"Disclaimer: I work for an ad company."

Stop breathing. Seriously. You're wasting oxygen that something more useful, like a cockroach, could be breathing.

"Fearing the loss of third party cookies (which IMO is not that much of a privacy issue)"

Your opinion is not relevant.

"ad companies were forced to develop alternative methods to track people."

No. No one is forcing you to track people, full stop. It's a matter of choosing to be evil.

"Granted, it is not as effective (in the same scope) as third party cookies, but the added benefit of being able to track users across devices - if approximately - gives then an edge over the old methods"

It's less effective for now and breaking it completely will be the next item on the agenda of whitehats worldwide.

"purportedly pro-user organization"

Yeah right. Someone hasnt been paying attention to them for many years, it does appear.

The contributors that are scratching their own itch are one group - the users who dont code are another. The first is only serving the second in the sense of letting them have whatever is useful to them at no cost - which is significant - but they still go in the direction that suits them, fix what bothers them, leave unfixed what does not. Which is only fair - they are donating their time.

But many people use free software without actually being coders at the appropriate level to alter every piece of software they rely on. And their needs are not always met by the results of the coders scratching their own itches. Very often they would be happy to pay small fees to see the things that are more important to them addressed, and often there are enough of them that feel that way to pay a freelancer decently to do the work, at least in theory.

Hooking the two groups up effectively is hard though. This is the latest in a long series of attempts to do so. I am hoping it is successful.

Historically, no one was Muslim before approximately 600ad. So if that's your test then Arabs fail it just the same as Persians.

There is a difference between paying for a bugfix on software you already purchased once, and paying someone to fix something you get for free.

Changing the passwords on the routers was part of his job. Handing the passwords over to the wrong person in violation of his contract would have gotten him screwed just as hard.

Eh, C band would probably be better, he mentions reliability and weather issues. Ku/Ka band just doesnt cut through rain the way C band does.

"Yeah it probably crossed their mind right before "but people will not accept that so we won't TELL THEM WE WILL do it".

FTFY. HAND.

My gut tells me that at least one thing they are missing in the mechanics is that these were aquatic animals. The inverse square law has always suggested strongly that it would be very dangerous for these things to try and walk on dry ground - and a broken leg would be fatal for them without exception. But they inhabited supertropical swampland areas and if they kept a good portion of their bulk in the water...

"You might want to look up your history a bit"

Irony detector overload.

You might want to look up some history yourself. Mr Oswald worked in a factory after defecting to the USSR, before returning to the USA and ultimately eating those bullets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_under_Japanese_rule

Some savagery for sure, but the periods prior and proceeding from it were hardly perfect either. There were some good points to the period and some real progress.

"Your thinking is too limited. It's obvious that they enjoy being the subject of Congressional probes about their failures, with the added chance that the boss could be fired like just happened to two Marine generals fired for negligence in Afghanistan."

Look, I am not pinning all the blame for this on any one person. There is plenty to go around. I see right now the intelligence folks getting real upset with Obama and with due cause. He's being a weasel and trying to throw them under the bus.

Ultimately the scandalous shape of the intelligence agencies has been influenced by executives and legislatures that have wanted 'tough action' or 'do everything possible' or some such formulaic, political reaction without knowing the messy details, and a judiciary all too eager to bend the law to the will of the other two branches. There's plenty of blame to go around and when Obama tries to throw his subordinates under the bus they have every right to be a bit indignant.

"And if it turned out that the attack they didn't stop was one involving Black Plague that ended up killing tens of thousands of Americans, just think of the pride they would feel. "I didn't stop that!""

A black plague attack would be extremely unlikely to kill so many, unless it was accompanied by more conventional attacks that thoroughly knocked out health care facilities as well. It was truly deadly in the middle ages, but then again, quite often so was diarrhea back then - our medicine sucked.

But sure, you have a point. It's perceived as safer, in terms of job, for these people to violate millions of peoples constitutional rights than to have to admit at some point that it is impossible, in anything vaguely resembling a free country, to be absolute sure that bad things can never happen.

This infantile philosophy of government is the root of the problem, not the particular people who happen to be pursuing their career goals at the expense of their country at any given moment.

Interestingly I understand the chinese phrase for japanophile is a taiwanese coining. Slashdot mangles it horribly though.

At any rate, while the anti-independence people seem to use japanophile as something of a slur against pro-independence folk, I think it has limited validity. There are those that remember the period under japan as better days but from what I can see they are a pretty small minority, and most modern independence voters have rather different issues on their mind.