> If we do a study following 100,000 people for 20 years and find a strong correlation between falling off a roof and breaking an arm, sure pedantically you can't show a causal link but we've learned enough to say falling off of a roof is bad for you.

That's not really a very good analogy.

A better one would be if a study followed 100,000 people who drove pickup trucks, and found that they're more likely to have permanent hand injuries like missing fingers. If that were true, it obviously wouldn't be _because_ of the pickup truck. Instead, the two things are correlated - and the cause is probably more like "carpenters drive pickup trucks" and "carpenters cut their fingers off a lot".

Speaking anecdotally, most non-drinkers that I know are very cautious people. I wouldn't be at all surprised if their life expectancy was higher, and it could have nothing at all to do with the physiological effects of alcohol.

It's pretty common.

At my current job (and my previous two as well), my total take-home pay was about 50% base-salary and 50% bonus+RSUs.

There are lots of companies that don't use this structure, and there are quite a few more that do.

PIPs aren't about improving your performance. They're more about "management has decided to get rid of you. HR needs a documented reason in case of lawsuit".

The pattern usually goes like this:

Director: We need to let Bob go. Find a reason.
Manager: Uhh - Ok. How about "Communication skills".
Director: I like it.

Manager: Bob, we've identified "communication skills" as an area that needs improvement. You have two months.
Bob: What does that mean? Can you give me some examples or metrics?
Manager: Nope.

Manager: It's been two months. You haven't improved in the area of "communication skills".
Bob: But what if you ask my cowor-
Manager: Nope. GL on the job market.

Director: Good job putting that paper trail in place.

A PIP isn't about improving your performance at all. If you get one, it's a soft way to communicate "you'll be let go at the end of the quarter. Best start planning for it."

What reason do we have to assume that Whatsapp actually is end-to-end encrypted? Or even if it is, how do we know that there isn't also side-channel access from Whatapp's servers?

I don't really care if somebody reads my texts, so Whatsapp is fine for me. If I were the kind of person who cared though, I definitely wouldn't take Zuckerberg at his word.

From what I've seen, most companies do pay a severance even for a pipped employee.

The carrot is that you have to sign away your right to sue for wrongful termination. So from the company's point of view, it's insurance against dealing with a lawsuit.

At the upper end of jobs, a lot of your total comp can come from bonuses and stock grants. At my last job, my yearly salary was only around half of my total take-home.

So this law is a good start, but still leaves a lot of fudge-factor room.

Systemd does have a decent compatibility layer for init scripts. You can put a script in /etc/init.d and ask systemd to reload. It'll generate shims for the scripts it finds in there. If you write LSB compatible init scripts, there's a very good chance they'll "just work". You can even specify dependencies inside of (or on) your init.d services.

This bill won't be allowed to pass.

Police routinely buy warrantless location data from brokers - one of those fun tricks that erodes our civil liberties. And the police lobby always vigorously opposes any bill that reduces or limits their power.

As much as we might want this bill - don't get your hopes up.

I agree with this philosophically. Turns out it's kind of a tricky, blurry line though. Where does software end and hardware begin?

Let's say I build a product with most of the logic implemented inside of an FPGA. Does that count as hardware or software? It's source-code (probably Verilog), it has a compiler, and it produces a binary blob that can be updated on-target. So a lot of folks would say "that's software".

But then I can take the exact same source-code, and compile it to make an ASIC mask. Now I've got a custom chip, so a lot of folks would say "that's hardware".

But if it's the exact same source-code in both places, how can one be patentable and another not? The IP isn't different, nor is the amount of novel design work.

And then from there, things start to get even murkier. What if my FPGA design includes a little micro-sequencer that runs custom opcodes? What if it includes a custom CPU that I designed myself? What if it includes an ARM microcontroller?

I don't have answers to any of the above, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on the topic.

Would it be better / different if they used the word "olds" instead of "boomers"? The word means nothing on its own. It's the intent that matters.

A trillion visits? Really? So 130 visits by every human on the planet?

That's hard to believe.

Yes, it is. The FSF's copyright-attribution policy means that it holds the copyright on a ton of important Linux software, including:

  - GCC
  - GDB
  - GNU Make
  - Coreutils
  - Bash
  - GNU Findutils, grep, gawk, sed, diffutils, etc
  - Autotools
  - Ghostscript
  - GNOME
  - Groff
  - Texinfo
  - fdisk
  - bc
as well as lots and lots of other packages.

As the copyright holder on all of these projects, the FSF controls their licensing and distribution. They could re-license everything back to GPLv2, release a GPLv4, re-license all of it as proprietary, or do anything else they want.

When the FSF decided to switch to GPLv3, it caused _huge_ waves in the Embedded Linux world by making it impractical to ship GPLv3 software in commercial products. One of RMS's more questionable choices, and certainly one that's increased the adoption of BSD/MIT-like licenses.

A lot of people think that the FSF is fading into the background, that they're not as relevant as they used to be. But they still wield a _ton_ of control over the packages we all take for granted. So news about FSF governance changes are important to watch, and definitely "stuff that matters" if you care about the Linux ecosystem

Tone it down. Youâ(TM)re throwing harmful and dangerous accusations around. Does it make you feel good to lash out?

Not sure if you were joking or not, but it turns out that there actually is a release of GPK cards on the WAX blockchain. I guess people really will buy into anything.

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