I actually do have almost 200 hours in community service, but almost all between high school and grad school. I volunteered at hospitals, homeless shelters, and habitat for humanity. Since becoming a professional, though, I have little time for that now. What's most disturbing is that I've now become more libertarian, i.e. disgusted that I have to pay so much tax for socialist services after having spent the entirety of my 20s in CS degree programs.

You're cute. I've done this shit for a living for a while. Yes, many companies' incidence response procedures are crap, but they shouldn't, and it is perfectly possible to get an emergency countermeasure deployed within 24 hours with all the t's crossed and i's dotted and perfect SOX compliance and whatever else you need. It's just something you need to think about before the emergency hits you.

Of course everything else is never equal.

But what are you trying to accomplish here? Argue that a project with 100 developers has more eyes on the code than one with 4? Moot point, no argument.

We don't get the luxury of having 50 identical software projects with different team sizes and a size control, so we have to go with the real world and "everything else being equal" is just a way of saying that you if you want to compare closed vs. open source, you need to compare comparable projects, not an open source project with a handful of people with a closed source project two orders of magnitude larger - or the other way around.

I finished my CS PhD about 10 years ago at a top-20 US university. My first year I was not paid, but after I hooked onto an advisor later, I received an RA or TA position for $23k/year, and in my last few years, I received a fellowship for about $40k/year.

That first year was horrible. I recall eating spaghetti and ketchup, and I distinctly remember having to ask one of my rich friends for a $500 loan just to pay my rent one month. That was one of the most humiliating experiences of my life, and it really shaped my financial planning. Now, 10 years later, although I'm making well over $150k/year, I keep my expenses very low like I'm still a grad student, and I always have at least 6 months' expenses in short-term accounts.

It's part of the Tao of graduate school.

I cheated by marrying while I was a grad student. While my wife didn't have that great of a job we had food. After I finished my PhD I supported her graduate studies, an MLIS.

The human eye has it's own depth of field characteristics plus a much greater dynamic range and resolution than any large flat screen.

So your large screen is going to fall short of that illusion.

I don't thing NSA knew about it. Somebody would have caught the unusual requests.

No matter how you twist it, something like 80% of techies are solidly liberal/progressive, judging by their political donations.

Last I checked, Texas was neither liberal nor progressive in practically any sense of the word.

I know this is an old thread ... but I really don't like Pulseaudio.

I never installed it on my Gentoo system. On my Mint systems, removing Pulseaudio is one of my first post-installation steps.

If I want to play sound over a network I export a read-only filesystem containing my media to the machines on my LAN (Samba does this nicely). Then I can play video and anything else over the network too, in a transparent way. I've never seen a single benefit of running Pulseaudio but I have seen lots of difficult-to-resolve problems. It's just useless bloat to me. I have a much better time using straight ALSA.

Welcome to the Internet.

There's a difference?

sysadmin, firewall admin - let's not pick nits here. The point is that there are mitigating measures, and if signing off on something that prevents your company secrets leaking out to the Internet without you even noticing takes more than 24 hours then your incident response procedures are retarded and you can hire me for a workshop to improve them dramatically.

Yeah, there was absolutely nothing anyone could do. Oh wait, except for this brutally complex and technically challenging thing right from the official vulnerability announcement:

That was definitely not a feasabole option for anyone on the planet...

You are right on those.

Except for the "nothing can be done" part. That's not your judgement call to make. There is always at least one option - pulling the power plug - and it might well be a feasable temporary solution for some people affected.

And in Afghanistan, the idea that a person renouncing Islam should be put to death, or that it is okay to marry girls at age 9, also enjoys 90% popular support. So what?

Yet murder rate did not change significantly - it kept going down at the same rate as before the last ban.

(which is because those massacres are a statistically insignificant event, basically)

Yet again, one of those bullshit "by a gun" statistics. Who cares about a subset of murders where guns specifically are used? What matters is the overall murder rate regardless of tools. That did not show any correlation to gun bans.

Another pointless "gun ..." stat.

BTW, it's true that Australia (and most other First World countries) has an overall lower homicide rate, and generally violent crime rate. But that has to do with the different approach to healthcare and other forms of welfare in US, which results in significantly higher income inequality, stratification, high poverty rates and low social mobility - which translates to more crime. Guns don't really play any role in this, as is evident when looking at crime rates within US - they correlate strongly with poverty, and not at all with lax/strict gun laws.

Another pointless "gun ..." stat. As noted before, the overall homicide rate was going down before the bans, and kept going down after them at the same rate - i.e. the decline was caused by other factors. It should be noted that this is a trend that is observed in all Western countries, including US, and in the latter said decline does not correlate with gun law changes (like AWB).

Another pointless "gun ..." stat. The overall suicide rate did not change, people just used different methods (hangings in particular spiked as firearm suicides dropped).

This is an utterly stupid statement. You are much more likely to be shot in my home country - Russia - that despite it not being even remotely "in complete anarchy or war" - and despite the much more stringent gun laws, which are only marginally more liberal than Australian ones. Heck, US has lower homicide rates than a good half of Europe.

Then, of course, the rate varies wildly within US from state to state, so much so that the average is meaningless. In my state of residence, it's the same as in Finland and Norway, and it's not some kind of rural depopulated place.