Look at what Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on iOS. I think it was released as part of a court case, the figure was in the range of 1B/year.

Google wants to be the default search engine, this is their core business, Chrome was just a way to protect that core business..
I can't say I fully understand any economics at this scale, but my guess is Mozilla is some of the cheapest traffic Google can buy, and Google is all about protecting their core service: search.

I work on a team that manages automation infrastructure, we're about 7-8 people building tools and services for automation; with other teams building test suites and release pipelines on top of the automation infrastructure. A mono-repo like mozilla-central runs some ~2k tasks per push; this involves building across platforms and configurations, a long list of test suites, performance tests, etc..

All in the name of making sure Firefox doesn't break the web, etc. I'm sure we could try to be more efficient about running tests, but this is also risky, because we have so many developers and contributors.

I generally see services/products without much innovation, huge barriers to entry and/or little change as candidates for being public services. Any kind of insurance is a good example. Government bureaucracies can be very efficient: consider private health care insurances vs. medicare.

In these scenarios private organizations often drive up cost/inefficiency, because they only way to introduce more profit is to drive up inefficiency.

Politicians... And yes, in other countries we do from time to time see massive reorganizations of public institutions. I guess a crazy person could even argue that Trump is reorganizing or disorganizing a lot of US government agencies, hehe :)

As with software: it's all about picking the right tool for the problem at hand. I for one wouldn't want to see a government run clothing line attempting to deliver the latest fashion -- just to give a extreme counter example.

On topic: a for-profit investment might be what it takes to attract even more private capital. Especially, with the amounts of capital currently in play on the markets today. Granted I don't have the qualifications to know if there is enough basic research to foster hope of finding a cure.

bThat's true, and surely there will be distinction between various degrees of negligence, stupidity and bad luck.
But keeping the intrusion under wraps for months on end will probably be considered fairly "calculated" and very deliberate, hence, the hammer would fall very hard.

With any luck, we'll see more openness and more investments in security. For sure the new rules are going to mean 2FA everywhere.

Not really, once there is an effective drug therapy supply is unlimited and demand is quickly finite :)
Sure, patents inflate the price, but most conditions that can be treated with a small surgery and/or drugs are fairly cheap to manage.


The only cases where we have something that resembles "infinite demand" is when we don't have a cure, and all we can do is an infinite sequence of supportive treatments.

Many conditions and treatments don't have an infinite demand and a limited supply. You'll get very far with cost-effective healthcare; not that I argue for giving up on people, merely prioritizing resources based on cost-efficiency rather than who has money.

There's probably no A/Cs in Scotland... and who knows maybe they don't use electricity for heating either. Oh, and it's the EU so energy saving light-bulbs are mandatory.

There are quite a few brilliant heating systems around the world that use excess heating from electricity production, or waste incinerators... When heating is supplied to your house through a hot water pipe it's possible to get a very impressive efficiency.
Heating water and installing hot water pipes is boring technology, but well proven and probably one of the more cost efficient ways to reduce greenhouse emissions. Even if the heating origins from burning stuff.

U2F is supported by Google and Chrome... Seriously, just get an yubikey... This is probably just Google doing the social work of forcing high-profile accounts to use U2F...

Rust has two upsides: safe multi-processing on a shared memory architecture; and safe manual memory management.

Shared memory architectures probably won't be relevant all that long... Limitations in hardware make cache synchronization hard, and limits the number of cores... Even today having multiple cores using shared memory is super slow. The future of safe multi-processing belongs to message passing, the over head is a bit higher, but the hardware will scale for decades to come.

As for safe zero-cost abstractions for manual memory management rust certainly has some benefits... But both go, java and .Net are proving that garbage collection isn't super expensive.

Don't get me wrong, rust the best language right now, and will probably be for another decade or two.. But the mental overhead of abstractions isn't free, so I'm not sure what the long term future will look like, except I know javascript will still run in 200 years :)

What makes you think the next bug will be in HT?

You can say this with respect to any feature of the CPUs...

I'll admit I wasn't a fan of gnome 3 from the beginning, and it took a few years before it started to work well.. but these days it's working really well.

I actually enjoy using gnome... what is up with all this negative sentiment?
Note: Don't get me wrong I still can't live without type-ahead in nautilus and will probably have to patch it when I upgrade again, but all in all gnome is nice...

Take a look at some of the under the hood things that have been going on: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Quant...

UI and extension changes are hard to make because they'll always upset someone, notice how long it's taken Mozilla to finally get rid of old extension APIs that was blocking development.

https://servo.org/ Browsers engines are hugely complicated, and forking then will always be hard, very hard.
Mozilla Firefox is and will remain the best option... with the work being put into servo and features being ported over to firefox we're seeing dramatic performance improvements coming up...

Extensions breaking is always sad, but there is finally a WebExtensions spec, so breakage can be prevented in the future. The reason extensions are breaking is because they historically have been tied to semi-internal APIs; and have been holding back development... In fact the power previously given to extensions could be considered dangerous.

In this case the engineer knew that he was committing fraud.

Imagine a construction engineer who at request of management signed off on a bridge wouldn't survive heavy wind :)

This is why you have a union, even as an engineer, if your employer is instructing you to commit fraud, you might have to sue (a strong union will have the expertise to handle such a scenario).

If you wish to claim consumer protection agencies and regulation for consumer protection is a major contributor to higher prices in the EU, you'll need to cite sources for that?


EU has a lot less litigation than the US, this makes it easier to be a business and to be a consumers... Unless you want to claim that litigation is efficient :)

Value over lifetime... But you can't make that math that simple... There are other costs.
Nor is it entirely about costs, we spend lots of money trying to make people live longer... If this is a cheaper way to do so, it's definitely worth pursuing.

Also note: if you're only counting deaths you're not counting all the money spent on astma medicin..