Such delightful ambiguity. Would "they" happen to be the laws, or the government?

Then what the fuck do we even have it for?

My favorite part is where the updater tells you that a new update is ready, but it won't install it automatically because Adobe needs another ad impression or something and you have to download and install it yourself. This is why I don't have Flash or Java installed anymore. I especially like when they try to sideload some crapware toolbar with their security update too. I can kind of understand this sort of behavior from a sketchy freeware app being hosted by J. Random Guy, but Oracle and Adobe are multimillion dollar corporations. Do they really care so little about their brand?

Of course the screen lock in X was a security device; back when X was designed most workstations were shared.

XScreenSaver has some atrocious code to work around the deficiencies in X. Most of the time it succeeds.

Ironically, the opposite seems to be true in the NSA, who didn't even use the orange-book security systems they paid (us) to develop. So they got sysdamins walking out the door with thumb-drives of incriminating evidence.

Actually I would think it depends more on how intelligent and how advanced it is. Microbial life on Mars will hardly instill much fear but a lot of curiosity. An advanced space craft appearing in orbit and contacting us will generate far more fear...but still a lot of curiosity about their technology. So I'd say that curiosity is the one constant regardless of what type of life we find. Whether we fear it will depend on the details.

Not necessarily.

Jobs' brilliance wasn't in his management, it was in his design sense, personal charisma, and knowing when to throw his company behind developing and pushing a new product (OS X, iPod, iTunes, Tablets).

Tim Cook doesn't have the same epic level of charisma but that could change, and he clearly hasn't screwed up the management part, but we've yet to see his signature on the design and product fronts. I think you can call Apple Pay and the iWatch products of the Tim Cook era so their success will be the first real test of whether he can keep the Apple innovation machine turning.

That's what mathematicians refer to as "trivial", which is one of the most derogatory terms in mathematics.

My point is though that without knowing the width of that distribution you have no idea how wide the 'middle' is: if your average time to evolve intelligence is 30+/-20 billion years we are still well within 2 sigma from the mean. This could make intelligent life sufficiently rare so that we could easily be the first in our galaxy given the age of the universe. With billions of galaxies there could still be more advanced intelligent life in a galaxy far, far away but we would never know about them.

Just curious but why do you say that? We have no clue how likely intelligent life is to evolve. All we know is that it has happened once, and it took 3.5 billion years from the formation of the first like on Earth. Suppose that this was very much faster than average and the the mean time for intelligent life to evolve (once life itself has started) is 30 billion years? Such a long time would hugely reduce the number of intelligent species since you need a very stable environment for a long period of time and even then you have to get lucky.

Trying to quantify what you don't know is a mug's game...in order to be able to do it you really need to know what you don't know. If anything I would argue that there is, perhaps, some weak evidence for intelligent life being rare: travel might be hard but radio is easy. We have not heard ET's broadcasts which would suggest perhaps that there is no intelligent life nearby (or they use some technology beyond EM waves).

That you know of. Besides, I'm sure you've had many that you've caught during the standard code -> compile -> run -> segfault -> debug cycle, but the more subtle ones are harder to trigger.

Depending on what the code is doing and what kind of legacy cruft you're dealing with it's not always trivial.

More likely the other devs feel like it's bad form to drag the names of past contributors through the mud in public. Particularly when the reviewers missed the bug as well.

I'm pretty sure it was implied that P(snowstorm) is high enough to make the cost/benefit rational.

Unless of course you think his comment would be better off at 4 times the length, detailing all of the obvious common sense assumptions he made.

He's referencing GWB's mangled attempt at the quote.

I guess we'll be well prepared for nuclear war then. Lets get right on that. Or maybe not.

Won't the option be to either let the GPU use the extra 1/7 speed memory, or force the data back out to system memory over the PCIe bus at a much lower speed? Outside of benchmarks, I don't think many applications are going to be demanding that extra memory anyway.