As a coda to my post, consider this howler:

World's Worst Typo Leaves Publisher Reeling

An Australian publisher is reprinting 7,000 cookbooks over a recipe for pasta with "salt and freshly ground black people." ... The reprint will cost Penguin 20,000 Australian dollars ($18,500) ...

This incident was mentioned in a book I read not long ago about the fine art of editing to a high standard.

It appears that tiny slip cost some poor sod real money. If the writer is sloppy or inconsistent in his/her usage standard, the proof-reading job becomes ten times harder. The writer probably accepted the wrong spell-checker suggestion when he/she was bleary with late-night fatigue.

There are a number of elements of British English that would get an American student marked wrong on an English exam, and vice versa.

This is because half the point of higher education is to master pedantry. There's a huge overlap in the cognitive equipment required to perform careful scholarship and lint-picking misplaced letters and words.

Students aren't actually marked "wrong" on their tests, despite the convention to speak about it this way. Their answers are marked "acceptable" and "unacceptable".

In an undergraduate course in computer science on an assignment devoted to algorithmic efficiency, I had a program that ran two orders of magnitude faster than the class median marked 6/10 because I didn't write my program in the mandated coding style with the mandated level of inane comments (requirements which I rejected then, and have continued to reject ever since). The professor liked Pascal and hated C. My coding style was closer to K&R and P. J. Plauger than Wirth.

Jon Postel

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

In order to be maximally conservative, one must strive for some degree of consistency. There's no way to do this without adopting some kind of norm.

There's a reason why some editors strongly prefer the Oxford comma. If you don't use it (I tend not to), there are situations where you can end up with your sentence not saying what you intended it to say.

Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall.

In the worst case, you can end up embroiled in a libel lawsuit. Many of the stylistic codifications accused of pedantry are similarly battle tested.

The additional social process that sometimes takes this too far is that you get a team of editors working on manuscripts from multiple authors. If every author has a different style guide, or the editors don't have a consistent reference, the group effort to achieve a consistent manuscript quickly degenerates.

Unfortunately, this often gets taken to the extreme limit, until you have obscure rulings on the picayune whose utility is obscured in the mists of time.

I learned to touch type on a manual typewriter, inserting two spaces after the sentence final punctuation mark. In the younger generation, this is portrayed as a fuddy-duddy convention. Do they even know that an advanced typesetting system sets the inter-sentence gap differently than the inter-word gap when they make this declaration?

I continue to use the double space convention when typing because it makes it easier to proof-read what I've written. My eyes are used to the double space to help me quickly navigate my sentence boundaries. And the extra space is pretty much effortless to type.

Going to the extreme of portraying the established conventions as nothing more than a bunch of "he said / she said" is complete bullshit. It's difficult to come up with a set of conventions that maximizes the conservatism (in the Postel sense) of a written text. What's the logic for coming up with your own? It's not so different than coming up with your own software license. There's a significant likelihood that what you come up with isn't legally solid, and there's a considerable burden imposed on everyone else to navigate Yet Another Vanity License. Why don't you also roll your own encryption method? It could work.

For me where it goes to far is when the standard authorities (e.g. Chicago Manual of Style) seem to forget that language standards are living standards. The underlying technology changes and the publishing demands also change. What was justifiable thirty years ago is perhaps irrelevant today.

I personally can't stand folding punctuation marks under an end-quotation mark. As far as I'm concerned, that's a matter for the layout engine, if it ends up being done at all. On the input side, it's just semantically wrong. All you get for it is a slight improvement of the visual tidiness on the printed page, at the cost (sometimes) of creating ambiguity in the reader's mind about whether the punctuation mark belongs to the quoted material, or not. Only a crazy person advocates at the same time for the Oxford comma (which averts ambiguity) and for end-quotation punctuation folding (which introduces ambiguity). Aesthetics or semantics? Make up your damn mind! (For myself, I use the Oxford comma as necessary and I make a point of being able to identify those cases.)

I'm sure most people sense that the argument in favour of standard usage as "just another style" mainly comes from people who wish to avoid effort and mastery rather than double down in the honourable spirit of Jon Postel.

Any platform requirements would have been useful in the original question. On Linux, USB gamepads can make xinput events. I only ever cared about it for the sake of disabling it, but the discussion in this Ubuntu bug may help get started on the right track. Basically you'll need xserver-xorg-input-joystick installed and may need to do some xinput set-props work (see starting around comment 24 there.)

How often do we need to repeat this mantra to people?

Not quite so often as you think, if this is just an excuse to regard an accessible, but possibly degraded primary copy as worse than having no backup of your backup at all.

Having in my possession a ZFS backup with some corrupt nodes, I could still have a provable hash from the Merkle tree of the content desired, which I could recover from a corrupt primary copy (i.e. the live drive itself) with no concern whatsoever about the corruption, so long as the checksum matches.

Anything that can go wrong in a primary copy can pretty much also go wrong in a backup copy. Hot media is more likely to fail due to write errors (or overwrite errors) whereas cold media is poor at prompt notification of physical degradation.

The rule of Occam's orthogonality says don't brick the primary device unnecessarily.

Here's the best part: they can audit the security of nearly a half a million lines of code in "several months".

You don't need to look for kidney stones in bone marrow. Most likely what they are doing is better described by "screening" rather than "auditing" even though the later is the conventional word.

Algorithms (such as ciphers) tend to be fairly easy to cover with test suites, whereas memory management and handling of randomness sources are both fraught with peril and difficult to formally test.

It really helps to reduce audit coverage if your code analysis tools can eliminate big chunks of code as purely functional with no side-effects on system state. A purely functional function would not include code that performs heap-based memory allocation, and would exclude the vast majority of system calls.

Even so, I suspect there's a pretty steep gradient on where to direct your best attention to identify misguiding coding constructs (approaches that are worse than wrong)—if you're not determined to check for identify kidney stones lurking in bone marrow.

No, I'm not ignoring any of that. Just pointing out that with respect to the OP of this thread which remarked about having people inspect the safety of the firearms (f.e kept in safe, trigger locks, etc) that that would have never flown with those who wrote the Consistitution - namely because they did have to live with some of that under the English Rule where soldiers could decide that you or your property needed to be searched for whatever reason they came up with. This is explicitly why we have the 4th Amendment (no Warrantless Searches) and limits on Property Seizure.

Look at how people fought at that time. If someone wanted to join in, they had to be able to fight. That typically meant they had to bring their own weapons - the military generally did not provide one for them. This was true even in the Civil War, though by that point the military did start providing some as there was more funding towards it. If you didn't have one, then you had to "borrow" one from someone else who had more than one available.

If you could't fight, or couldn't arm yourself appropriately then you were of little to no use in the militia; though you might have gotten deployed for recon, scouting, or other intelligence operations.

While IANAL, in the US the legal issue is basically that you cannot remove a right (must less one specifically called out in the Constitution) to protect the minority, if only (at minimum) inconveniencing the majority.

The Founding Fathers would not have allowed home inspections of firearms. In their minds, it was not the government's business how many or what kind of firearms you had. It was a civic duty to have a firearm to start with as that qualified you to be part of the militia (even if you didn't have a firearm you could still join, but then you had to find someone to give you one).

No they don't. But they work well to load the coffers and scare everyone else into paying up, especially when the other party is gagged on the topic as part of the settlement, which is what MS tends to do - so even if they pay out (B&N) then the other party can't counter MS's story as to why, etc.

May be, may be not. Even so, they could do so by sealing the filing so only the parties in the case can read it; all it takes is for Microsoft to claim trade secret, harm to its business, etc for that to happen. And the judges in Seattle (or WA for that matter) are typically in their back pocket for one reason or another - it's a very friendly state towards MS, but then, MS pours a lot into funding various public things (f.e education) there too so there's the whole "don't bite the hand that feeds you" thing going on there.

Would have been nice if TFS had included an explanation of what the TSYNC feature is.

This would be inconsistent with masses of people clicking into the discussion thread going "WTF?" and then sticking around to post a comment.

I'd quit Slashdot in a heartbeat (abandoning what limited loyalty remains) if I were willing to wade through the alternatives in search of an alternative forum in which the paragraph as a unit of discourse has not yet been un-invented.

Back in grade nine, back in the 1970s, in a school where the majority of students ended up in vocational college, I already held a low opinion of people who charged ahead with the lingo-of-the-day without providing the least context. Slashdot in its current incarnation routinely falls below the personal standards I used to judge my 14-year-old classmates back when Star Wars was the hottest property in known history (I was quietly polite about it, but none of those people became my friends). Every freaking time a Slashdot story does this (i.e. pretty much daily), I have a grade-nine flashback to the least nerd-compatible environment I've ever been forced to endure.

Edge has a pretty good piece today: Yuval Noah Harari in conversation with Daniel Kahneman.

I don't have a solution, and the biggest question maybe in economics and politics of the coming decades will be what to do with all these useless people.

He merely means by "useless" the portion of the population who have no skills at anything that can't be better done by a (recently or soon-to-be-invented) machine.

There's no fixed algorithm for ensuring that one remains a viable member of the "useful" population, but I'm going to continue with my grade-nine policy of gravitating toward those who 1) employ paragraphs when engaged in written communication; and 2) provide adequate background before lapsing into the lingo-of-the-moment.

As I said, there's no fixed algorithm and I might well be wrong, but from where I presently sit, I'm voting as stated on this matter with my entire bag of skin.

an hour earlier

An hour earlier than what?

Humans have been phase-locked to the mean solar day for just over 200 out of the last 6 million years.

1883: Railroads create the first time zones

Not even the sun is phase-locked to mean solar time. There's this little detail called the Equation of time whose discovery dates back to the Babylonians, which governs annual variation in apparent solar time. Apparent solar time just happens to be the primary zeitgeber on circadian rhythmicity in all mammals (that I've heard of) and a great deal more.

The majority of people feel that DST is a bad idea and want it to stop.

Majority of what population? People living north of the 49th? I doubt it.

Majority of people who wish pi was equal to 3 and that the earth's orbit were circular? Almost certainly, even though I don't think these two simplicity boners are conceptually compatible.

Reading the FAQ and TFA, this is more about BusyBox than the Linux Kernel.

And well, anyone dealing with a proprietary product should know better by now than to include BusyBox in their product without also providing the code for it as BusyBox has a very good history of winning court cases of this type.

Now, while the initial thing was regarding BusyBox, they are also trying to go and push against Tivoization with GPLv2 trying to gain access to "vmkernel" from VMware ESXi. Linus has had a long history of allowing Tivoization, so that might not get through the courts so clearly, but it's a second prong of attack they are using. Expect nVidia and any other proprietary driver maker to possibly join in on that prong - whether arguing for VMware's position or trying to curtail a court ruling that would expand beyond this particular case (since it's basically about an ESXi OS that uses Linux in some form) from impacting other driver manufacturers (f.e nVidia) that simply provide a binary blob for use with their hardware to customers. It should be pretty easy to make the differentiation between the two groups; but you never know what a judge will do.

IANAL, but that's what I see.

Well, having used VMware Workstation 8 and 9, I can was able to download and modify the Linux drivers provided by VMware, necessary to fix some kernel related bugs (http://clocksmind.blogspot.com/2013/04/vmware-workstation-8-and-linux-kernel-38.html) as kernels changed over time but VMware simply didn't keep up with compatibility.

So frankly, I'm a little surprised but then, may this is for a different edition or something.