i'd totally trade the entirety of Castle for more Firefly. i'm mostly watching Castle for the Firefly references.

missing out on Dr Horrible would've been a shame, tho.

You fool, that's not pot! You've smoked the psilocybin!

"I see no freely licensed BSD systems before 1993."

That's because of the legal issues with AT&T. Linus has been quoted as saying that if BSD UNIX had been available at the time, he probably wouldn't have written Linux.

So one could argue that the existence of Linux owes more to AT&T than just the creation of UNIX.

You obviously missed the part about "being able to tinker with everything".
The windows 7 source code is not available to be tinkered with.

So windows 7 and really any proprietary software does not meet the basic mission requirements.

You evidently don't know how big the Moon is, or how much momentum is in its orbit around the Earth. Indeed, the Moon doesn't quite orbit the Earth, but rather the Moon and the Earth orbit one another around a center quite a ways away from the Earth's center. Or you just don't know how much energy can be produced by a nuke plant - a very tiny amount compared to what's needed to push the Moon out of orbit into the Earth in any appreciable amount of time.

But if you want to keep carrying on about some fact free paranoia, that's your business. Lunacy, but your business.

From: Mr. Dave Fu Wong
Seoul, South Korea.

I will introduce myself I am Mr. Dave Fu Wong, a potato farmer working in a field in South Korea Until now I am the master potato grower of three million hectres to most of the South Korea government kitchens and I have since discovered that most of the potatoes lay dormant in silos with a lot of starch in the silo on further investigation I found out that one particular silo belong to the former president of South Korean MR PARK CHUNG HEE, who ruled south Korean from 1963-1979 and this particular silo has a deposit of grade A lucky golden variety potato with no next of kin. As you know, lucky goldens do not only taste like food from the gods but can be consumed raw like an apple as well as grown anywhere even during the winter.

My proposal is that since I am the master potato growing officer and the potatoes or the silo is dormant and there is no next of kin obviously the potato owner the former president of South Korea has died long time ago, that you should provide an account for the potatoes to be transferred.

The potatoes that are floating in the silo right now are some fifty kilotonnes and this is what I want to transfer to your farm in Idoho for our mutual benefit South Korean post office is so super efficient that a single postage stamp will get these potatoes to you post haste! Unfortunately postage stamp cost fifty Korean currencies or $10,000 American Dollars (apologies for your economy) please send bank account information or cash money order for immediate shipping.

Please if this is okay by you I will advice that you contact me through my direct email address.

Please this transaction should be kept confidential. For your assistance as the account owner we shall share the potatoes on equal basis.

Your reply will be appreciated,

Thank you.

Dave Fu Wong

There is a difference between observing users and listening to users. The way to do usability testing is to watch lots of users work with the product and pay attention to the most common problems they have, but not necessarily to listen to what they say. If they say "I don't understand feature X", then fine. If they say "You know what would make this better, you should add feature Y", then you should probably ignore them. Users know what they hate, and they sometimes know what they don't understand, but they hardly every know how to design good software.

TFA is absolutely correct that the developer should watch and stay quiet during the process. (If you've ever been a developer in this situation, you know how incredibly painful and incredibly useful it is.) But the goal of the testing process isn't for the user to give you solutions, it is for the user to shine a spotlight on the problems. Once the problems are clearly understood, the developers (and designers) have to go back to work to figure out solutions.

Given all the people available to produce FLOSS it's frustrating that after several decades achieving "mainstream" traction has eluded the community. Perhaps something is missing which might help FLOSS jump the gap. That something else might not be yet another programming language, library, kernel version, desktop rewrite or new OS but rather something that addresses the human side of things. A great entrepeneurial hope might be just what the situation calls for. Don't dump on someone for realizing the fundamental problem and giving it the old college try.

I'm sorry, are you suggesting there's something that does bode well for American democracy these days??

Sadly, the modern American brain contains a short circuit that associates any mention of "Korea" with images of "puppet sex". Adding "South" to "Korea" doesn't overcome this effect. It's all Kim Jong Il territory to US. Amuhrrikuh, fuck yeah.

If you develop in Europe and sell in US, you are impacted by US patent laws.

There are also international treaties about patent, so if you fill a patent in your country, you have a year to fill it in another country. This is well known by companies, to use this to gain one additional year of protection.

Software patents are not supposed to be valid in Europe, but they are filled anyway just in case. An invention with both hardware and software parts can be patented, so the distinction on software patent and usual patent is not so clear.

Build-in a kill switch for when your spyware hits the wrong machines.

Yeah, RAID is just playing statistics - you're taking a chance that during your rebuild window, you don't get a second drive outage in the same RAID set. The bigger the RAID set, the lower the chance is, but the chance is always present. Even if you go to extremes like triple mirror, remote site replicas... the chance of a compound 6 drive failure exists - it's just the odds are phenomenally low, that at that point you're far more likely that what's happened is that a plane has fallen out of the sky onto your datacentre instead.

Um, don't schemes like raid 1+0 solve the parity rebuild problem? Even in the worst case of full disk loss, only one disk needs to be rebuilt and even for a large disk that doesn't take very long. Am I missing something?

b) The woman for opening it and infecting the computer?

Yes, for abject stupidity.

That depends on how well the executable was disguised.

It depends on whether it launched when she opened the e-mail. It depends on the content and header of the e-mail itself.

It depends on the security of her home computer. Her own e-mail program or browser. The protection provided by her ISP.

Think it through.

Imagine yourself as the specific target of a malicious attachment. Crafted by someone who knew you well. Who "thinks geek."

I received an e-mail once from a respected open source project that linked directly to the Windows executable. Something I'd never seen from Microsoft.