Except that there is not one other fully-featured NTP client/server software system that I know of.

Half of the so called "NTP clients" are really S-NTP clients (Simple NTP) that are barely if at all better than using the ancient BSD rdate command to jerk the time forward or back (whichever is needed) in a discontinuous fashion, that can cause gaps in logs, missing time-based trigger events from being fired, and other well-known woes.

As far as I know PHK doesn't pretend that Ntimed is finished or fully functional. As far as I know it also doesn't pretend to support a large amount of "legacy" systems that still exist within companies networks, even if the vendor(s) disappeared 20 years ago in some cases. OpenNTPd is a pure network client/server system that AFAIK does not support external or master references (i.e. Cesium clocks or GPS modules) so while it may serve the purpose for a large number of users, it still depends on the continued operation of NTP.org's NTP software which is the de facto evolution of David Mill's reference implementation that was not intended to be a global or even enterprise-grade critical infrastructure project, but his research implementation as he, his colleagues, and students researched time synchronization.

Some of NTPd's problem are that a) it has been maintained in a hap-hazarded fashion for 15 years longer than it should have been. b) any system where a single individual is critical or irreplaceable is broken. c) NTPd has been weak in release management / engineering for a long time now, and Stenn's ad-hoc approach hasn't done much to make the work easier for himself. I admit I had not realised that the software project, NTPd, has fallen into depending on a single person. I fact I thought the ISC (Internet Systems Consortium, the group that also maintain BIND, the most common Unix DNS server on the Internet) partnership was more than a means of managing payment and offering a few servers, I thought it was intended to take NTPd, like BIND, and make it into a healthy development community, revitalize the documentation, and share expertise in maintaining a critical infrastructure scale project Open Source of Free Software ecosystem.

The most important yet non-technical solution is for Harlan Stenn to extract himself from being a critical piece of the NTPd software development and release process. IMHO he should focus 100% of his time on mentoring others to take over the various roles he is currently doing himself, and documenting the not so obvious knowledge about the protocol, its implementation, and the history surrounding pieces of code, to preserve his own knowledge, and what he can of David Mill's knowledge that isn't currently enshrined in Mill's papers and technical notes.

Perhaps like OpenBSD that had to learn the hard way many years ago, companies can be leery (wisely from a legal point of view) of funding a seemingly one-man controlled Open Source project. Legally it may open up the possibility of being considered illegally hiring an employee in some jurisdictions ("perma-temps" or "consultants as de facto employees"), as it serves to primarily fund ongoing work that does benefit the sponsor either for their in-house or their product/service offerings.

I have no ill feelings for or any dislike of Harlan Stenn. In fact I suspect he has unwittingly painted himself into a corner, and is now approaching the breaking point. And I believe the solution is radical, but not necessarily financially or technically challenging.

Wow, that's so bad I'm not sure where to start; "Greenwich Mean Time" is a) a timezone still used by the UK when "British Summer Time" is not in effect, and is similar but not the same as UTC "Universal Coordinated Time" timezone, c) based upon the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London, UK.

UTC "Universal Coordinated Time" is the present day global standard time reference (yes damnit that is the correct English name, in French "temps universel coordonné" or unofficially "Universel Temps Coordonné" with an unofficial English name of "Universal Time, Coordinated" to keep the abbreviation similar to UT0, UT1, etc.).

The "military time" (i.e. 24-hour clock) reference is nonsense, and ignore 24-hour clock usage in civilian European life, and as well as being standard in anything time oriented.

NTP is references to UTC, but UTC is in fact itself coordinated globally by about 80 national labs that operate their own national time references (typically 3 or more Cesium based time references, larger labs include hydrogen masers) which is coordinated by BIPM (International Bureau of Weights and Measures located in France). They work with International Astronomical Union (IAU) for things like determining when leap seconds are necessary to keep errors minimal. The largest contributors (by clock sources) are the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), US Naval Observatory, and the UK National Physics Laboratory (NPL) as I recall. The UK NPL and US NIST being pioneers in Cesium (Caesium) clocks.

GPS has become the dominate, and preferable means of professional time synchronizations over distance due to the presence of rubidium or caesium references on board the GPS satellites themselves, and the proliferation of low-cost, widely-available GPS receiver modules including time-synchronisation models with 10s of nanosecond or better accuracy (uncertainty). This means GPS has also become the preferred means of high quality synchronization of NTP "masters" or low stratum references. -- The under-noted point that GPS's geo-location functionality requires a high precision time synchronization between the multiple satellites to determine a position with any amount of accuracy (bounded uncertainty).

People who care about the iWatch functionality will buy iWatches

Well, shit. That's what I wrote in my head. So much for proofreading.

Finally? As compared to what? The other 30-50 stable releases since it's creation in 1998, as a replacement / update for SSLeay (which was written by Eric Young and Tim Hudson)?

I can't understand the fuss, since the iWatch and a Swiss watch are two different markets.

Mostly. However, there's going to be a large intersection in the people who buy a $device in that price range mostly to show off how much money they have, and the iWatch is probably going to own that market.

People who care about Swiss watches aren't going to buy an iWatch. People who care about the functionality of an iWatch probably aren't going to buy an iWatch. But people who want an excuse to flash an expensive piece of wristwear are going to buy a gold iWatch and set their phone to send a notification to the watch every few minutes so everyone can see them checking their wrist.

Death/mass violence threats are not a political correctness issue. They are a criminal issue.

Sure. And if speech crosses the line to become a real criminal matter, then by all means treat it as a criminal matter.

That doesn't change the fact that in 99.99% (or more) cases the motivation is to get a rise out of society rather than the aggression or hatred the parent post was blaming.

At the same time, institutions hyper-sensitivity where even perfectly innocent and reasonable behaviour gets perceived as a threat ("OMG! Someone's walking towards the art department carrying something in a long bag! Call 911!") and the complete lack of sanctions for gross over-reactions has basically turned trolling into an instant denial of service.

There's gotta be a balance. Right now, the way things are structured, we're letting the trolls run the show and just reacting. Poorly.

I don't object to references to raping my daughter and leaving her in a bloody pile in a ditch because it's politically incorrect.

No, but you also don't issue a press release saying how the entire community is just aghast at the whole business and how you're going to host a conference to talk about "healing", do you?

If they said something sufficiently heinous, you might try to track the fucker down and kick his ass (i.e. how "talking shit" was generally handled up until around the 70's), or perhaps something like Curt Schilling. In other words, a response based on going directly after the perpetrator. Direct threats are something for law enforcement to handle.

A "politically correct" response, on the other hand, is rooted in the idea that all we need is a bit more education and a lot more censorship.

Education will probably work in the very long run, unless it's so ridiculously heavy-handed that it becomes parody and propaganda. Censorship will work for a short while until the next mole pops its head up. The gaps in between the short and long term is where the trolls live.

I don't know what the ideal solution to trolls is, but I'm positive that ineffective hand-wringing isn't it, nor is trying to engage them in healing dialogue.

I'm pretty sure that effective, but not excessive, discipline where they can be caught is one necessary aspect (we tend to fail pretty badly as "not excessive" when discipline actually happens). Having society be just generally more resilient to offensive (and particularly anonymous) speech is absolutely critical.

But monopods are still allowed, right?

...an anonymous way for people to let out the aggressions and hatreds that they already had, and are just afraid to announce...

I doubt it.

Most of them are just trolls. You know, bored assholes who've learned exactly which buttons to press to get the most reaction out of society.

That being said, the root of the problem is the same; political correctness is fundamentally just a way to tell the trolls which buttons are the best.

They are Canadian, the Bank of Canada is (politely) asking people to stop "Spocking" their Canadian five dollar bank notes ("bills").

So the protection is only effective if someone steals my phone while it's turned off, which is, like, 0.1% of the time?

Entirely different threat vectors.

When the phone is on and locked, the attacker has to (relatively slowly) manually punch in a PIN and deal with lockouts and such. Shorter passwords are sane in that case.

When the phone is powered off, the attacker can pull the flash and do a high-speed static attack. A short PIN won't stand up in that situation.

You might want to qualify that. I know MSDN (MS Development Network) and TechNet (IT professionals) have had pre-release and release versions of ISOs available since before 2000 if I recall correctly, but that wasn't suitable for delivery to consumers, but services for software development and mid-to-larger corporate and enterprise customers, access was bundled by annual subscriptions, roughly $1000 USD and up.

I think retail license purchases & ISO download, or downloadable recovery ISOs via Digital River has been available since MS Vista, at least since 2011, but perhaps earlier. /shurg

Then over the next 15 years we managed to push the clock-speed boundary up another, what 3-4x? That looks an awful lot like hitting a brick wall to me.

It could be. Then again, it may just be the improvements that gave rapid increases in clock speed were the low-hanging fruit at the time, and once increasing clock speed further became difficult (but let's not say "impossible") then other low-hanging fruit came along.

Maybe it's a brick wall, and maybe not, but the industry has a long history of "probably not" when it comes to telling them what they can or can't do.

There is some debate among people if 5nm will make sense or even be reasonable to do...

It's not a new discussion by any means. It was an old debate when people were asking whether a 100MHz bus was as fast as we could get, and 45nm was considered ridiculously small. The GHz barrier on clock speeds seemed insurmountable.

Didn't stop anyone, did it?

If it can be done, someone's going to try. If it can be done profitably, we'll see it on our desks or in our pockets in a few processor generations. That's just how it is.

I should have no reasonable expectation that a farmer (Nye wrote "regular software writers and farmers") would have expertise in astrophysics for example.

I'd expect farmers to have a far better background in and a more intuitive understanding of science than software writers. Farming is, at its core, applied science. It may not be as rigorous or structured, but for thousands of years people have lived and died based on how well farmers hypotheses have panned out.

Software writing and computer "science" in general falls more under mathematics than science. In mathematics, once something is proven it stays proven, not matter how sloppy or random the process of getting to the proof might be.