In / on a US market, you are fully liable not only for what you do, but also for the consequences, even if and when unintended or unforeseen, of what you do. Or say.

At the institution where I currently work, AIT / Austrian Institute of Technology, in 2013 I started ( believe it or not ) the first fully-FOSS project in the 45+ year history of the institute: ubicity, a social media aggregator. Although senior management applauded the initiative in the beginning, and although the thing was nothing short of a sheer success, fear crept up soon after: people did not know how to deal with it, especially not the many elder guys ( "elder" here meaning: "close to retirement and not willing to learn anymore" ). Result: in spite of resounding success, my contract got terminated. I do not mourn about it, having found a very nice contract through which I can further develop ubicity.

Question: have you seen this pattern before, and how do you interpret it ?

I mean, really: wtf ??

I mean: good enough for me, a software engineer, who does not have to toy around with the actual equations and who does neither have to set up nor perform the actual experiments...

In what must be as far back as 1997 or so, I once played through the entire Alpha Centauri game. It took me a full day and a full night. And then - it was over. I never gamed again. In my view, computers are there to be programmed, not for gaming. The only game I still play is chess. Ever since I turned 8 and my father esteemed it about time that I learned it, as it was - in his opinion - a skill that a grown-up man must have. It is the only thing I am grateful for to him.

$19,000,000,000 for an app that does not make money and has 32 employees. IMHO it shows that Facebook is slowly panicking.

running Xfce. That.

Mathematical truths are not "discovered". Believing so is the purest platonism. Mathematical truths are constructed.

comprises military fiction. Especially Dan Simmons' "Hyperion" space opera. I read that one at least 6 times, all four books, and still couldn't get enough.

1) DHCP 2) silent adoption of IPv6, especially in China 3) NAT

Remember that HP once was almost only known as a producer of measurement equipment. Then they went into the computing hardware business big time. They, too, needed the "next big thing". As much as I may despise Apple, from a corporate-strategical point of view such a move sounds like making a lot of sense for Apple.

( or, actually, two ): Ars Technica.

That sounds like a good starting point for a revolution. And not like a stupid idea at all.

I mean hey, design for security *does* exist, after all.

Damn.