Google's stance on a 60day turnaround of vulnerability fixes from discovery, and a 7-day turnaround of fixes for actively exploited unpatched vulnerabilities, is rather naive and devoid of commercial reality.

I think what you're saying, is that if someone is going around stabbing people in the heart, and if a doctor says these victims all need immediate medical attention (even the victims which are in isolated areas far from hospitals), then that doctor is being naive and devoid of medical reality.

I personally think you should quit blaming the doctor for the unfairness and horror that is inherent in the situation. Declaring the urgency of a problem being addressed, isn't "naive". It's not naive, even if addressing the problem is incredibly hard or even if it's effectively impossible.

If the doctor truly thinks the victims all really will get "immediate medical attention" then he'd be naive. But advising it isn't naive. Yelling at people "get that victim to the ER as fast as you can!" isn't naive. Telling people that heart stab wounds are very serious, isn't naive.

And the analogy with Google here, is that you just got stabbed in the heart, they're advising and hoping you get immediate medical attention, and 7 days from now, if your wife asks Google if they've seen you lately, they're going to tell your wife, "I heard he got stabbed in the heart last week. You took him to the hospital, right? If not, you better get on that, right now." You're concerned Google is going to scare your wife?! Be concerned that you're not at the hospital yet!

You think Google is being naive with unreasonably high expectations, but the need for those high expectations isn't their fault!

I will acknowledge that supply-side convenience can result in lower prices for customers, but I would still feel better of at least SOME of the GMO stories in the US talked about making the food better in some way other than cost.

Here you go. It's probably a hoax, though (been hearing about it for a long time yet I still don't see it in grocery stores).

Even then, if it is the same mechanism, you are still not infringing the patent.

Really? That sounds like copyright, where how you created something is what matters to whether or not it's a derived work. With patents, a completely independent implementation is still infringing, if in the end, it's the same mechanism. It doesn't matter how you got there. If you breed (rather than synthesize) Roundup Ready, it's still Roundup Ready. No?

...

The Roundup Ready patent has always struck a chord with me as a programmer, maybe because it parallels some things that happened to us. You could look at Roundup Ready as an interoperability requirement, something that is needed, in order to be functionally compatible with Glyphosate -- sort of like how you have to implement LZW to be able to read a GIF image.

(I'm not saying it's a perfect analogy. There are various differences. The big one up until 2000, was that lots of GIFs were in the wild and they could come from anywhere, whereas Roundup was single-source due to its own patent. So the "need" to be compatible with Roundup was more dubious than GIFs. But when the Roundup patents expired, the situations became much more similar, and Glyphosate could be argued to be almost a defacto standard.)

Since anyone is allowed to make or use Glyphosate, and it's pretty common and widely-deployed, its situation is a lot like a world where many users are sending you GIF images that you need to read, and the government is there, telling you that you're prohibited from doing so. I can sympathize with farmers a lot, when they say they ought to have the right to make plants which are compatible with a (now) non-proprietary weedkiller.

If that's the case then we don't know if it is safe for human consumption, do we?

Yep, to the same degree that we don't ever know if a new wild strain is safe for human consumption.

People, look at this as good news. This means that patented genes are in the wild, doing their own thing and the patent being infringed by mother nature herself. Confirmed by USDA, an authority courts can't merely blow off without looking silly.

The fact this happens, is a great reason why either gene patents ought to be abolished, or at least the patents in this particular genotype ought to be invalidated.

I'm really struggling to see how javascript is a moral issue.

When I go on about proprietary software being "unmaintainable and unauditable" do you think I'm talking about morality? If ever trade secret + legal monopoly software becomes as trustworthy as maintainable and auditable software, then we can pick morality nits.

Until then, let's stick to practical concerns. Practical concerns like "how can I be sure this foreign untrusted code isn't fucking me?" or "I figured out how this is fucking me, and I want to make it stop" or "I made it stop, but then I got a letter from a lawyer" or "I don't use that site anymore, because it was fucking me too much and their lawyers were assholes, saying I wasn't allowed to modify the code they were offering to my computer."

Oh, of course: it's our own fault we were getting ripped off, since the government and the people are one and the same. Please, tell me another fairy tale.

It's not a fairy tale; it's a strategy. (Spock: "A lie?" Valeris: "A choice.")

This is another one of those RMS things which really does seem pretty nitpicky and impractical, at the time it's written but history shows that whenever you later look back, RMS is almost always right.

Javascript is so transient, so unimportant, and so close to the blurry line between code and content (though I'm surprised to be reading so many opinions here which are placing it on the "content" side). Our browsers are getting pretty decent at sandboxing these days, so the consequences of running unmaintainable and unauditable code within them, seem light. Who really needs maintainance for code that you only use for a few seconds and then throw away?

But it's creep. Unless I have my browser only run Javascript from whitelists, the "normal" operation is that it's doing something (running all kind of crazy proprietary stuff) that, outside the browser, just doesn't happen. My machines aren't are "pure" as RMS' machines but even so, there are really only so many places where I still have unmaintainable and unauditable code. The browser multiplies that by thousands.

It's funny; I normally don't go adding thousands of proprietary PPAs to my Ubuntu machine, and tend to be pretty conservative about what I allow to be installed. Yet my browser still isn't using a whitelist for Javascript. That's not entirely sane or consistent, is it? No matter where you stand on the Free vs proprietary spectrum, you get to call me a hypocrite. (Fortunately, I probably get to call you one right back -- unless you're as hardcore as RMS or as resigned as an iPhone user.)

They're individually inconsequential (I think!!), but I sure spend a lot of time in the browser. What's otherwise a fairly trustworthy machine, seems to be hanging by a thread: the browser's correct virtualization of the Javascript universe. If I'm really ok with that, then you'd think I'd also have some Windows or Mac OS X virtual machines around too, to further run more unmaintainable and unaudited code for my convenience. Why don't I? Maybe it's simply because doing that wouldn't really give me any more convenience. But maybe I'm inconsistent because I don't have my shit together, mentally.

I think there's a valid concern here, it's just hard to say it's important or what (if anything) to do about it. But I remember when "The Right to Read" pretty much got the same opinion from me.

As far as what to do about it, FSF's proposal seems pretty modest: don't have government actively making the creep deeper. We have enough to worry about without our own government putting us further at risk. Regulations.gov shouldn't be distributing a bunch of proprietary code to citizens; leave that sort of thing to commercial sites. Even if it's currently believed that the current version of that code is harmless (it wouldn't totally surprise me if some people have illegally(?) audited the Javscript), it's not a best practice, and outside of exceptional-because-we-don't-have-our-shit-together web it's something we normally wouldn't do or permit. If regulations.gov told you to download and execute regulations.exe or the iOS app as the only way for citizens to get some information from them, I'm sure plenty of people would be screaming. This is the same, but also different, by degrees. Whether it's two degrees or ten, though, I don't know...

When you whip out your camera and photograph my desk or back I am forewarned, and have time to rare back with the haymaker that will surely be your next experience. But there is no defense against people walking into your store, your office, your meeting wearing Google Glass.

This is what I totally don't get. Of course there's a defense against this stuff: the same defense you'd use if you saw a camera crew walk in with a giant WPIG news camera. If your cow-orker attented a meeting with a handheld camcorder always pointed at your face, you really wouldn't say anything?

What you don't have as good a defense against, is the in-the-wild-for-many-years miniature cameras with basically the same intrusion capabilities as Google Glass, except that they're less overtly displayed. Ten or fifteen years ago (actually much longer ago, but around turn-of-century is when it all got really cheap, I think) was the time to rage against this tech, not now.

But ok, rage on. Better late than never, if GG starts the debate which should have been. But flaming this particular product for something for which it's not even a real example of the problem (since GG is both relatively obtrusive (you see it) and relatively expensive ($1500)) seems kind of lame.

We should demand "recording" LEDs indicating when cell phone cameras are on, and the same for Google Glass.

The funny thing is that you might actually get something like that for the next revision of GG. But you're never going to get it in general; you'll never be able to feel like it's something you can rely on. Cameras are going to be recording you, without the slightest visual or audible signal. It's probably already happening.

Take it from a guy who often wears a hat when he's outside. I don't have gear in there but you'd be crazy to take my word for it. I could have some gear in there, and you'd never know. There are people out there with backbacks, purses, shirt pockets, bulky coats .. it's over, I think. This would be a great time to be a voyeuristic perv, and GG doesn't really have anything to do with it, other than riding the same cheap components wave.

Nukes?! I prefer to use Chinese Needle Snakes.

Perhaps I missed it, but how was this murder terrorism?

I thought everyone was familiar with the process thanks to the Saturday morning cartoons, but perhaps some of you Delinquent Terrorees need it spelled out.

After a crime or crime-like event, what'll happen is that someone on the Terroree Committee announces their IBA (Intent to Become Afraid). Another committee member seconds this, possibly after some out-of-band side-dealing. This brings the terror (small "t") to the floor, where a wider discussion ensues. If seven ninths of the committee supports Afraidity, then goes to the larger Terroree Assembly for more debate and ultimately a straight majority vote. (I'm oversimplifying here, but I'm not sure how much detail you were requesting.)

If it wins the vote, it is promoted to a Terror (large "T"). A Terror's actors become "terrorists" and the action "terrorism" and so on. If no motive for the terrorism is found (no one comes forth and explains their demands and that they performed the act in order to persuade the public to see things their way, the classic boilerplate being "I committed that violent action in order to prove that my views are the wisest views") then something can be made up -- technically after being sent back to the Terroree Committee. To save time, the original committee's meeting may come with a non-binding suggested motive, and after the assembly's Terror vote, a popular Terror will often immediately proceed to a vote on the suggested Terror Motive.

All members of the Terroree Assembly agree, as a condition for joining the assembly, that they will comport Afraidity with any and all Terrors, without exception, and regardless of however they voted upon the original terror (the "Mandated Afraidity"). This helps to address charges of illegitimacy, so that we don't have a repeat of the Cole incident (where it languished in Terror Court after passing the assembly (with high absenteeism) and a poll of the assembly members found that 87% of its members hadn't been Afraid).

The Mandated Afraidity, while once thought of as draconian and overburdensome, is now widely accepted thanks to a notification network which helps to keep assembly members up-to-date and informed about exactly what to fear, how to persuade the public to comport Afraidity, etc.

The amount of "I know nothing" coming out of DC the last two weeks rivals Sgt. Schultz

They're trying to fix that so please stop resisting.

Guns can't hurt you, only your own choice to perceive pain, disability and death as bad can.

One of the weaker Star Trek episodes, IMHO, but I gotta admit: it's memorable.

If you raise corporate taxes, prices increase.

The prices of corporate products increase. The prices of items made by businesses which do not inflict the expense of unaccountability (a.k.a. limited liability) would have no reason to increase, because their taxes wouldn't have been raised.

Let's be clear: we're not talking about taxing businesses, we're talking about taxing a certain type of (currently popular) way of doing business, to counter-balance a form of subsidy. It's a type of business which involves getting a special favor and additional rights from the government, which natural persons don't have. It's an artificially-created privileged class. Not all entities need be included within that class.

(I realize there are problems (big, big problems) with running a business outside of the limited liability system. I don't have a complete answer to the various obvious questions which are going to come up.)

We tend to think of corporate products as being a good deal, and corporate eggs are cheaper than the eggs sold by the chicken-raising neighbor down the street. But unless the neighbor bothered to fill out a bunch of forms and jump through a bunch of hoops, the neighbor was taxed. The "cheaper" comparison wasn't fair, as the corporate price was lower due to society pointing a gun at one face and demanding payment, while not pointing a gun at another face. See the problem? At least part of corporate efficiency is an illusion; something we've chosen rather than adapted to. It's not something you would find in a free market.

Nobody has shown that what Apple has done shouldn't be morally acceptable.

Wait.. Apple? The bad guy in this story is Congress.

And nobody's arguing what that Congress did was illegal, just that they ought to all be lined up against the wall and .. voted out of office and replaced with people who make a less byzantine structure, instead of creating laws which are designed to let megacorps avoid taxes while the rest of us have to pay.

But we can't do that, until you and I stop voting for the ones who we heard of in some ad. Those are the ones who probably owe someone, for their funding.

(Hilarious and ironic? Is that a challenge?)

What's hilarious and ironic is that you here are doing the Exact Same Thing.

Whoa there, buddy. I'm an innocent witness! I told you something fascinating (IMHO) that I saw happen in 1985 and now you're giving me shit for it?

Fine. Next time someone tells you they're concerned that "hackers" may have influenced their computer, I'll just let you go on thinking that they're bragging about how awesome their computer is. Then we'll see who looks like the insensitive clod.

Later you'll find out, briefly wonder why Sloppy didn't tell you about the new meaning of "hacker," and then you'll remember this day. You'll come crawling back, on your hands and knees, offering to do to all sorts of gay things to earn my forgiveness.

Genie's out of the bottle. You can whine and bitch it all you want about how stupid it might be, but "gay" has at least three meanings now, and some hipster (THERE! Now you can accuse me of labeling people) will come along and explain "gay" is up to five meanings now. And maybe then I'll join your side, saying, "Enough. I don't want to know."