I'm retired, now, partially because what I do best, tech support, has all been outsourced. However, I do like the feeling that there are people who's day is better because of me, so I'm active on various web-forums and mailing lists devoted to community support for the Linux distro I use (Fedora). In some, small sense, it's a "working retirement."

Well over a decade? It's more like well over thirty years. There were virus infections written for MS-DOS 3.X back in the 1980s.

"I am not a number, I am a free man!" Not any more, you're not!

Tell me this: if the NSA did put a backdoor in the package and if this audit found it, how would the NSA know about it in time to prevent it being reported? Sending a security letter to the auditors would just be considered proof that there was a backdoor to be hidden. The auditors may have been forced not to reveal anything about it to the general public, but you can bet that the people over at TrueCrypt would have found out about it and eliminated it as soon as possible, although they'd probably have had to pretend that they found the flaw themselves to protect both themselves and the auditors.

I fully expect that in 5-10 years most of the users will not know what operating system they are using.

What makes you think that the average home user knows what OS they're using right now? If they're on a PC, they'll know they're using Windows, because that's what came pre-installed, but they probably don't know which version, nor care. If they're on a Mac, they'll probably know that it's OSX, but again, not which version. And, they won't care because as long as it works for them, that's all that matters. If it doesn't work, they'll take it to a computer shop and let a geek fix it for them and the only question they'll ask is how much it costs.

No, Mr. Abrams, the investigation hasn't indicted anything. It indicated that somebody might have taken control of the drone away from you. I don't know if that's actually the word you used or if whoever wrote the story is to blame, but in either case, the Slashdot editors would have caught this if they were actually doing their job of editing the submissions. Why they haven't been replaced by people who know the difference between using a spelling checker and doing proper proof reading to catch misused words is something that only the PHBs at Dice can answer.

"Hearts full of joy, hearts full of truth. Six parts gin to one part vermouth!"

I remember asking Dr. Forward that at LACon II, back in '84. He pointed out that a sphere of antimatter could only react to normal matter on its surface, limiting the speed of the reaction. He said that it wouldn't explode, it would evaporate and that it would look something like a drop of water on a hot griddle.

So there's nothing wrong with making stuff scriptable and changeable.

True. I have no issues with extensions as such; in fact, I think they're a great idea, just as browser extensions are. One of the many things I have against Gnome 3 is the fact that it's almost impossible to customize without extensions. Now, consider the case of a "Windows refugee" who's just installed Linux for the first time, with Gnome 3. It doesn't look or work the way they expect, and until they learn about extensions and how to install them they can't even do anything about it. Unless somebody either helps them get the vital extensions installed, or helps them replace Gnome 3 with a less user-hostile DE, they're very likely to give up in disgust, go back to Windows and spend the rest of their lives bad-mouthing Linux because they were stuck with a DE that they couldn't work with. Gnome 3 may be good for Linux geeks that know how to beat it into submission, but I'd never (not even hardly ever) inflict it on a beginner.

In the Linux world, Product X = Gnome 3. Totally unusable for many people without third-party extensions, yet those same people keep telling everybody how great it is. The only way it makes sense for me in either case (Win 8.x or Gnome 3) is if the advocates are all masochists and think that everybody else likes pointless suffering as much as they do. Personally, I use Linux with Xfce because it does what I want, the way I want without using up excessive RAM or CPU.

There are a number of species of small fish that feed on the larvae. Stoking the ponds with these is a well-known method of controlling mosquitoes that's been used for decades. If they're not already being used in your area, it may be that they're not adapted to your climate.

...quake-free Texas...

Everyplace is earthquake country if you wait long enough. Deal with it.

I can remember people saying the same thing 20 years ago and it hasn't happened. And, I expect to be making the same kind of comment 20 years from now as well.

My understanding is that once he came to power, many Germans bought a copy because it looked good to have it on display. Very few of them, however, managed to read all of it.

"I'm not stupid enough to have done that" might raise enough reasonable doubt to get you acquitted in a criminal case, although the prosecutor would probably argue that it's just as reasonable to think that you might have done it simply because you didn't think that a jury would find you dumb enough to have tried it. Depending on how good your lawyer was, you might or might not get away with it.

However, as I pointed out in the text you quoted, this is a civil case, not a criminal one. Just making the jury think that you might be too clever to have used your own IP for something like this won't work; you have to make them think that somebody else probably did it. My guess as a non-lawyer is that about the only way you can get the jury to agree with you is if you could demonstrate that you were on vacation when the download occurred, and that it had to be somebody else. (Note that if you can do this, you don't, as has been stated elsewhere in this thread, need to be able to say who actually downloaded it.)