n/t

Why do you assume you know more than I do on that score?

Because of your comments above that demonstrate a very poor awareness of current events. That makes it a very safe bet that the average reader of this site knows more than you say you do on this score - however I very much suspect that you are deliberately pretending to be stupid and ignorant just so you can have something to argue about. Please stop playing this petty mass debate game.

Yeah, but your boss can't expect you to work on your commute. This is really about adding 10 hours a week to your workweek.

QNX is rock solid - no doubt. But people want devices with lots of features and lots of hardware support, and hardware developers want to develop on an open source OS with royalty free licensing. So, Android runs on linux.

yeah, but this is PHP - a fractal of bad design.

The real question is, when will Debian/Ubuntu/Redhat/Suse be verified?

Redhat has been verified by the CentOS team. If you read the -devel mailing list from back when it was done, it was a real pain in the ass. "Compile this SRPM on this version of Fedora with this version of this library installed", etc.

But they did it, after a long effort, and got binary matches.

They are always like this - especially if the vendors can keep the source secret. I've taken to running VLAN's at home - mostly WNDR3800 refurbs ($50 w/ Prime) running OpenWRT and GS-108T switches (poor GUI, but linux inside), feeding to a pfSense instance. Anything that's not all open source goes on an isolated VLAN that can't get traffic to or from anywhere without an explicit rule. pfSense makes it pretty easy to set up a VPN to get to data on the inside, so outside ports don't need to be open.

I set it up as best-practices, but with Bull Run, D-Link, this, and other similar stories, it seems like an even better idea in retrospect. If I were the NSA, I'd want a backdoor in Roku.

The whole point of the Thompson hack is that it would survive a source code audit. If you compiled the clean source for the compiler with a dirty compiler, it would insert the backdoor into the new executable, making it self-replicating in an virtually undetectable fashion. The code you compiled yourself would be byte-for-byte identical with the bootstrap compiler.

The schools teach that if you vote in an election, then your interests will be represented by your elected officials. Informed adults know that's such a steaming crock, but do we really expect government schools to teach that? Meanwhile, most voters don't bother to get informed (they did that in school, right?).

Heck, my kids' school teaches that Columbus thought the Earth was flat and that Lincoln started the Civil War to end slavery - it's mostly all folklore with the varnish of history.

You seem to have missed the Montevideo Statement a few weeks back. All of the Internet governance bodies are going NGO.

Someone who doesn't drive nevertheless benefits from, say, a supermarket whose goods got there by road; and there are countless other examples of how someone who never sets foot out of the house benefits from roads.

Yeah, but in decent jurisdictions, they pay a penny more for a bunch of carrots, to help offset the fuel tax which pays for the road maintenance. The non-drivers don't need to be more connected to the roads than that.