His donation to Proposition 8 has been known literally for years. He was CTO before his promotion to CEO; he had a seat on the board of the Mozilla Foundation, as is natural for its co-founder. None of his gay subordinates or coworkers seems to have levied any accusations of unfairness against him in all that time. One of the Mozilla bigwigs commented that she was surprised to learn of the donation when it came out, because Eich's friendliness and evenhandedness toward gay employees defied her stereotype of a Proposition 8 supporter.

Eich had no trouble getting along with those who didn't share his views, but it seems that not everyone reciprocated.

Well yeah, that's because they added an essay portion that's scored separately. You'd expect the average score for the two-part test to be about 1,000 and the average score for the three-part test to be about 1,500.

They are offering the use of their money, which they could otherwise invest in some profitable enterprise; that is worth some interest. Without risk, one would expect it to be low interest -- like treasury bonds -- but certainly nonzero.

That's fair. I used to think I hated the blueness of common CFLs when what I actually hated was their terrible color rendering. I'm disappointed that there's not more of an emphasis on support for the full color spectrum in CFLs and LEDs.

Your tone is flamebait, but your question is valid. Firefox has a project called MemShrink whose focus has been on reducing memory usage. In the time they've been going they have found and fixed leaks in Firefox; come up with better ways to find leaks in add-ons, which were the biggest culprit; changed how Firefox handles memory used by add-ons to eliminate virtually all such leaks; and optimized Firefox's memory management in a bunch of non-buggy cases.

So yes, if memory usage is what drove you away from Firefox you should take another look.

I believe that this is the discussion being referred to, where Linus expresses his frustration with nVidia.

They also weren't a portal. Remember what the Excite home page came to look like?

I don't know about Britain (where carrying pistols was hardly unheard of in the nineteenth century), but I don't know that I've ever heard this as an argument for gun control in the U.S. It seems an odd argument: It would definitely work to make carrying a weapon more difficult for the law-abiding, but the only way to make it less desirable would be if it indeed made it nearly impossible for criminals to get access to weapons.

And British gun control has led to knife crime and to forms of knife control that look downright silly from this side of the pond.

And our (the American) revolution was largely inspired by its principles.

It's hard to tell from context whether you're not from the US or you're an American who has never used seven-digit dialing.

In the US, the first three digits of a ten-digit telephone number are the area code. Traditionally if you were calling someone who was in the same area code you were in you would not dial the area code but only the last seven digits of the telephone number. If you needed to call someone outside your area code, pressing 1 first allowed the telephone network to know that you were dialing a ten-digit number.

It used to be that when an area code ran out of telephone numbers, it would be split into multiple area codes. This meant that some numbers would change in the first three digits, which is inconvenient. The modern practice is to add a new area code that applies to the same geographical area as the old one, but that means that someone living next door to you may have a different area code than you do; the solution is to make everyone dial the full ten digits regardless of area code.

I think landline practice (7- or 10-digit dialing) still varies by region, but all modern cell phones use ten-digit dialing.

Canada is becoming a free country after all! When did they change the rules on caffeine and non-brown soda?

There are plenty of people who are legally in the country without being US citizens.

When I bought mine you had to go looking for the Ubuntu machines page; when you got there it explained very clearly, in non-technical language, that if you don't know what we're talking about you don't want one: go over here to buy a Windows machine. They thought that out ahead of time and were very clear about it.

The biggest problem is that those cryptographic hashes tend to be easily parallelizeable on a commercial GPU, resulting in a brute force attack many times faster than an ordinary CPU. Hashes like bcrypt are much less GPU friendly.

Do you really think that? A dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalist Christian that thinks the Apocalypse is a good thing because he gets to meet his BFF Jesus that day, in charge of the second largest nuclear arsenal in the world?

Are you privy to some quirk of Santorum's eschatology that makes him more dangerous than previous theologically-conservative presidents, none of whom has yet provoked a nuclear holocaust?