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.

I guess that opens a philosophical discussion of whether writing device drivers counts as "kernel coding" at all.

writing device drivers is debatable; the kernel side of it is frequently just cut and paste from elsewhere and most of the "real work" is on the device side. A strong argument can be made that maintaining them in the longer term is true kernel coding as there's a bigger need to track changes to the kernel side of things.

Then again, it might've gotten easier. I haven't maintained drivers since the 1.3/2.0 days.

8. moving parts can be lubricated with either gun oil or maple syrup.
9. bayonet lug will accept a non-lethal Shawinigan Handshake module
10. Canadian flag on the butt to ensure that our troops aren't mistaken for Americans ... this stuff practically writes itself.

A VERY vocal minority do not want Systemd on ideological grounds (although I suspect it is more a matter of the new and different scares them, no matter what advantages it may offer)

"new and different" actually is a huge problem, combined with what appears to be a very atypical adoption process happening in a very short period of time (in Debian, within a single release cycle).

Now, ignore the vocal minority. There's always a vocal minority. Sometimes they're right, most times they're just loud, but in the bigger picture they're still a minority.

It's the silent majority you need to be worried about, and the silent majority don't want systemd. This has nothing to do with the technical merit of systemd. They don't want any substantial deep changes. They want small, piecemeal, trackable and revertable changes. The very conservative people who's livelihoods depend on Linux "just working" are looking at this systemd business and flat-out wondering if the distros have lost their collective minds?

My group, who are usually pretty near the bleeding edge by our corporate standards (we generally track current stable releases and and deviate from stock as little as possible) normally track Debian stable and we're seriously considering bypassing/delaying Jessie. I can't imagine selling systemd to the other parts of the organization who have deep mods to the distro and reams of detailed documentation that'll have to be completely gutted.

Basically, all this discussion is pointless noise. Watch the adoption rates for the next couple of release cycles of the more "conservative" distros who have been pulled into the systemd gravity well. Particularly adoption rates where there might be a desktop/server breakdown. That's the silent majority passing judgement. I don't think it's going to be good.

Online shops is the obvious place to enforce this. No packaging for simple stuff like cables, plain bags for non-breakable loose stuff, plain boxes for everything else. People are buying from pictures and reviews and shoplifting is a non-issue, so packaging only needs to be minimally functional. I think AmazonBasics products use this approach, and it'd be nice to see Amazon push it back a bit on their suppliers.

Ideally, it should be the responsibility of the retailer to display the product attractively rather than the job of the package, but blame Walmart. They've done a pretty solid job of unloading a lot of traditional retailer jobs back on the manufacturers.

There is no way for the policeman to scan the QR code while the phone is in your possession in your car.

Hold your QR code up to the always-on camera on his chest?

There is no justification for using paramilitary police action on non-violent petty crime.

I generally agree, but I'd definitely grant an exception in the case of these swatting pranksters. "Live by the sword", etc.

And just to get the joke out of the way, "You wouldn't shoot a policeman. And then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet. And then send it to the policeman's grieving widow. And then steal it again!"

Well, of course not. What kind of sick fuck would steal a helmet full of shit?

if this action by ABP is in fact happening, a fork of the project should most certainly be considered as this 'whitelisting' violates an expected feature or function of the application by its community of users (and possibly developers.)

It's actually pretty old news.

That being said, I don't recall ever seeing one of those acceptable ads due to the other measures I use like noscript/scriptsafe, so I can't really comment on how acceptable they are.

Apple made products that people finally liked to use, and could use it easily enough, and fairly intuitively.

... and, to maintain the karmic balance, they made iTunes.

It saddens me that a fellow Indian would resort to this.

Absolutely. After being raped by a fellow Indian and then having to deal with corrupt Indian authorities, you'd expect she'd think twice before she went to seek justice in another country and besmirched the pristine reputation of her fellow Indian's.

Now, if only they could do something about the number of people who keep voting for assholes who break campaign promises, then campaign promises to do something about climate change might actually matter.

so what the fuck are they meddling with cyanogen?

Is that some kind of trick question?

They're pursuing their mobile strategy with their usual determination and intelligence.

While that seems vaguely plausible on the surface, I honestly have to wonder if the vendors branch the sources because it is the most direct way to accomplish their goals.

It's possible. But looking at how the hardware OEM's operate (particularly at the level of the SoC vendors), the process from the outside looks a heck of a lot like "branch, patch, compile, rm -rf". And it's worth pointing out that the crap the OEM's mod into Android (Touchwiz, Sense, etc) plus the bloatware on top has been getting less invasive as time goes on and the vendors have been getting a bit quicker to pick up Android version changes. So there does appear to have been some improvement.

But at the core of it, "giving back to the community" and "smartphone OEM" aren't phrases that one typically expects to see together.

Let me put it another way: if Google isn't happy about this situation, why the fuck didn't they fix it a long time ago?

I think the carriers and OEM's are probably a lot less amenable to arm twisting than you think. The carriers basically lost complete control over the iPhone, so I can't see them being enthusiastic about Android also becoming a black box to them, and the OEMs are going to make what the carriers are willing to buy, plus they still want to have their crapware and whatever to set themselves apart from the rest of the pack.

It's worth pointing out that by now, the major OEMs probably have enough Android expertise that breaking off and building directly from AOSP is a feasible option if Google tries to flex too much muscle.

And if you think things are bad now, think of how much worse it will get if a substantial chunk of phones don't even have a common Google Play-based core capable of patching an ever-increasing set of components.

That's not even getting into the anti-trust concerns Google's going to run up against if they start adding more conditions to their contracts. They're already getting grief over "forcing" the bundling of their apps, imagine what they'll get if they start "forcing" their own updates to the core O/S (I'm sure the contract wouldn't be written quite that way, but we all know how it would be twisted).

At this point, the only proper "fix" I can see is for Google to keep doing what they're doing. Keep improving Android, building and improve their collection of must-have apps, try to maintain a market of unlocked Android Nexus/One/GPE phones, and keep some pressure on the OEMs to get with the program. I'm also quite interested in seeing how the Google wireless offering might go... if they create a carrier which only accepts unlocked phones and isn't trying to rape the consumer for profits, the North American carriers could be in for a well-deserved ass-kicking.

try { ...
      throw BlahException("blah");
} catch(Exception& blah) { ...
}
^^ Idiot.