I've used GPG since... I don't even know, for a very long time. However, since I communicate a lot internationally, and I don't know (and I don't want to know) about every country's regulations regarding encryption, I gave up sending encrypted e-mails at the very beginning, but I still always sign my mails. I never even thought about how many people use or don't use GPG, it's just been there, ever so useful - and I think that's good so. I think "run its course" is harsh though. Why? Because one Moxie Marlinspike says so? Bollocks. If it's useful - and it is -, it's good to have it.

"I doubt any one person has full knowledge of how a computer works. I have a reasonably good grasp of most of the software layers, and a fairly good idea of how the hardware abstraction works, but reading about the pentium division bug makes it clear that an undergraduate math degree is not enough to understand the inner workings of the CPU."

In my third year we had a 'digital computer architectures' course, which should be compulsory at every uni for every CS/IT student, regardless whether they just want to become coder monkeys or sw engineers, etc.

Actually my first M degree was called 'IT engineering', which was hard to explain to a lot of people, so I always told I had a CS degree. However, when I started to move more around internationally, and I learned what a CS degree in the U.S. means, I stopped doing that. My opinion is (and not just mine), that any degree that has CS or IT in its name has to include courses about computer architectures, electrical engineering, math&algorithms&numerical methods to some extent, simply to provide a basic background knowledge, so the graduates will have something to build upon later, having a better understanding of how things work.

In the extent of relevant background knowledge, U.S. CS/IT master level university programs still fall very much behind in what central/eastern European universities can provide (despite the huge financial differences), and with a strong background knowledge and understanding it's always easier to go forward professionally.

"so you no longer need to hire someone with a doctorate to use a machine learning algorithm"

Unless you actually want that someone to actually know what they are doing, e.g., to know that there's no one-size-fits-all "machine learning"...

Only one comment I can think of: outrageous prices (still, and again) combined with outrageous terms.

Regards,

a European broadband user.

It's not the sheer number of hypothetically available charging points that matters. It's the accessibility (how many are pubically accessible on the street), the real number (number of publically available points per let's say every 100 miles), and the real availability (on average, how many of those points are available at any given time, taking into consideration that on car can block a charging point for 4-6-8 hours easily thus significantly reducing availability statistics).

Anyway, unless we're talking about a small electric car, used solely inside a city, and charged every night at home, I'm still not interested. Until the day we can drive 1000 miles with max 2 stops, max 15 minutes each, I won't ever be interested.

I'll say this: all this seems that in a world where most freedoms are being curtailed, this seems to be one issue over which people can still have some control. However, dumb and idiotic it might be. Now, I know that there are many kids who - for some medical/health issue - can't get some of the vaccinations. I'm OK with that. But people denying their kids the vaccinations that could save them from a lot of trouble, I feel that's simply stupid, and dumb beyond any conceivable sane limit.

I mean measles? Really? In all my life I have never met anyone who didn't get the vaccine for it. When I heard about how people don't allow their kids to have it, I just stood really dumbfounded. It's just simply one of those things you'd never have believed existed. These people really want to leave their kids vulnerable to all kinds of preventable diseases? I'm sorry, but to me, and to a lot of other people I discussed with about this, it just seems insane.

The U.S. is generally very protective regarding the safety of the country and of its citizens, so why not regarding the children? If we'd make a list of freedoms curtailed or stepped on in the last let's say 50 years, the freedom to unnecessarily endanger your kids should have been the first to go.

You can bash me all you want for this opinion, but I couldn't care less. Why? Because my kids will never get the measles.

Simply WTF. If nothing else but "names, birthdays, medical IDs/social security numbers" would've been stolen, that in itself would've been much more then acceptable. Hell, one would expect the most sensitive data of people would be more protected... At the very least, the company should cover IDtheft protection expenses for _all_, for at least a year, maybe more. Plus, they should be fined, with such a large amount that they'd get scared, and start implementing _real_ data protection policies. Yeah, you wish...

At companies and agencies handling such data, _all_ kinds of data leaks or thefts should be treated as criminal offenses and they should be punished, I mean really punished. If you can't handle the protection of the data, don't handle them in the first place.

While I also consider the thieves to be criminals, I'm more angry with those, who simply are inept to protect their best assets, even more so since they have the money, manpower and resources to do so.

Also, I'd like to see a national blacklist established, with all companies and agencies on it, who had similar massive data breaches, and made publicly available, so as everyone could judge and decide whether they'd like to entrust their data to such idiots.

"which prevent cities from undercutting established players on price"

Now, how come that the most "free" country in the world has laws for that? Shenanigans. If the "ruling" lobbyists can make laws they want, then it's not a free country and it's not a free market, just state and accept that, and quit whining about how things stand.

"hardware-enablement stack in Ubuntu, starting with upcoming Ubuntu 14.04.2, you will be able to upgrade your kernel"

Well, thank the gods, where would we be without hardware enablement, oh man.

Lehman Brothers...

I went to school alone since I was 7. OK, not alone per se, I went with one of my classmates (later lifelong friend), who lived close to us. And in a much worse city, in a much worse country. That doesn't mean bad things can't happen. But saying these parents are bad parents for doing this is crazy a** stupid. A lot of US people - even some I know - can be really weird when it comes to parenting issues...

"Nothing is being forced on anybody. The situation is that systemd is popular and well liked by people making actual decisions, and hated by a bunch of loud pundits that don't have any responsibilities and are jealous of the decisions of others."

Not forced on anybody... except when your distro replaced sysvinit with systemd and while you can 'de-replace' it, they already tell you they won't support sysvinit in the future. At this point it becomes 'forced' and you can't really explain it away.

"Consider the following carefully: if you had an audited version of systemd, and you were used to using it, and someone proposed that you scrap it for a collection of scripts, would you accept that solution?"

Wrong. There's nothing to consider, since the situation you describe doesn't exist, and you can't expect everyone to just accept it will anytime soon. What I see is that a lot of people get pissed of systemd being pushed into the distros they use because they consider that move [very] premature. I don't think that's hard to understand.

So, who wants to be the one who improves the automatic speech2text capabilities of automatic wiretapping systems in the US for a few bucks? :))

For a long time now several banks (I'm talking EU here, I never saw this in the US, but that doesn't mean they don't have it) offer services where you can generate a temporary card number for a one-time single transaction, and the generated number becomes invalid after that single transaction. It's meant for online payments - you generate the number with a specified sum that can be spent, you make the transaction after which the number disappears. This, combined with a two-layer online banking login (password + single-use token sent by text to your phone) seems pretty solid to me. At least, I never heard anyone using it having their card data stolen.