QNX is rock solid - no doubt. But people want devices with lots of features and lots of hardware support, and hardware developers want to develop on an open source OS with royalty free licensing. So, Android runs on linux.

yeah, but this is PHP - a fractal of bad design.

The real question is, when will Debian/Ubuntu/Redhat/Suse be verified?

Redhat has been verified by the CentOS team. If you read the -devel mailing list from back when it was done, it was a real pain in the ass. "Compile this SRPM on this version of Fedora with this version of this library installed", etc.

But they did it, after a long effort, and got binary matches.

They are always like this - especially if the vendors can keep the source secret. I've taken to running VLAN's at home - mostly WNDR3800 refurbs ($50 w/ Prime) running OpenWRT and GS-108T switches (poor GUI, but linux inside), feeding to a pfSense instance. Anything that's not all open source goes on an isolated VLAN that can't get traffic to or from anywhere without an explicit rule. pfSense makes it pretty easy to set up a VPN to get to data on the inside, so outside ports don't need to be open.

I set it up as best-practices, but with Bull Run, D-Link, this, and other similar stories, it seems like an even better idea in retrospect. If I were the NSA, I'd want a backdoor in Roku.

The schools teach that if you vote in an election, then your interests will be represented by your elected officials. Informed adults know that's such a steaming crock, but do we really expect government schools to teach that? Meanwhile, most voters don't bother to get informed (they did that in school, right?).

Heck, my kids' school teaches that Columbus thought the Earth was flat and that Lincoln started the Civil War to end slavery - it's mostly all folklore with the varnish of history.

You seem to have missed the Montevideo Statement a few weeks back. All of the Internet governance bodies are going NGO.

Someone who doesn't drive nevertheless benefits from, say, a supermarket whose goods got there by road; and there are countless other examples of how someone who never sets foot out of the house benefits from roads.

Yeah, but in decent jurisdictions, they pay a penny more for a bunch of carrots, to help offset the fuel tax which pays for the road maintenance. The non-drivers don't need to be more connected to the roads than that.

I went to an Adobe Flex party in Boston shortly after the Macromedia acquisition. The visuals were really good, the development model looked nice, I was pretty stoked. Then I found out that the SDK was proprietary and difficult to extend, that the licensing was deployment-based, and that the front-end was also proprietary and limited regarding devices it would run on.

That was enough to not look at it again. I just am reading now that they gave up on that, tried to give it away, and eventually dumped it on Apache.

Still today, look for an environment that is open, extensible, runs its output on standards-based devices, and also one that has a vibrant community and a good contribution model. Avoid monolithic solutions, but rather parts that do their jobs well and play nice with others.

There was a Mac game called A10-Attack which had multiple views. We'd put three NuBus cards in a Mac IIci and have front and side window views. It was pretty fun, and we didn't even think about being cooked by being inside the CRT zone. The screens *were* supposed to be windows, so the illusion didn't need to worry about the gap between screens.

Goodness, that was eighteen years ago.

Maybe we should have an AI in charge of the nukes?

Back at base, bugs in the software
Flash the message
"Something's out there"
/
Panic bells, it's red alert
There's something here
From somewhere else
The war machine springs to life
Opens up one eager eye
Focusing it on the sky

if(false)

Signed-off-by: me

until such a time as you are instructed to commit the greatest mass slaughter in human history

To worry, worry, super-scurry
Call the troops out in a hurry
This is what we've waited for
This is it boys, this is war

Any questions?

"So you pay for college?"

Law enforcement logic.

"These guys have it coming".

To even be in law enforcement, you have to drink vigorously from the cup of ends-justify-the-means.

what exactly is the difference?

When people ask me why I'm a theological noncognitivist, I ask them if their God needs to be omniscient and omnipotent in every universe in an infinite multiverse or if it'd be OK if thier God is a pimply-faced youth in another.

Typically, they have no idea what I'm talking about, and probably just assume I'm nuts.

The aliens had to make us believe in gods so we'd eventually figure out how time works. "It was worth the price." - Darth Albright

That sentence makes no sense to me. Progressive tax rates are not regressive, and I don't see what "live in economy" means, nor how it applies here.

There's a really good Harvard economics study on this - I'll find the link if you really want to follow it, but the net is that the price of "progressive" taxes just become buried in the cost of goods. In the US, the income tax increases the price of goods about 22%. If a single mother working for minimum wage is buying a loaf of bread for her kids' sandwiches and paying $3.50, she's paying about half a dollar of that cost to pay for the income taxes of all the producers upstream. She pays a 22% tax at the register, but it's 'embedded' in the cost of goods.

Since she's participating in the economy, she can't escape the "progressive" taxes - they're all regressive.

That equates to a little over $10k/year per person, including children.

Yeah, many governments get by pretty well with far less than that.