If Torvalds steps down on his own, he can pick a successor at that time. If something happens to him or he just quits without arranging a successor, there's going to be a fight. The second scenario argues for arranging for a successor earlier, but the problem is as soon as you do, there's temptation on the part of people (possibly including but not limited to the successor) to try to force the succession earlier than Torvalds would want. So it's in his best interest to not arrange for a successor until he's ready to step down.

What matters in the 21st century is the size of the economy. We should use a map of the world based on GDP.

The apps are software that process your data with your permission. For example: Quicken.

I'm pretty sure with Quicken the money goes the other way -- the banks pay to be able to participate in Quicken's direct connect service, which is why some banks don't offer that or charge extra for it.

This but unironically. Why should Klarna have some sort of legislated privilege to get the banks to do work for them for free?

Incidentally, Klarna sucks; they offered some sort of premium -- I think a case or something -- for buying Bose headphones through them, then they never provided it and didn't respond to inquiries. It wasn't expensive enough to make a big fight over but it definitely soured me on Klarna.

The top of a piston usually operates at under 300C (the gases, of course, are hotter). Only the exhaust system gets hotter than that.

After the NSA got busted hacking all the internet connections (including those of American companies), I think tech companies will find it hard to side with the NSA.

It really bothers me the way social media companies use 230 for their own benefit. Initially, when I was young and naive I thought it was about protecting people's freeze peaches, but it's not.

No? Without 230 or something similar, the company hosting the content is liable for it. Since any given defamatory or copyright-violating post could be worth hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars, running such a board would be far too risky and expensive for anyone BUT a large corporation, and they'd have to take steps like pre-approving every post or video to make sure it wasn't going to cost them big money. How much free speech do you think you'd have in such a world?

That document is in contradiction to this document, which takes precedence. However, even taking it to be a "low-level threat", that would usually not, according to your document, result in a law enforcement investigation.

She actually threatened to kill "Mexico's".

The other girls on the chat were teasing H.M. about looking Mexican because of her darker complexion. One of H.M.â(TM)s friends asked in the chat, âoewhat are you doing this Thursday?â H.M. responded in jest, âoeon Thursday we kill all the Mexicoâ(TM)s.â To which another friend wrote, âoeIf Mexicans killed ur gonna die.â

This is obviously not a true threat.

If it ainâ(TM)t the Medical Industrial Complex, you tell me what the fuck changed in 50 years. Because it wasnâ(TM)t the truck. Or the school. Or the shotgun.

It was the cigarette. They don't let the teachers smoke on school grounds any more, and that makes everyone way more on-edge.

The regulations were so bad that they came up with a (lawful) workaround (changing the mounting position of the engines) to avoid triggering some of the worst of them, and then when that workaround changed things enough that too much regulation would be triggered, they came up with another lawful workaround, MCAS. And that caused the trouble. They couldn't do make anything new because the regulatory burden for new things was too great, so instead they piled workaround after workaround on the old thing.

And you can scoff at "cheapest" all you want, but if the result of Boeing doing something else is their customers have to retrain their pilots, then as someone else put it "they might as well go to Airbus".

If you think you need a Harvard degree, let alone a Harvard MBA to work for Google, your view of the world is quite off.

It's pretty complicated because if you regulate too few, you end up with lead in the food, but if you regulate too much, you end up passing a law where only bayer or monsanto is allowed to deliver products because you need a multi-billion dollar equipment they hold a patent of.

Right. But those who wish to regulate don't have a specific amount of regulation in mind. They have either a goal of 100% safety, or a direction of "more regulation". This means you have regulatory bodies who spend all their time dreaming up new possible hazards and regulations to prevent them them, and any time some failure does happen there's a bunch of new regulations written to prevent it (they will tell you "Every safety rule and regulation is written in blood" and therefore cannot be relaxed). So the barriers to entry and costs become insurmountable for new entrants (or even established players which haven't ossified enough to not even try anything new) and the field becomes moribund.

To see why we have "budensome" regulations, look at Boeing jets.

The reason we have the Boeing jets we do -- specifically, the 737-MAX -- is those burdensome regulations. To put modern engines on something the regulators would consider a modification of the existing 737s rather than a new design (which would require a much more burdensome process, not just for the aircraft itself but triggering a requirement to retrain all the pilots -- pilots have to be certified specifically for every aircraft type they fly), the engines were mounted in such a way that they tended to push the nose up during takeoff. In order to avoid this resulting in that regulatory requirement to re-train pilots, the MCAS system that caused all that trouble was invented. And so, while regulation usually trades safety for development time, cost, comfort, and utility, in this particular case, the safety wasn't achieved either.