I find it quite alarming that anyone would go anywhere near a company forum, excpet to sing the company song and add their vote to how GOOD everything was. One place I worked had one. It was shut down after 6 months as it was only HR who posted anything and the number of times that content was read was in the single figures.

Short of turning up at foo.com's premises with a government issued photo id, or swearing an affadavit, how exactly would foo.com know anything at all about anyone called John Doe? Let alone be able to differentiate one individual with that name from all the thousands of others.

Further, how could it know that John A. Doe was a different (or the same) individual as John B. Doe and that each actual, real, live person had only one identity filed with foo.com (and who would tell them when that person had died? - and what proof would be required to support that claim).

There are far too many pitfalls for anyone other than a government department to administer this level of control. There are also far too many different countries that would have to both agree standards and share this information in a secure manner.

Bugs come when people lose track of the big picture. When they lose concentration and focus - just like when jugglers drop the ball.

If you want to reduce the incidence of avoidable bugs, get rid of the distractions. Ones such as other people interrupting, phones ringing, asynchronous non job-related alerts going off (fire alarms excepted) and the administrivia associated with the programming environment. Maybe even unplug them from their "entertainment", too.

There will always be non-avoidable bugs: ones where the programmer is simply making a mistake, isn't up to the task in hand or has been given a bad brief or wrong information.

Which assumes there are a finite (and small) number of bugs - even zero-day exploits. I think we can safely say that's not the case.

As the "incentives" for finding new 0-day exploits grows, then more people will have a reason to start looking for them. If the government then buys up the "popular" ones, everyone who's running non-mainstream software will suddenly find they are being hacked. Whereas previously the 0-day exploiters would just have gone for the low-hanging fruit, now they'll be going higher up the (almost infinitely tall) tree.

If a new buyer comes into the market - a buyer with lots of money, then all that happens is that the price goes up. It's simple economics and we see this happening in every market: from commodities to TV programmes.

If the price becomes high enough, new exploiters will enter the market and start discovering exploits, in competition with the original suppliers. Then the NSA would have to start dealing with those guys, too. And so the circle would keep going round: more money, new exploit finders, asking higher prices.

If the NSA wants to improve security, they would set up their own zero-day exploiters to not only find, but to fix security holes and then issue those fixes for free (or use the exploits to force fixes on the exploited software. They might also ask for new laws that would require software vendors to pay them for fixing these problems. However, it's by no means certain that this would be their intention. They may simply be collecting hacks for their own nefarious purposes.

After all, we haven't seen a government agency buying up all the drugs, in order to stop them being supplied to the population - so why would they use that tactic here?

But that isn't how it works.

The whole FOSS thing is a trade. On the one hand, the coder "donates" his/her/its time doing things that are funAnd when you multiply the time spent by maybe some thousands of users, all trying to work out the same problems - compared to the time taken to write, compile and toss-over-the-wall some of this stuff, "free" software is probably some of the worst deals on the planet.

And as for that old crock: You get what you pay for or "Hey, it's free: what do you expect?", most of this stuff is far from "free", it has a large negative value, as it takes many hours or days of your time just to get up to zero: the point at which you can start to do something useful with it.

The simplest course of action would be for the major search engines, i.e. Google (there are some others, I'm told) to simply cut those spanish newspapers out of it's web-crawlers and search functions. If there are no links to the newspapers in question, there can be no tax to pay.

If that means that the online versions of these publications simply cease to exist? Well, that's not the search engines' problem. Would the E.U. then have to instigate a new internet law, to force these sites to be crawled and to force the search engines to do the opposite of forgetting about E.U. citizens and actively "remember" about them.

I have the impression that the newspapers that were pressing for this law don't realise that, despite what they may think, they really are not in a position of power, apropos the internet.

Let's review:
"Pay authors" ... "Provide journal free ... "

Don't worry, it won't. I'd reckon on one edition.

Of course, what this whole field of study needs is a rich uncle (or sugar daddy) to provide funding for specific, basic, pieces of research. You'd think that for all the money they've made from social media, some of the FB/Twitter/others founders or major beneficiaries could put their hands in their pocket.

Or maybe they are the *last* people who want to make this subject rigourous and scientific?

To replicate an experiment, you take the description of the conditions, tasks, environment, fixed independent and dependent variables, analytical method and results provided by the original experimenter in the (peer-reviewed) paper they published.
If you can show the same results, with the same statistical significance, then it's reasonable to assume that the experiment shows a valid scientific phenomenon.

If you can't then one of the two experiments got it wrong and more work is needed.

The basic problem with social experiments, that are based on the judgement, feelings, or anything else that the studied group merely says it would / would-not do, thinks, feels, or otherwise emotes is completely subjective. Asking people how sad, happy, angry something makes them feel and rating that feeling - or the difference from previous values - has no scientific merit, as none of the terms used have any hard, scientific, definition and none of the participants have had their feelings "calibrated".

It's little different from a scientist (a proper one) measuring electric voltage by sticking their tongue across two electrodes, or measuring distance by eyeballing it. The level of accuracy and standardisation the social "sciences" have at present puts them on a par with chemical research: phlogiston, fixed air (CO2) in the 17th century.

As for being able to determine which variables are being measured - or even what all the variables are in their experiments, the social scientists have yet to discover their subject's version of fire.

One of the techniques the government has for allowing the discussion of sensitive issues, without starting a witch hunt is called The Chatham House Rule

Meeting held under this rule do not allow the the disclosure of who said what. The "what" can be reported, but no-one is permitted to say who said it. That permits people to express views, or ask "what if" questions (and get considered, informed answers) without having to always play to the (media) audience and make guarded, ambiguous and watered-down statements.

Since the government recognises the value of these sorts of meetings (as well as the established protocol of "off the record" briefings, which cannot be quoted) it's ludicrous that they would think that removing anonymity would be a good idea. This can only be one of those "silly season" media reports, usually made up by journalists who are bored as politicians are away during the summer months.

Yup. Smaller, better, cheaper. This is exactly what the RPi people should have been developing for the past 2 years.

The world has moved on since the BBB was the game in town.

Now there are much better boards (though maybe not all with the BBB's size) that, unlike the BBB support audio in & out, have more RAM, dual-core processor and more flexible power options.

Some of the new generation boards also make the BBB look quite expensive - both for what you get and in absolute terms.

Well if you hardly ever reboot, then of course you won't have problems. (Just so long as you don't wear out the flash used for /tmp and /var/log

The whole point, as raised in the observation about crappy SD-card + power regulation is that when the board experiences power failures, then it is likely to corrupt its filesystem. Since your board doesn't suffer from outages, it's no surprise you don't have these issues.

A household that can't afford $100 for a used PC isn't likely to be one that's paying for an internet connection.

Give them a computer and it's like giving a starving man a tin of beans - but no tin opener.

The computer is only the tool. The resource that stop children being underprivileged (in an extremely narrow, and not very practical sense) is internet access.

MicroSD required mechanical connectors to the device and is a great deal more expensive that flash - in a very price-sensitive market. Given that an IoT thing could find its way into any environment, the last thing you want is for its operation to be dependent on the correct operation of nasty, cheap (and they *would* have to be cheap for comparable production costs) connectors and uSD cards of variable quality - that are outside your control.

Far better to have everything firmly and permanently attached to the board. Why solder in a connector whan it's just as easy (and takes the same amount of board space) to solder in flash instead. That way you don't get the blame when an idiot user "recycles" an old uSD card and blabs all over the internet how crap and unreliable your product is, as their card keeps corrupting.

RPi got it completely wrong in this respect. You don't hear of corrupted software & kernels on all the cards that use flash. If it's more "difficult" for noobs to use, then that's no bad thing either as it discourages those who are lacking in the clue department. This is not meant to be a plaything for children.