Can we stick to "News for nerds", please?

That's clearly a fallacy -- the "effectiveness" argument requires you to buy into the false dilemma that the only way to get potentially live saving information is by torturing prisoners. Certainly the CIA has dug up plenty of information before and since that did not require torture.

Even if torturing prisoners was "effective," who cares? If something is immoral, good results will never make it moral.

Unless you're advocating a new form of Creationism that I'm not familiar with, the universe wasn't built from human labor. Software, on the other hand, is -- and that's why it costs money to make.

Free software isn't free to make. There's a reason it's free as in libre but not necessarily free as in gratis.

If your wife is making more noise than the computer, spending money on computer parts won't solve the noise issue.

Does it come with dual hidden blades?

Actually, GIMP still uses GTK+2.

Maybe he's suggesting to just use plain SSL without the initial plaintext exchange and initiation.

Yup. Nobody needed to reinvent traditional TLS/SSL secure sockets in order to send email.

What's wrong with STARTTLS? To quote the original RFC: "...a client that gets a 454 response needs to decide whether to send the message anyway with no TLS encryption, whether to wait and try again later, or whether to give up and notify the sender of the error."

So in other words, if you're writing an SMTP stack you have to handle a severe security edge case by parsing a string instead of getting an exception from your secure socket library. What could possibly go wrong! Oh right... there's a reason this is on Slashdot.

By stripping out this flag, these ISPs prevent the email servers from successfully encrypting their conversation, and by default the servers will proceed to send email unencrypted.

Look, most severs these days are configured in such a way that STARTTLS runs on a different port than the plain-text connection. The server will reject login requests until the STARTTLS handshake is completed.

So sure, a few old, badly configured servers will continue over an unencrypted connection. But take it from a guy who worked on an email client, this is not a typical setup these days.

(Also: STOP USING STARTTLS!!!)

She's a former reporter who went off the rails and now only gets attention because of Glenn Beck and friends. This isn't Slashdot material.

She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government.

Yup. It's almost like there's a reason she's a former CBS reporter. But on the bright side, maybe she can get a job working for Alex Jones or Orly Taitz.

And it's just in time for the end of net neutrality, so you can be sure your ISP will charge you a premium plan to access HBO online.

A: Yes. It's called "evaporation." Next question, please.

The key difference between non-corporate open source projects and Microsoft or Apple is that companies have HR departments. Problem employees can be dealt with or even fired.

There isn't really an analog in your typical open source community. In fact, smaller open source projects tend to be so grateful for any help that asshole behavior is tolerated -- or even considered the norm. It's a sad state of affairs for the majority of us who want to contribute, but have no interest in dealing with a cesspool of assholes.

Android is open source and can be forked to work however you like. Windows, not so much.