like amazon's ratings system a lot. You can tell a lot from the distribution of scores. You have the actual reviews you can actually read. They flag the most useful favorable/unfavorable review, and in my experience, they really are useful. They also aggregate commonly mentioned topics, so you can identify common themes with respect to a product - like a common defect.

Same thing with yelp. Sure, the scores can be skewed by hipsters, yuppies, or assholes who make it their life's mission to review things and be clever. But more often than not, I've found the reviews to be fair. And I've also found that reading a handful of positive reviews and negative reviews gives you a very good impression of a place - same with amazon.

So no, these review systems aren't perfect. But they're really good, and as a result I'm much more likely to actually like the stuff I buy than back in the bad old days when you waited until someone you know bought something you want, or bite the bullet yourself. It's much better now, and just because there's room for improvement doesn't mean we should throw it all away.

I built mine outside - anything bigger than 36" and I'd have had to widen the door to get it in the house!

I hadn't seen the mining sets before - those look really cool. Might be something for birthday, thanks for the tip.

Completely agree. First off, one is fully entitled to throw their instructions away. One of the things I like about the playsets is that you get a diversity of interesting pieces to use. So you build it their way the first time, then it just becomes an interesting bag of parts.

Not to mention which, they do still sell bulk bricks, and bulk specialty pieces. So if that's what you want for your kids, buy it. Of course, if the same kids who lack the creativity to make their own designs have parents who lack the ability to do actual research, that I buy.

I liked building legos when I was a kid, and now my kids do. I built them a 36" square recessed table for them - just for legos - so they can build things and not have to worry about cleaning up, or about the legos falling on the floor. I love coming home from work and seeing how their designs have evolved. No instructions in sight.

(Seriously. If there are 100 shootings per day, out of 250 million persons in the USA, your chances of being so shot on any given day are 4 places to the right of the decimal point in terms of percentages-- (borrowed possibly false statistic from previous poster.) At that rate, you are more likely to die in an airline catastrophe.

What the fork? 11k people die from gun related homicide per year. Can't say the same for airline catastrophes, can we?

The solution to deaths like these is NOT "gun control".

That's an unjustified conclusion. It might be, or it might be part of it.

The solution to deaths like this is to get people the help they so desperately need, without any overtones of disparagment, or of belittling the people who need that help.

OK, fine. Except when the patient stops taking the medication - which happens often - are you sufficiently willing to solve the problem that you're willing to involuntarily commit the patient? Isn't that a whole lot more infringing on liberty than getting rid of the guns?

(If not a gun, then perhaps a bomb, or poison, or any number of other methods.)

I keep seeing this but it seems rather unjustified. Assembling a bomb isn't easy. Particularly one that takes out more than a few people. Poison is pretty hard too. Additionally, the violent nature of guns makes them so damned appealing - thanks to the Columbine generation there. Take away the guns, you take away the appeal, I think.

So essentially, they have openly stated that because the practice is useful to the government ut should not be subjected to judiciary review, despite clear concerns from privacy advocates, and seemingly legitimate legal challenges to the validity of the practice?

Well, sort of. Or more like, don't arrest AT&T officials because they did what the President told them to do. Kind of the wrong spot to put them in. Sort of like Mom tells you to do something, and Dad tells you he'll ground you if you do. They shouldn't be in the middle between two branches of government.

This is a government issue, and a separation of powers issue. It's also a "vote for candidates who will end illegal wiretapping" issue. Of course, that was Obama, and he wasted no time completely flipping on that issue, so good luck.

There are those who try. One version of this scheme is abusive "naked short selling." Sell a huge volume of stock short which drives down the price, then cover a small fraction (taking a profit), and cancelling the other orders. You cancel most of the orders because otherwise covering them would increase the price in the same way that you drove it down in the first place. Doing this abusively without good faith that the short orders will be filled is supposed to violate SEC rules, but (as per Wiki) enforcement is alleged to be spotty.

Which is why, if used correctly, it is *a* piece of evidence, not *the* piece of evidence. To go with the DNA analogy, which seems to have become the new 'car analogy' on slashdot: what if the lab messes up? Mistakes happen.

I saw a story once where some guy got busted for a fairly minor crime, but they collected his DNA and ran it. Bang, hit on a 30 year old cold case where someone had been killed in a cemetary, blood collected from a gravestone. Guy pleads his innocence. Turns out they got two hits from that gravestone, and the other hit was a guy who had been 4 years old when the crime was committed. Something's messed up, right? So it turns out the common denominator was that all three DNA samples were run by the same lab in the same week - the cold-case sample from the gravestone, the guy who got accused of the murder, *and* the 4 year old (who had since grown up) and was also arrested that week. Clearly all three samples were co-contaminated, right? Not according to the lab director, since they don't make mistakes. And the jury returned a guilty.

Point is, even DNA isn't foolproof. Neither is an IP. Both are helpful, neither is sufficient. But just like if your DNA shows up at a crime scene, if your IP is involved with copyright violation, you can expect to be making a lawyer's car payments, even if you're ultimately exonerated. Good reason to secure your networks.

I mean damn PETA come on, this is why people start thinking you're just a bunch of nutjobs....

I can never decide if this is some sophisticated ploy to seem ridiculous while driving attention to an issue through use of hyperbole.....

...or whether they really are just nutjobs.

Either way, you know you've really accomplished something as an organization when you are completely immune to parody, because really, there's no room left.

Not that it's what he meant, but computer-floppy-computer was probably the most common disease vector back then. In the pre-internet era, anyway. Floppies-from-home were plague-bearers. At one point I think my school had some sort of quarantine.

So it's quite possible for a floppy virus to infect an entire lab, but I'll grant that Mr. Jock probably wasn't that savvy.