There's always the idea the U.S. Founding Fathers had: citizens should join a defensive militia, but not a standing army.

If they want to use other services, then they can damned well build their own.

That seems to be kind of what Angela Merkel is proposing? The whole proposal is: Europe should build their own online services and stop using America's.

They do actually have the cables and backbone. Despite the weird wording she doesn't seem to be talking about an actual European network, since that already exists: if you ping from Sweden to Italy it goes through Germany, Austria, etc., like you'd expect. The problem is that many of the successful hosted services are in the USA, so while the ping stays within Europe, when you email from Sweden to Italy, it probably hits up Gmail in the USA.

Well yeah, Merkel isn't really worried about the German police reading email. If she were, she could do something about that problem more easily...

However I think in addition to being worried about US snooping, this is also a convenient opportunity for promoting local technology firms. If a bunch of people move from Gmail to European email providers, that's good for the European tech industry regardless of whether it actually hampers spying.

I don't see why failing to return material goods should be worse than failing to return money. If someone didn't return a $50 DVD, just turn it into a $50 defaulted loan and send it to collections.

It's not theft if someone actually lent it to you in the first place.

If I take $1000 from you without your permission, that's theft. If you lend me $1000 for a week and I fail to repay it after a week, that's nonpayment of debt, not theft.

To be fair to the Marines, the CG render in Lockheed's pitch video really made the V/STOL capability seem like a must-have.

Pretty much all these quantitative sociology studies turn out to be questionable. Between populations of convenience and these hokey numerical personality tests, the results don't inspire that much confidence.

Even though in my day job I do statistics, when it comes to social science I often find qualitative anthropology/ethnography-style research, where researchers actually get out there in communities, try to understand them, and talk to people, quite a bit more informative. Especially for preliminary understanding where it's not often even clear what a phenomenon's broad characteristics are, and therefore difficult to design an intelligent quantitative study with useful metrics.

Alas, this kind of stuff gets more citations and press, because sampling 5000 people and rating them on a 0.0 to 10.0 personality scale using a questionnaire seems superficially more scientific... 'cause it's got numbers.

Works pretty well in Norway! Its nationalized oil sector sends the majority of oil profits to the state-run National Oil Fund, which has accumulated nearly $800 billion in assets to be used for the benefit of future generations of Norwegians.

My guess is it's a takeoff on the classic sysctl.

Ah yes, the other reason there are no good engineering managers: someone who is actually focused on managing their team well, rather than playing corporate-politics games in the higher echelons, might well get fired.

Probably; I don't think they are really links, in the sense of something that is ever actually rendered as a hyperlink. I would probably also exclude things like loading JS resources.

It is now official. The Università degli studi di Milano has confirmed: Linux is dying.

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Linux community when UNIMI confirmed that Linux's flagship domain, kernel.org, fell to a shocking #1797 in the Common Crawl rankings. You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict Linux's future. Its domain now ranks just behind Excite.com, the now-irrelevant search engine from the 1990s, which edges it out at #1796.

The glaring gap between Linux's ranking and the rankings of those in the vibrant, enterprise-ready world is in itself embarrassing enough: Apple #8, Microsoft #17, even Oracle #248. But what seals the coffin is that Linux has fallen behind even the notoriously moribund FreeBSD operating system in these industry-leading metrics, trailing it by nearly one thousand, five hundred positions.

There's an extension to the <link rel> tag that overloads it by, instead of linking to actual related data (as the tag was intended to do), treats the target of the link as defining a schema / data format, when rel="profile". The URL is then essentially a globally unique key for the data format; parsers that recognize the format will see the key and know how to parse some other information on the page. gmpg.org is the host of one of the early ones, XFN, which is linked in default Wordpress installs.

Apple used PowerPC from 1994 to 2006, fwiw.