The problems with this platform all stem from marketing and distribution channel issues, which I hope they can find a way to fix. The product itself is quite solid, and continually improving. Its just that its still having to fight against a product image of what the company was selling 3 years ago, and they're not meeting that challenge as directly as they need to be.

> It will take years, if not decades, for us to return to the position that we had prior to his disclosures

ALL THE REST OF US believe that "the position" they "held" is and/or should be flat out ***king illegal. We think the morons passing laws that mangae to circumvent and directly violate key attributes of our democracies - are the traitors. It's getting damn close to the time when a "citizen's rights" shouldn't be bound by borders, and a governments "limitations on powers" shouldn't end at the borders nor be different outside the borders.

"Oh look, I'm outside of X, obviously no laws at all apply to me, fuck you and you and you."

Actually, that sounds exactly like the governmental state equivalent of "Freemen on the Land"!

Anyone who's had any dealing with Oracle knows they have never completed a single project on time and within budget. Their entire business plan is to keep you paying for as long as possible. "Forever" being the preferred target.

You mean the computer model that has been predicting warmer temperatures for more than a decade that haven't happened? That computer model?

I kept using my old HP notebook (with a 1920x1200 display) for years after I should have replaced it, precisely because all the PC laptop manufacturers seem to have colluded to deny me the option of ever buying a display with that resolution again. This year, when they finally started coming around, they seemed to think that high res was *far* more important in a dinky 13-inch screen, and dragged their feet on 15-inch offerings as long as possible. While they may now finally exist, they're quite hard to find and in limited selection.

So I basically just waited until the Haswell 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro came out, caved, and bought that. 16:10 screen and all.
(And its great, except when developers of many of the more cross-platform software projects look at this "retina" thing as something they don't really need to care about, resulting in apps the OS upscale in ways that look horrible. Just a note: "retina" support is basically resolution-independent scaling of some portions of the UI, because the full native res of the screen is actually "too" high without it.)

Why yes, that's an even better idea. Let's all have the gov't hoard all sorts of gold that could actually be used for something useful instead... You'd love for your graphics card to triple in price because now the gold for the contacts and other components is all scarce now, wouldn't you? A gold standard has a big downfall in common with BTC... it's naturally deflationary. A modest rate of inflation is not necessarily a bad thing, but having to go from paying 1/4 of your net income on your mortgage now to 1/2 of your net income in 15 years doesn't sound so hot either does it?

I'm sure that the Boston program is only down temporarily - stupid monkey with the wrench broke things. But never fear, it will be back again in the near future under a new guise... And when it does, I will keep singing that one Rockwell song every time I get in my car...

While I don't doubt your statements, it's probably a little further off than you might think still. Consider this: this 1911 gun still costs between 10 and 20 times the normal cost for a 1911 manufactured using conventional methods these days. As the price difference shrinks, I suspect the cries for more draconian laws (not just patent or copyright) will get louder and louder.

Every single cell phone has a unique ID code associated with it. Simply require the cell phone provider industry to create a shared database that would contain the this ID code of all stolen phones and make it illegal to activate a phone on this list.

The cell phone provider industry doesn't want to do this because a stolen phone means they might get a new service contract with the thief while selling the victim a new phone (which almost always extends the existing contract). Doing anything about stolen cell phones is lost revenue to them.

A child is in greater danger from a backyard swimming pool than from a privately owned firearm.

True, but every generation or two Germany makes up for that by killing a whole lot of people.

Nice, you compiled that whole post of yours with the -pedantic flag. And you ended up with a resulting program that doesn't perform the functions that the whole rest of the threads here pertain to. Perhaps somebody forgot to typecast it, but in reality what people who are complaining about the handling of the issue on behalf of the twits (that's what Twitter users are called, right?) to Github is not actual feminism. It's *militant* feminism which threatens everybody's freedom of expression in what should otherwise be an open society. (Note: I'm not talking Constitution or law here, I'm talking about culture.) Is a project like c+= sophmoric? Crass? Offensive to some people? Yes it is - on all counts. But perhaps the offensive material is meant to be a social commentary to get people to understand that things can go too far to the other extreme as well. (Yep, I'm giving everybody here the benefit of the doubt.) In the end, I think that if the facts are portrayed correctly here, then perhaps Github overreacted to those who already overreacted. It isn't as if the project was a networking stack named "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion"...

"Perhaps the British should also work on reforming their laws on free speech (or lack thereof)." -- While I am all in support of the right of free speech (excluding the "yelling fire in a crowded theater kind"), isn't it a bit pretentious for somebody not a citizen or residing within a given country to tell them they need to work at making their laws more like your own? If I'm not mistaken, in a strict legal sense, the USA is amongst the minority.

Not to mention that the other difference is that we the captive audience to somebody's cellphone conversation only hear half of the conversation, which is far more annoying that hearing the whole conversation at the same volume level.

The question shouldn't be "how to spy on Americans with violating our rights?" The question to ask is, "why the fuck are you conducting massive spying on Americans?"