Nexenta is Gnu libc and userland with the OpenSolaris kernel.

Honestly, unless you're a DJ, it's pretty unlikely that you have any audio that doesn't exist as something digital (MP3, AAC, WAV, etc.)

Well, you know, there are still a couple of people around that play musical instruments (you know, those expensive things you don't have to plug in), and we sometimes like to record the sounds that we make. And others sometimes go to listen to people playing these instrument things, and they sometimes like to record the sounds. Craziness!

It's not quite 'blind' trust, though. It is reasonable trust, because we've seen that in the past, the methods and models those guys talked about have actually been verified. They invented electronic things that have had a profound effect on humanity. History tells us modern medicine has improved human health immensely (if you're rich enough, of course). And I (an ex-researcher) do know how the scientific method works and what its limitations are. Therefore my "belief" in science is reasonable.

The best part is that it works for you even if you don't believe in it -- so creationists can still enjoy the fruits of science. Science is better.

And what exactly do you suppose we puny humans can do about that "huge locomotive with blaring sirens that's about to hit [us]"? We can neither deflect the "locomotive" (your "dinosaur killer"), nor can we get out of the way (move the whole planet).

Not like there's anything we can do about preventing earthquakes either.

But even if we had the ability, do we have the wherewithal to actually do anything about either asteroids or earthquakes? We're demonstrating how good we are about ignoring the future and playing ostrich, just look at the prospects for our petroleum-happy way of life.

Like any good drug dealer they need to keep the first "hit" free.

Except that these "drug dealers" aren't doing it for money, they're performing a public service. ("Public service"? Isn't that something commies do?)

Here's Pat Schroeder, then the incoming president of the Association of American Publishers, in the Washington Post of Feb 7, 2001. She was interviewed at the meeting of the AAP, hence the "brie-eating mortgage holders".

"We," says Schroeder, "have a very serious issue with librarians. ... Technology people never gave their stuff away, but now folks are saying, 'You mean the New England Journal of Medicine is charging people?' ... Markets are limited. One library buys one of their journals," she explains, pointing to the Brie eaters. "They give it to other libraries. They'll give it to others." If everyone gets a free copy, she says, the publisher and the writer and others involved in making the book go unpaid. "These people aren't rich," she says of those in the room. "They have mortgages."

These are the people arguing against making publicly funded research publicly available. Here's the full article: Pat Schroeder's New Chapter.

Well, the original idea of the TPM was exactly that: Sandbox everything, manage every trust relationship in your system, hardware, software, whatever, and make it possible for the average user.
Of course we know what that was turned into.

But a good example is SElinux, which is not much different, except that is entirely software. Here on Gentoo, there are SElinux policy packages for every important software. Which are kept proper for me. (Yes, it is far from prefect, but it is a start, that if extended to every app in the repository, with different usage profiles, is what I mean.)

I have the recalled notebook, i filled the form, and months passed with no contact from Acer. I wrote an e-mail and no feedback. If this is the build quality, if this is the support, what will happen to my notebook when they will get it?

RTFA - he was going 85mph, which was reported as being 35mph over the limit (in non-american terms, he was going 137km/h in an 80km/h zone, 57km/h over). In Canada, going about 100-110 in an 80 zone is pretty normal, but a cop on a bad day will nail you for a couple hundred bucks. OTOH, there's a 'magic number', which happens to be 50km/h over the posted limit. Get caught doing that, you lose your car, your license and get slapped with a $10,000 fine. So, a Ferrari Testarossa goes for about $250,000 plus taxes, shipping etc., meaning a final price tag over 300 grand. He'd have lost his $300,000 car, had to pay a fine (granted it's chump change for him) and he loses his license, making the fine he got about even with what would happen in Canada for the same thing

Having had minor surgery under local anesthesia, I can positively say that pig is NOT the only thing that smells like sizzling bacon. There is a reason cannibals refer to "long pig".

Presumably the use of a "full body scanner" won't be considered "indecent" in court. Whereas pictures of a naked child holding a sex toy for instance would be.

If you can't tell the difference, you should be shot. The Guardian certainly deserves to be. Because presumably they would bring up the same argument against, say, visits to the pediatrician or medical imaging.

But that's a big problem. Developer work is effectivly not measurable.

How do you measure code quality? Any "mechanical" method (counting lines, lint scores, whatever) can be very misleading, basically it can be shown by example that it measures the wrong thing.

How do you measure being on time? That strongly depends upon the guestimate that we all do in the start. In most methods, this "educated guess" is done by people who do not have to keep the time limits set.

Add to this that management usually does not understand what the developers are doing (the only thing you might count on is that your immediate superior has a vague idea what you are doing, in most places. The superior of your boss usually has your whole group condensed to one line, and so on), and it gets very hard to be appreciated as a developer. Hence older and more experienced developers often develop a cynic streak, leading to under performing. As long it's hard to prove that you are under performing, ...

Furthermore, customers usually do not realize that sprints where vaste amount of functionality gets implemented in very short time (with potentially not much sleep) are something that is not really easily reproducable. Sometimes the subject matter you are working on turns against you (it's way more time consuming to finish off these last half-dozen bugs and edge cases, because it usually involves a good measure of debugging).

Ah, and one last item that makes our job so hard to cast in work days, debugging. There are bugs that you write yourself, against these you can try to protect yourself. Then there are bugs that you inherit from internal modules, 3rd party libraries. Then we've got the whole area of problems associated with the customer not telling everything. Then we've got complete changes of functionality and focus midproject.

Does not happen? I had once a situation where a sister company refused to hand over any documentation beyond what the end customer had. So while we went to reverse engineering stuff that one trip to the sister company could have avoided; Why you wonder? In this case they had a real good reason, the systems they've sold to the customer did not what they were supposed to do. And our effort was to port some applications that would have enabled the customer to check the functionality through his own officers, not relying on the operators from the seller company; so they stonewalled us, while delivering "updates" to the customer, ...

I laughed my head off while watching Google's day in the sun reported in teh national news last night. Thirty seconds about Nexus and how it was going to give Apple's iPhone competition then three more minutes about the the Apple app store and the expected iSlate and how Apple was changing the market again. They were raving about a product not even officially announced from Apple for three minutes and how it would change the world.

Poor Google can not win this horse race if they can not even stay in the TV news for more than 30 seconds! TV commercials last longer than that.

If I was expecting to run out and buy an Android, I would wait after that news clip just to see what I could have had from Apple later this month.

1Ghz isnt overkill. Also, the nexus one DOES have multitouch, its just that the apps preinstalled on the device dont have pinch zoom on them. You can download a browser with pinch zoom whenever you like from the app store. So before you tell me it doesnt have multitouch, keep in mind that it does and this has been confirmed by several people who own the phone.

I have a set-top box which can download TV and films. It's a Windows PC with a BitTorrent client. No doubt there are other solutions, but mine works without DRM.