I agree with twistedcubic. RMS, what questions should we be asking/proposing?

Would have been nice if the police had confiscated the media card from the drone.

Bullets? Yes. Shotgun pellets? I doubt that's ever happened. They're too light and they spread too far. They're supposed to be shot in the air.

There's a risk of falling drone debris (which would be on him, as it was above him when he shot it, and I would assume he'd have told his kids to get out of the way), but there's zero chance of danger to anyone from the shotgun discharge.

Completely agree. You don't have to be able to bang out an OS, but man, if everybody just knew how to grep through some files or automatically run an SQL query, dump the results into an Excel file and email it to somebody, the world would be a better place.

Pick your poison. Get robbed by your coworkers or get robbed by your boss. You're still getting robbed. But I bet your coworkers will rob you less, given that they're being robbed by the same process.

Resistance was futile!

Oh, sure, I'm just saying it would be funny. Revenge for all the epithets /.ers have hurled at him from this site. Not nearly so many since he retired, but you remember what it was like in the late 90s and early 2000s.

Bill Gates.

Replaces the front page of /. with a picture of him naked, rolling in money, pointing at you and laughing.

Oh, you're absolutely right. I'm definitely not saying it would be impossible to hide a backdoor in an open core design. Absolutely could. Same thing with FOSS...just see the Underhanded C Competition.

But today you could have (and probably do have...) explicit backdoors in silicon, besides debugging interfaces, and you'd never know. With an open core design, you'd have to hide it.

They can if they believe that performer will incite violence, which I believe was their reasoning here as the performer is from one of the gangs involved in the violence. The concert was a fund raiser for a kid killed in the getaway after another gang shot one of Keef's gang members.

I don't think that's unreasonable.

As usual, I prefer to blame the victims (us).

On a desktop personal computer, it would never occur to you to think "Oh, I just assume I'll get software maintenance from my ISP," and if anyone ever actually said that then you would point your finger at them and laugh and their over-the-top stupidity.

But change the form factor of the personal computer to handheld and suddenly we don't do the pointing and laughing. On the very face of it, it's JUST AS STUPID. So WTF?

Users are not exercising their common sense. They simply aren't. You can make excuses for not using common sense and explain why we did this very obviously stupid thing, but don't pretend it's not happening. Every morning you're getting up and putting a "kick me" sign on your back. You know that you're doing it and you know what consequences will invariably flow from it.

"I don't have any other signs to put on my back! All the signs on the market say 'kick me!'"

"Just because I wear a 'kick me' sign that doesn't mean anyone really has license to kick me! They shouldn't be doing that to me!"

Ok, go on and say those things. You even have some valid points, and the things you're saying might even be technically correct. But that doesn't mean you don't sound stupid, because you don't have not getting kicked in your requirements! WTF, people?!

Stop thinking of handhelds as some weird special case where ALL your experiences with software maintenance magically don't apply! THAT'S STUPID! So yeah, I'm a victim-blamer. You know when you buy your PC from your ISP or from a manufacturer who has a history of preventing maintenance, what's going to happen. And when people pretend they don't know the invariable consequences of buying PCs from ISPs, the stupidity takes on a flavor of dishonesty. Mmmm, yum!

I disagree. Saying "people couldn't understand the hardware" is the same as people saying "open source software is irrelevant because you can't understand the software."

Some people can. I have an electrical engineering degree and specialized in computer architecture in grad school. I could understand it. And just like anything else...it's not that hard when you know what you're looking at.

Eh. When laying out silicon, you generally use libraries of simple parts you chain together. You make a register once, and then you replicate it each place you need a register. A TON of those transistors are cache, which is the same pattern repeating over and over again.

I'm not saying there's anyone who's looked at every transistor, but there's probably somebody who's looked at the layout of a cache cell, a register, an ALU, standard multiplexers, etc.

You check out as the real KGIII. Or a very good KGIII Markov chain text generator.

Skeptical != cynical.