Very thoughtful, and respectful of the original series. The treatment of women was mixed in the original series, but I always looked forward to an Uhuru, Nurse Chapel, or Yeoman Rand story, because they were more than sex objects. Heck, even when being treated as sex objects (e.g., Plato's Stepchildren), there were depths to it beyond the obvious.

I don't understand why patenting FOSS offers an advantage over its use as prior art. Is it a "mutually assured destruction" model, where e.g. Google wants patents to assert defensively? Or is it cheaper in the long run to have an explicit patent on something, rather than having to defensively assert it as prior art, if the patent office swing-and-a-misses it and grants an illegitimate patent to some other company?

Out of one side of their mouth they argue that Moto's couple of dollars/device is a totally outrageous licensing fee, given the % of a said device's capability relies on the patents involved (as if being able to play video and do wireless hardly matters to an Xbox) ... and out of the other side, negotiate - only under NDA, of course, because darkness fears the light - for on the order of $15 patent licensing fee for each Android devices, for what the temporarily-courageous Barnes & Noble leadership showed to be be patents that covered a ludicrously small part of said device's capability.

Of course they're getting flak. Point to one time in history when someone has really, earnestly tried to change things that matter without being criticized.

All of the spitting contest "they made amazon searching the default, how dare they", "they refuse to ignore the architectural issues with X, how dare they" stuff is to be expected. It's people who aren't actually trying to implement a vision for the future whining about others who are.

Ubuntu is fighting to put Linux and open source at the heart of the device convergence wave, with a unified OS for phone/tablet/desktop; to push into enterprises, with AD integration and a cogent management alternative in Landscape; to push the open cloud mantra with OpenStack integration and robust and open juju charms.

You make bold thrusts like that, people are going to look for opportunities to thrust their toes underfoot, so they can whine about having them stepped on.

I agree with the spirit of what Ubuntu is trying, independent of whether I agree with all their choices. Let's think big, and push for great things. The alternative is a continued landscape of many small technical distros (the Gentoo and Slackwares etc. of the world) serving specific needs in their small ricepot - or larger distros (e.g. SuSE) serving as footholds for corporate interests. Not that that's particularly wrong, each case has to be weighed on its own merits - but neither is the "think big or go home" model.

About 2 weeks ago or so, I stopped being able to watch any Amazon Prime video on my Ubuntu 12.10 box. I was fine previously, after installing HAL and disabling the Pepper flash plugin in Chrome, so the Adobe plugin was used. But suddenly, with Flash 11.2.202.280, it didn't work.

After experimentation, I found that video viewing was re-enabled by back-leveling to an earlier Flash plugin version. Instructions here.

Can't try it till tonight, but hopefully that workaround is effective still. Minor edit to the instructions, I later tried the plugin version right before 11.2.202.280 (can't recall the number) and it worked fine ... probably better than back-leveling all the way to 10.1, like I mentioned in those instructions.

Wouldn't that just be cool!! To root your phone just so you can sell your soul to Zuckerberg!! Because, you know, there's just nothing about this whole idea that in any way doesn't pass the sniff test.

You and the parent would likely be wrong as to their motives. They have very lucid reasons for forking, ones that pass the smell test. One of the developers enunciated them here, though he's careful to qualify it as his perspective, not an official position.

Really?? You believe this? Have you tried to install software on a Surface RT from someplace other than the MS app store?

It will take them time to boil the frog on the x86 front, but dollars to doughnuts, they're going to do everything they can to get as close as possible to Apple's 30% cut of all software installed. They may not get completely there on x86, because of customer-generated and enterprise software that requires complex installation - but I'll bet you any amt of money they gaze longingly in meetings at that greener pasture, and strategize on how to get there.

FTFY (minor typo) ... more importantly, I call Dunning/Kruger. Just because what you describe is what you've seen happen doesn't mean it's a universal truth. Proprietary software has an in-built bias that nudges kids in the "learn how to use our software now, so you'll be consumers later" direction. Compare kids who pick up an OLPC with Sugar, where the whole user interface and every app has included source code that can actually be changed at runtime (with the baseline easily restorable, so experimentation doesn't have any fear factor built in) ... and what do you know, a fair % of the kids actually groove on figuring out the programming language and doing interesting things by modifying the software!

Wanna bet which of the learning experiences is better in the long run?

Android has taken it on the chin from a security perspective, even though most of that relates to poor user choices. Chrome OS has some interesting and significant security-related architecture and implementation in place. I'm very sure that one fertile area of cross-pollination will be to port the kernel and configuration changes in Chrome OS into the Android environment.

Cross-pollination in the opposite direction? Harder to see, other than the ability to run Android apps on Chrome OS (which isn't really a merging of features).

Chrome OS (which I assume you mean, when you say it's another Linux/GNU/X-windows distro) has a number of things that differentiate it from most other distros, including some of their own innovations and coding efforts that are being upstreamed.

See: this discussion, for example.

Not a lot of info available, but one vulnerability seems to be with the i915 video driver (hence, would be limited to devices using embedded Intel graphics), and the other a Chrome bug related to GPU usage (hence, hardware acceleration) that is listed as resulting in a potential denial of service or more.

So the attack would likely involve a web page employing hardware acceleration, that leaks an overflow into the i915 driver, resulting in ... DoS? Shell?

Calling it not reliable means that there isn't a deterministic way to establish the system state needed for the exploit to work.

Google has fixed Chrome already - and now we need to watch what gets upstreamed in the i915 driver for the next week or so.

p.s. PinkiPie da Man (or woMan, don't know gender).

I'm a scientist who spent time in theology school. I won't claim to be expert on either side (epecially not on the history of science), but I know enough on both sides to clearly see the Dunning-Kruger effect on both sides.

A major theme here is "it doesn't run many apps, that's why it's secure". Yeah, that must be it - it probably has absolutely nothing to do with the way they've implemented Mandatory Access Controls in a rigorous fashion, and the way they isolate resources with heavy use of cgroups, and the read-only root filesystem and tmpfs /tmp, and how they've made every binary use ASLR and NX and DEP, and how they've rewritten several major typically-vulnerable daemons to not run as root, and how they've developed userland daemons to broker access to hardware, and how they don't allow any files in user home dirs to be executables, or how they've started to sandbox device drivers, or the way they implemented separate processing stacks for HTTP and HTTPS, or how they verify not just the boot record but the whole boot stack and partition table and nv ram on every boot and and and ...

Yeah, all those things probably don't matter. They probably don't play any role in exploits that work on Windows-based Chrome failing on Chrome OS. It's not more inherently secure than any other OS, riiiggghhhhhttttt ...

http://techcrunch.com/2012/12/17/forrester-report-shows-amazon-aws-reigns-supreme-with-developers-as-windows-azure-gains-momentum/

Honestly, my tongue was in my cheek, both because I hadn't refreshed lately on Azure vs. AWS usage, and because I assumed any performance study would isolate external usage as a variable. But it does appear Azure is still much less used than AWS, especially when you combine the "EC2" and "Amazon services" responses (though I'm impressed that Azure has come as far as it has in just 2 years).

And note, iCloud uses only file services, iirc, and uses both Azure and Amazon, also iirc, though I don't know the mix.

Of course, that is just a survey. Otoh, it's from Forrester, which is often accused of a bias for MS (I have no idea of the truth of that).