I have to say that I had to look up the exact meaning of "avid" (I am not a native English speaker). And you are correct. I was in the understanding "avid" meant that you are not only enthousiastic about something, but also good (or at least better than average) at it. Like "admirable" (in fact I am looking for the translation of the Dutch word "verdienstelijk").

That being said, it would mean always everybody nowadays is an avid photographer, considering the millions of selfies, food-shots and other mundane photos. Not really noteworthy.

Sorry, but this is not what I would call "pretty avid". Most shots are quite plain and boring.

> I can't fathom why morons are complaining about this.

Strange as it may sound, I have found that the typical Slashdot public is extremely conservative concerning technology. Whenever a (successful) company changes its product or experiments with features, many slashdotters would reply that they are not going to use it, so it has to be crap. Or, they complain how the existing product / version is superior.

Luckily, the world is not made of slashdotters, and companies and people keep experimenting and trying out new things. And yes, some are indeed crap, but without changing anything, there wouldn't be progress.

Damn you are right. I did the simple "mysql php tutorial", and except for the first hit (from W3Schools), ALL of them used the old, deprecated mysql_* functions and were wide open to SQL injection.

Is there something the programmer's community ought to do? What could we do?

This is called a "meta-Godwin", where Hitler is brought up as a sensible argument.

Can we go deeper?

Not quite, with Google Apps for Business (perhaps also with normal gmail), you can POP your "normal" mail to your GMail environment. I have it all in one convenient location, including calendaring with non-business users. Also, the ICS invites work across platforms.

Since NetworkManager, day-to-day network use (be it WiFi, wired or whatever) Just Works. I like that.

However, when (as a developer, hardware-tinkerer or network problem solver) you are plugging in and out cables, connecting devices, etc, it would be nice to have NetworkManager to be put on "mute" or something. Just keep my fixed IP on the correct devices and stop enabling and disabling connections. That's the only time I turn the service off.

Do matches, sticks and gasoline count as technology? Then yes.

You can also setup a large phone to render smaller screen resolution, using adb, for example

adb shell am display-size 640x480

I have never ever used the Android emulator for testing, because it is annoyingly slow and a real device works just fine.

Why are slashdotters so angry about the release schedule? Isn't this what is supposed to happen? According to ESR, release early, release often (and listen to your customers) is what makes open source great.

Is it really the release cycle, or is it that you feel that Firefox isn't listening to its customers. And who are the customers, really? The extension developers, or the people that use it on a daily basis to surf the web?

In my opinion, the customers are the people who browse the web. And if I look at it as that kind of customer, I am quite happy with Firefox and its release schedule. I get updates automatically and often and they often make the browsing experience better. Sure, sometimes something breaks, but they are keen to fix many of these problems.

It's all about "the semantic web". If a table is used as a design, its semantics are incorrect.

That's like saying "yeah, but of the crashes in which nobody survives, what are are the odss then, huh!?"

It is about the amount of money you have to spend to save lives. And yes, there is a price for a human life. You have to outfit *all* planes for this system to work, so you have to take *all* crashes into consideration.

the world moved on. When the N900 came out, it was one of the best phones available, both in package and in software. But it has been over four years now. The world has moved on. It has moved on to slimmer phones, larger screens, not to mention better touch screens (yes, I have used the N900, and the screen is way worse than the touch screen of my Galaxy Nexus). I type faster with Swype than I ever did with the QWERTY-keyboard, the screen is better, it fits better in my pocket, it is lighter, etc.

Being compromised isn't the issue. The Linux kernel has been compromised as well.

The issue here, is that there is a backdoor being built-in deliberately. That could compromise trust.

No, it was the email given in the standard Apache 500 Internal Server Error message, as you can see in the article. They put ***@themepark.com as contact address on the fb.themepart.zynga.com server.

It was a configuration mistake, not a stolen site.