Bad weather isn't a problem, unexpected bad weather is. Where I used to live (in the UK, so no red vs blue today), we had one day of snow pretty much every year. The city council decided to be very cautious and ensured that they had enough salt and grit available to keep the roads clear if they had a one-week snowfall. One year, we had two weeks of solid snowfall and temperatures below freezing and the whole place ground to a halt. Meanwhile, places a bit further north were fine because they typically had snow all winter and so had prepared for it. Now, you could argue that my council should have prepared for the snow better, but in the 10 years that I lived there I only saw more than one day a year of snow that one winter - maintaining the equipment reserves to handle it every year would have been expensive and you can bet people would have complained about the waste of taxpayers' money.

For some reason, probably related to lack of coffee, I typed Geneva when I meant Vienna.

No, he's in the Ecuadorian embassy, which is on British soil. Britain does not regard foreign embassies as foreign soil (neither do most countries). The Geneva Convention prohibits forced entry into embassies and grants diplomatic immunity to anyone within them. This means that people in an embassy are still covered by the laws of the host country, but the only redress that the host nation has is to deport them as soon as they leave the embassy.

Often, he knows just a little bit more about the subject than the person hiring him and that's enough to convince them that he knows a lot more. From there, he's in a position of authority and so people believe whatever nonsense he spouts, because they don't know enough to contradict him. I've seen this in quite a few small businesses whose core competence is not computer related - they hire someone to 'do their IT' at a rate that is close to what they pay secretaries, they get the only kind of person willing to do skilled work at that kind of rate (i.e. someone who isn't very competent), but that person knows more about the IT stuff than management and so they assume that he knows a lot. It usually isn't too big a disaster, until you find out that they've been keeping their entire dadabase (which isn't even in first normal form) of all customers and orders in a single Access DB, which isn't backed up, is stored on a USB stick 'for security' and the manager who just quit took it with him...

Huh? That video starts at exactly the same point the one I posted does.

You might look at Centaur. They make much heavier use of formal verification in their chip designs (in collaboration with UTexas) than Intel. Intel has the luxury of being able to afford to throw manpower at testing and simulation, Centaur (being much smaller) has to spend their time and manpower as efficiently as possible to compete.

Start about 4 minutes in.

There's a lot of work on provably correct software. Probably the most advanced currently is the NICTA group behind seL4. They estimate that the developer time (and therefore cost) is around 30 times greater than writing good (well documented, with a test suite providing good coverage) software without verification, which is significantly cheaper than previous efforts. It is worth it for things like seL4: a microkernel that is at the core of your TCB and provides guarantees. It's not clear yet that the cost will scale linearly with the size of the software, so 30 times is a pretty conservative estimate. 100 times is probably more likely.

You don't need to be God to write correct software, you just need to put more than a couple of orders of magnitude more time and effort into it than you would for normal code. This includes making sure that you have a machine-readable specification that defines what 'correct' actually means. If your customer is willing to pay for this, then they can get correct software. Now, good luck finding a customer who is willing to pay 100 times more for the difference between 'mostly working' and 'formally verified'.

Exactly. I have no problem with rulings like this, as long as Valve can be sued for fraud if they use the words 'buy', 'own' or 'purchase' anywhere in their advertising. A quick glance that the Steam web site shows it listing 'Top Sellers' and says 'buy it once, play on Mac, PC or Linux'. If they are not allowing you to buy the game, then this is fraudulent advertising.

I work with Peter Neumann, so I don't need a history lesson on MULTICS. The code is available now, if you want to take a look at it - it's very simple compared to a modern UNIX.

Each of the last times, they made some things better and some things worse, and they fixed the worst regressions before they forced everyone to move to the new version. Now, they have made the site basically unusable. I've been here for about 10 years and was in the top 5 most active commenters for a couple of quarters of that, and I'm still no on beta. If I do get forced to move to beta, then goodbye Slashdot.

Note that the parent's advice only applies in the USA (where it is very accurate).

Code written by government employees on government time can't be copyrighted (there is an issue for SELinux here, where some new files had GPL headers slapped on them and can't actually be GPL'd because they were written by NSA employees). This is code written by people on DARPA-funded grants working in universities and private companies, so that rule doesn't apply.

I'm currently funded on a DARPA grant, and we release most of our code under BSD or Apache licenses (quite a bit of it is already rolled back into FreeBSD). As I'm a UK citizen working for a UK university, there is no restriction at all on whether I can copyright things, but our contract with DARPA strongly encourages us to release code under permissive licenses.

Note that this is not a new release of code by DARPA, it's just a centralised place for tracking all of the places where DARPA has funded code that's been released as open source.

If you consider people who reuse libraries instead of rewriting everything from scratch to be script kiddies, then I hope I never have to use any code that you've written...

They're still soliciting it. Stop whining here and send an email to feedback@slashdot.org.