As a business traveller who isn't going to type his credit card details into a random captive portal that claims to be affiliated with an airport-honest-really-not-a-scam, I welcome free WiFi at airports.

Public transport is already easy to do with conventional batteries. Between overhead power lines and induction charging at bus stops, there are ample opportunities to top up the batteries during the day.

This isn't meant to replace that, it's meant to augment it. Most of the time, the 260 mile range is fine. Sometimes, it isn't, and this gives you an emergency reserve. In normal use, you'll never use it, but if you're planning a long trip and don't manage to get to a charging station anywhere in the middle then you're not going to be stuck miles from civilisation with an empty battery.

I don't think I've ever seen a Phoronix report that showed error bars in their graphs and I've never done performance tests of the ones that they run without any jitter. They also have a history of making spectacularly bad decisions about what to benchmark. For example, they did benchmarks of FreeBSD against Ubuntu, but used a FreeBSD beta that had WITNESS and INVARIANTS options compiled into the kernel, both of which impose a fairly significant performance cost (but give better error reporting). Yesterday, they benchmarked GCC's OpenMP support against Intel's Clang-omp branch. Sounds easy, except that they didn't specify optimisation flags and GCC defaults to -O2, whereas Clang defaults to -O0. A sane evaluation would have shown the results for -O0 to -O3 for both compilers, along with error bars showing the standard deviation over ten or more runs.

A subscription for Phoronix? The site that yesterday published a multi-page article comparing Clang and GCC's OpenMP performance using -O0 for Clang and -O2 for GCC? I'm sure that's a good use of money...

If you are a subscriber, then you can use HTTPS, however your traffic then stands out to traffic analysis (it's not hard to tie the encrypted connection which sends more information than an HTTP GET with the sudden appearance of a new post in the next user's unencrypted request for the page). They're also, I believe, still using a certificate that was issued before Heartbleed was disclosed and so is almost certainly compromised.

Shooting politicians will almost certainly effect change, but it most likely won't be the change that you're looking for.

I can't speak for Finnland, but in the UK traffic offences are handled a bit differently. You typically receive a letter in the post telling you to pay a fine or appear in court. If you pay the fine, it's cheaper (the same number of points are still added to your license in either case). If you're definitely guilty then it's the obvious thing to do. Before you get to court, there are several things you can do, including requesting the camera photos. These are typically the only evidence that they have and requesting them means that a human will look at them carefully. If there's obviously been an error, then they will usually drop the case then. Because most of the obviously guilty cases never make it to court, the magistrates expect that a significant number of people who actually make it that far will be not guilty, so there isn't quite the prejudice that the US system has.

OpenSSL took the worst possible route. They had FOO_{standard library function} and BAR_{standard library function}, and also just used the unadorned library function. The FOO_ variant had some special behaviour, the BAR_ version was sometimes the standard library version and sometimes their own (depending on both the platform and the function - in some cases they always wrote their own even when there's an adequate - or even better - version shipped with the platform, in some cases they made a per-platform decision about it).

Almost right, except that you stick #define printf GOOD_printf at the end of the #ifdef block and then always use printf(), don't force everyone reading the code to work out that GOOD_printf() means printf().

The problem with this idea is that it assumes that it's easy to attribute costs to a particular programmer. The Heartbleed bug added a new feature (yay! Marketing checkbox!) and sat undiscovered for a couple of years. Do you think that the developer would have been fired immediately after introducing it in a closed-source environment?

The close button is easy to spot, because it is in the same place on every browser tab / window. If an annoying ad pops up, don't try to close the ad, close the page. Let the web site know the next time that they look at their analytics that they have a very high bounce rate and eventually they'll figure out that it's because they're pissing their (former) users off with their annoying ads.

I stick something in my user CSS so that links to the site get a warning added. I can then decide before I click whether it's worth adding following a specific link to the site. Usually, I don't. Unfortunately, most sites don't get statistics for how many people choose not to click on a link because they've been annoyed in the past.

If I associate your 'high end brand' with the projected battery life on my laptop suddenly dropping when I open a page with an advert for it, then I am not going to be predisposed towards that brand.

I'm pretty sure there's AdBlock for Firefox mobile. I tend not to block ads - I'd rather boycott sites that have annoying ads than give them the impression that their behaviour is acceptable - but I'm very happy with the self-destructing cookies plugin and Firefox for Android.