If this is true doesn't it mean that Bin Laden won the war on terror?

Every time I go to the airport I think this. Those full body scanners? Thanks to Bin Laden, now you practically get strip searched for every flight. You have to take off your shoes. You cannot take drinks on a plane.

You then have everyone on edge no matter where you go. You and a friend play CounterStrike. You get on the bus and start talking about good locations to plant the bomb. You will probably be wrestled to the floor by some over-zealous commuter.

It doesn't surprise me if this is true. The US attitude to privacy and civil rights have been becoming more like China's every year since 2001.

"which might have consequences in the future"

If a secret set of rules is making you less likely to express your viewpoints (and support certain press organizations), that is already a consequence. It's unfortunate that rational people don't feel free to exercise their freedom in today's United States.

I clicked the "speculation" link thinking it would be a forum thread full of scientist debating whether it was caused by volcanism or something similar, I didn't expect to be trolled by APOD.

This is actually reads like a pretty good list of suggestions for any new leadership team, not just Yahoo. Fire all the "architects" who get paid $250,000 to make gigantic UML diagrams and can't actually code. Pay top dollar to retain and recruit talent. Don't spend a whole lot of time with some broad marketing message that everyone will immediately denounce as meaningless fluff anyway. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Form great teams and empower them to make great products.

I'd just like to add that I think it's important for Mayer or anyone else in this position to do this quickly. If you're two months into the job and you're still having "introductory meetings" with all the departments and putting together "the vision," then by the time you actually start to make any changes, it'll be that much harder because of how much your products have declined and your talent has hemorrhaged in the meantime.

$1.6M of taxpayers money for a 40km bike route? You could build almost 35metres of freeway for that!

Alternatively, if your post does get buried, it might be because you bald-faced assert that people who don't agree with you lack learning, can't accept reality, don't know what a state is, and are living in a make-believe fairy tale land.

In other words, "if you disagree, you're a big stoopid thicko". You're clearly not up for reasonable discussion, you're just soap-boxing.

Well, that and whining about the possibility of being buried, as some kind of reverse-psychology downmod defence.

Here's the flipside. Some people are never satisfied with the work of others, and it's exactly this dissatisfaction that can drive them to hone their own endeavors. Obviously, Miles Davis doesn't hate music and it's not as simple as saying his expectations are too high. You can tell by the way he reviews these things that when he listens to these records, he hears them as a jumble of good bits, missed opportunities, and garbage.

He's not satisfied hearing missed opportunities, so he is "forced" to compose and perform on his own terms.

> Either you play a whole chord against it, or else . . . but don’t try to play it like you’d play, ah, Walkin’ the Dog. You know what I mean?

> They move up in triads, but there’s all those chords missing – and I never heard any Spanish thing where they had a figure that went

> and you’ve got to have the rhythm section along; you just can’t keep on playing all eighth notes.

Imagine that every time you listen to music, there's something else you want to hear. You have to get better at making music, or else you'll never get to hear that thing you want to hear.

Personal anecdote: I was reading the other day and started to get disappointed, angry even, at the kinds of stories I was reading. I kept feeling that the stories were laden with missed opportunities for exploration, drawn out tension that couldn't carry the weight it was given, and hackneyed philosophy.

I got a bit frightened that I might "have to" become an author. I'm not that good at writing, to be honest. But in order to read the story I want to read, I might have no other choice.

(And of course, I'm glad Miles Davis was a musician and not a critic.)

Specifically on the architect issue, I think the system and the incentives are setting them up to fail. If you're a senior guy, measured on fluffy terms like 'influence', you're not going to get a promotion by saying you designed the simplest thing possible - or by saying you just took this project from Github that happens to solve your problems.

You are incentivized to build grand, complex systems which will look good when you want to do a talk at an O'Reilly conference - which is exactly what winds up happening.

Every time someone comes up it with a "cool" way to deploy via Git, it turns out their definition of "deployment" is nothing more than dumping something on a server. It completely ignores every aspect of deployment other than putting the files somewhere else, which is 5% of the work and 1% of the complexity of deployment.

That's not even a sufficient professional scenario for anything but the simplest of non-essential website. Hell, this won't even do for the simplest of WordPress sites.

BTW, who on earth still uses FTP?

I've run 200+ server environments on centos4, a 40+ server cluster on centos5, and now run a 50+ server cluster on rhel6. I'm pretty much dead on their target audience here.

This seems almost mean. Its a billion dollar company calling out a volunteer group of a couple of guys for being slower than them.

Part of the reason I switched to rhel was exactly this graph, I didn't have a lot of faith in centos as a going concern given the delays on 6. But also, its clearly not easy for a reason. There is a lot of work to be done, and the farther you trace your way up the rhel/epel/fedora tree the more you realize this is a community providing an insane amount of value and deserves to be funded.

So if Oracle is going to sell me on using and/or paying for their distro, being faster than a handful of volunteers isn't gonna do it. Going toe-to-toe with redhat on funding, contributing, producing and supporting open source software such that I want to fund you is what'll do it.

This is a good idea in theory but potentially bad in execution.

What I'd like (and I suspect many other developers would too) is a nice laptop that I can install Linux on, and have it Just Work.

What it looks like Dell is providing is a nice laptop, but with a custom build of Ubuntu installed. If Dell's Windows installs are any indication, that means it's going to be loaded with crapware or custom non-OSS drivers. This is just speculation, but the fact that you can't dual-boot Windows on it is a big hint. Who knows what crapware they're going to load up on it, and then you'll be tied to their special brand of Ubuntu if you want upgrades or support.

What Dell should do instead is work with hardware manufacturers to iron out Linux driver bugs for just one nice laptop. Then sell that laptop with a stock Ubuntu build and let developers go to town. I'd pay a lot of money for something like that. Instead, today I have to buy a cheap Dell laptop, install Ubuntu, and deal with the driver headaches that exist to this day. (And don't tell me Linux is a magical fairy land because it Works For You, because it doesn't Just Work for me. It hasn't for years and it still doesn't today.)

It's the third out of four:

http://www.forghieri.net/jazz/blind/Davis_1.html

http://www.forghieri.net/jazz/blind/Davis_2.html

http://www.forghieri.net/jazz/blind/Davis_3.html

http://www.forghieri.net/jazz/blind/Davis_4.html

Muslim here.

I never understood both sides and their actions. I mean I find both Islamic fundamentalism and American actions all round globe both equally dumb.

I don't think OBL ever had it as an explicit aim to pull down US militarily or culturally transform US into a Islamic state. That is impossible, and I assume somebody like him already understood that. I guess his aim was to drag US into a war and then reduce them to a state USSR, now russia was in 1990 post Afghanistan war. Long wars benefit nobody. They are a huge drain on man power, economy and morale of a nation. Its actually surprising that US fell for it. I was expecting more of a Intelligence based response where the CIA would hunt him down and kill him, instead of wasting trillions dollars.

On the other hand. Afghans seem to be very stubborn people. They don't give up easily no matter how shitty state they are in. Its just in their blood and culture to not accept foreign occupation over them. Even the British that had the entire Indian subcontinent under them couldn't conquer them. In the recent history alone, every body knows what has happened of USSR after going there. So no matter how bad the Taliban is, they still consider them as their own country men compared to Americans who actually released them from their bondage.

As a moderate muslim, I feel bad every time I'm pulled up for an ideology which I have nothing to do with. I've been a subject of religious discrimination many times since 911. I've been asked to come for extra rounds for job interviews, pulled up separately and checked at building security points, had troubles to open bank accounts, asked to delay visa filing for visiting abroad etc innumerable number of times. I feel having an arabicized name a huge liability to carry, a kind of burden for which you have to pay no matter even if you have nothing to do with their ideology.

On the other hand I see so much turmoil in the west, due to the war ordinary people like me having to pay for no mistake of theirs. Wars, economics crisis etc.

When I look at all this, I can't help but wonder that perpetrators of these crimes actually won.

> Browser not currently supported

Firefox that is.

I assume you're on the Oracle Linux team? I'm sure you're sincere, and I'm sure the Oracle Linux team has many good folks working on it (likewise, the rest of Oracle). But, when you work within the belly of a beast, an absolute horror show of historic and ongoing wrongdoing, you have to expect pushback and mistrust from the Open Source community.

Oracle is a corporate sociopath. If you wish to label me a zealot for expecting ethics from the people and companies I work with, that's fine. But, it's not going to alter the reality that I am not alone. Many people mistrust Oracle, and just because one unit within Oracle seems to be trying to do right, it doesn't alter the fundamental nature of that creature. It'd be easier to overlook past misdeeds if Oracle was not currently behaving in unethical ways on a massive scale, and attacking Open Source on several fronts.

Oracle cannot have it both ways. It cannot wage war against Open Source and software freedom, and expect the Open Source community to just look the other way and choose Oracle products. At least, I sure as hell won't be looking the other way.

You, most of the HN crowd, and myself live in a world removed from the real world. I work for a company which sells fancy business cards and print products to dentists who easily spend more than $1000 on one order, and you know what? They usually have an earthlink.net, aol.com, or yahoo.com email address, and nothing in this world is going to make them change that. I tell some customers we can set them up with your own business email FOR FREE, and they simply politely refuse. Yahoo has the eyeballs of people who actually spend money, not people like myself who want free email and who are trained to never click on an ad.

12. Ignore #11 because it's dismissive and ignorant of the important components required to run a company that aren't directly related to customers or users.

Really. The author is a former Y! employee who's experienced firsthand what he thinks are a lot of the reasons behind the company's decline, and you step in with a snarky one-liner that basically says everything he's written is invalid.