Not necessarily, there's a real question whether ./ got paid or suckered.

I thought so too, until recently, when their apparently inability to report many fairly significant events of social unrest has been very obvious.

There have been anti-government protests with tens of thousands of people marching against the current regime, relegated to 2 minute slots on the local news shot from a low camera angle to conceal the fact that there were 50,000 marchers (by the estimates of the police observing).

Coverage on the destructive privatization of our National Health Service is notable by it's absence.

Even if they are not wholeheartedly supporting the Tories, they would appear to be under their thumb.

This is nonsense. Computers generate programs they weren't designed to produce all the time.

There's a very beginner-approachable book on the topic called "Blondie24: Playing at the Edge of AI."

This "challenge" was passed by Claude Shannon in the 60s.

Our programs use 4-digit years. We tell our customers that they must notify us by the year 9,995 if they want year-10,000 updates. And, if we are expected to go to a different galaxy, they must pay for travel.

They have shown that they can not be trusted. They must lose the power to do this.

Pull someones certificates or kill some CA. Someone needs to suffer because of this.

What happens now is that there's an investigation. Depending on the outcome the CA may be revoked for good, or merely forced to reissue lots of certificates. The deciding factor is the reason for the screwup - for instance they may have got hacked, rather than been actively corrupt. In that case Microsoft will have to decide if they have patched things up enough to continue as part of their root store program or whether to pull the plug. I doubt many people have certs issued by this CA so the damage would be relatively minimal.

Unfortunately you can't just kill any CA that screws up. For one, if the CA was widely used it'd be disrupted. For another, nothing is unhackable, especially when you get the NSA involved. Expecting CA's to be able to reliably fight off professional hackers from dozens of governments and never ever fail is likely an impossible standard to ever meet.

Hard decisions ahead for browser and OS makers for sure ...

Minix was really the first of its kind; a Unix-like OS that you could run on cheap (relatively speaking at the time) commodity hardware and that you could get the source code for. A lot of the computing we take for granted now comes from Tanenbaum's work.

My first Minix install was on a 386-SX with a whopping 4mb of RAM I borrowed from work back in the early 1990s. I quickly abandoned Minix for Linux once it came out, but for several years I had Minix running on an old 386 laptop just for fun.

I really miss the good old days when technical debates were over the merits and faults of such simple things as different kinds of kernels, and not about whether or not every single thing you do online is being stacked into half a dozen nation's permanent data storage facilities.

The Linus vs. Tanenbaum dustup is from a simpler, more positive age.

Well JS sucks as a language to develop in so there is a benefit in developing in something else even if it ends up being machine generated into JS. However... it would be far more useful for browsers to support a low level bitcode (e.g. LLVM) with a set of APIs that tie into the gui, web, threading, local storage etc. than another high level language. Google has something already suitable for the job - PNaCl, but it should be standardized and simplified so any browser can implement it.

Dart could compile to bitcode and then it would execute at near native speeds. Even stuff like asm.js that is an optimized usecase for machine generated js is still a workaround of the fundamental issue - the lack of a lower level alternative.

This seems to be quite typical for government consultations. There's very little in the way of rigorous process. I remember years ago in the UK there was some poll that showed people were worried about anti-money laundering laws and their effect on freedom and civil liberties (it was a poll about risks to civil liberties, Ithink). So the British government said they'd respond to this by ordering a consultation on how best to improve Britain's AML laws. They invited public comments, etc. 6 months later the consultation was published and it recommended making the laws even stricter. There was absolutely no evidence-based approach used at all.