That would be the Libertarian Party, maybe some of the other parties as well.

I grew up in a more rural area of central Illinois where it was very common to have bars that could only be reached by vehicle (or foot I suppose) as there was no public transportation to speak of. Sure, you could probably call for a cab and wait a long time for it to arrive, but what are the odds of doing that once you've driven yourself to the bar?

I've been playing video games since I was around five years old and got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. I used to love to play games, the only thing I liked more was programming computers (started at about the same time) and I wanted to program video games when I grew up.

Now that I'm older, and have some money in the bank, I find that I have many more interests than I have time to pursue them. I'm in a Judo club and am at the dojo three days a week, I'm learning guitar, I've got a membership to a car club and want to work more races, I want to try some comedy lessons, learn to kayak, do some work with micro-controllers, etc.

I don't have time to play that many games. I'm looking to play through something with an exciting story and explosive action that isn't too long, which usually means action games and story-based FPS. I literally cannot play certain genres anymore, like platformers or RPGs. At this point, with about 3 decades of gaming experience, it just feels like I'm wasting my time on something I've played a million times already.

I learned to program in the early 80's on Apple ]['s as part of my school district's gifted program when I was in first grade. We started with Logo and those plastic CRT overlays and then moved on to Apple Basic using some programming manuals developed by our school district (IL #66). Kids are capable of learning to program while they are learning to read and when they start that early there's no need for typing classes later since they've already developed the skill.

My mother was a school teacher which certainly helped and she brought a computer home each summer, at about the same time my Dad bought a TRS-80 which I setup and programmed and I was into video games since I got an Atari in, I think, '82. Video games definitely encouraged my experimentation with computers as did my interest in those choose your own adventure books and the Infocom text adventure games. My public library had an Apple lab and I was there several times a week using the computers and playing games with the high school students; this was as an elementary school student.

You need to cultivate the interest by creating a supportive environment at an early age. Public schools tend to fail students by focusing on boring things like tests and facts that turn kids off to school instead of just making learning fun. Kids learn a lot more when they're having fun at play; there is plenty of time to focus on course material at the high school and collegiate level.

I would still argue that they're bidding improperly. They're offering what they want and not what they'll take.

I know this sounds like I'm trolling, but I'm not - it's a serious question. How do you know you can trust open source projects? I've always assumed that large projects - particularly linux distros and their package repositories - have some kind of QA and code audit system in place, but how do they work? Are a couple of naughty obsfucated lines really going to get caught?

I know it's a cliche, but unless you actually audit the code (and don't miss something) you can't really trust it. The best that you can do is trust a group like the OpenBSD guys to perform code audits for you.

I didn't see anyone mention the infamous Debian SSL bug, so here's a link: Debian Bug Leaves Private SSL/SSH Keys Guessable. The gist of the story is that some random package maintainer was getting warnings about a memory region containing an uninitialized value in some OpenSSL code. Rather than actually looking at the code and trying to understand what was going on, the maintainer incorrectly assumed that their debugging/profiling tool was flagging an actual problem and simply initialized the region to 0. The problem was that this memory region was intended to be used as a source of entropy. To make matters worse, this bug went unnoticed for about two years.

So, to answer your question, yes, the QA/audit process is probably broken; it's most likely geared towards testing application functionality versus testing for correctness. And no, two lines of incorrect code are probably not going to be noticed.

As far as real solutions go, I suppose it depends on your level of paranoia. Sure you can use an OpenBSD based firewall at home and limit your inbound/outbound traffic, but as soon as you connect to a remote service, you have to trust them as well. In "Secrets and Lies", Bruce Schneier comes to the conclusion that technical measures are simply not enough and that you have to manage sofware-related risks the same way you would manage risks to your home, automobile, or life, with insurance.