It may be just a Pavlovian response, but twinkies were cheap in my childhood and lots of parents handed them out as treats when the kids were good. I doubt that I am the only one with fond memories of eating twinkies. The current iteration does not live up to my memories, but Woody Harrelson captured the essentials with his role in Zombieland.It may just be a cultural thing but watching that movie may help make some sense of it.
While I feel sorry for the workers who lost their jobs, there was no way they could continue to operate at their previous costs. There is a side of me that is relieved to know that I can still buy a box of twinkies to enjoy with one of my favorite Zombie movies.
Too much of my childhood was spent with twinkies and it was depressing to think that future generations would be denied that opportunity.
I fail to see why this is such a big deal. This type of approach has been used for years. I am most familiar with the Oracle ILOM but IBM, HP, and others do something similar. I guess when they do it on a chip basis people treat it differently than when they do it on a system. When I first started working with computers, the machines would use multiple boards to implement the cpu. Now people act as if the world has been recreated because we have System-in-a-chip technology. While I recognize the progress and agree that things have improved, the approach is still the same when you think in terms of functional units.
I never received any training, and I've worked at multiple agencies, and I still have active clearance. Maybe the process isn't as robust as you'd like to think?
While I have no problem thinking that the system is not robust and can be improved, instead I think about what Occam's razormight contribute to your claim. Maybe you have no idea what you are talking about.
And those for whom 'a security clearance is available' will recognize what was said here.
I disagree. And instead of trial by media, maybe we let due process take it's course. Because I assure you, there are people much a smarter than us, who hate Clinton much more than anyone here, and they want blood.
I am curious about what you disagree with. Do you disagree that I attempted to add something to the discussion? Or perhaps you disagree that false claims are being promoted?
If you are foolish enough to think that the laws about handling classified information have not been violated, your problem is much worse than simple false claims. There are plenty of people here who have held security clearances (some still with an active clearance). There is a lot of training that goes along with that clearance.
I say she's fine and will survive intact and be the next president. You may not like that, but it won't make it any less true.
I would remind you what you posted above about "maybe we let due process take it's course". And hopefully anyone seeing this information will not be thinking they know what I personally like but will be in a better position to know what is less true.
So instead, you make your own childish comment about them not providing any references and you provide a Wikipedia link that proves their point. If you had read your own link, you could have noticed a reference to emails that "were classified from the start." and "born classified". But since it seems to be too much effort to look at reference #90 in that sea of information, I will simplify it for you by providing that link here.
But perhaps your goal was to sound informative and hope that the truth would be buried too deep for most people to actually understand it. Just my attempt to add something to this discussion. The false claims still seem to be promoted but evidence clearly shows the laws about handling classified information were broken.
So, when they say her e-mail has classified information... I say: No doubt! Now, if they say she sent information that was MARKED as classified at the time she sent it... Yes, that's bad! She should be penalized for that.
I am waiting to hear what you say when you realize that "they say" some of the classified emails were born classified.
he has a hate-boner for Obama and a political axe to grind
The fact that this is what you take away from the article speaks volumes about you.
For those who actually work with classified data, it does not matter what classification is used. Call it Secret, Top Secret, or any other term but the obligation to protect it is universal. There is no RED vs BLUE political discussion when it comes to protecting classified data. Any professional working with a clearance understands that.
And to address the point that Aighearach makes, sometimes there is a time sensitivity to classified data. It does not relieve you of your obligation to protect that data just because you know it will become unclassified in the future.
And in 2010 and 2014 Congress was elected. And in 2009 Obama clearly espoused that "elections have consequences" so it should not be surprising that this situation exists. It seems that many in the cherry picking crowd fail to comprehend that others might like a different cherry flavor.
And some consider 2008 an especially good flavor with the big D controlling the Presidency, House, and Senate.
This is not the only attempt to say that NASA can't afford to continue to use resources they've already developed and launched.
If you look at the SOFIA Project, you will find that the aircraft recently reached a fully operational status. This is a platform that should run for about 20 years collecting data and expanding our scientific understanding. They were scheduling and assigning people time slots for years on out before this budget release.
The budget proposal shows other priorities. NASA has been asked to mothball this platform to save the money that would be required to operate the airplane.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I am not an uninterested party. My spouse is a civil servant working on that program. We are close enough to retirement to handle these types of priority changes. But I do feel sorry for the younger people who moved from AMES and bought a house here expecting to collect scientific data for years to come.
It is possible that different Centers have different codes, but Dryden (or should I now say Armstrong) does not enforce a dress code. I wear a tie for personal reasons but that means I am overdressed.
ACES typically sends out low skill people who can swap parts. The brighter ones realize that their customers may be engineers who would be considered power users in any organization. When the ACES people listen to their customer, they frequently find a good solution. But then they have to go back to their pointy-haired-boss and explain what happened. Their is no escaping the bureaucracy though.
the level of animosity directed at OWS is more telling about Slashdot than about the movement itself.
So what does my animosity tell you? I find it hard to parse your comments. I may see myself as part of the 99% who will struggle making a living for the rest of their life, but that does not mean I will turn a blind eye to the stupidity involved in the OWS movement. I do think about how OWS is relevant. I enjoy reading the comments from others about how it is relevant. But then again, I am only looking at 148 of those comments since 412 are too abbreviated for my consideration as it currently stands.
Of course your MMV and you are free to set your threshold wherever you want.
What it comes down to is that people on this site believe themselves to possess a God-given right to enjoy other people's work without paying, and they'll demand that "right" be defended by any means necessary.
Thank you for letting me know what kind of person YOU ARE.I will now judge you by your own words. And for those who may want to condemn me for my righteous indignation, I cannot tell you how many times I had to respond to my ISP because I believe running Tor is a good idea.
OF COURSE anyone with half a brain knows why you did it. Nobody thinks you are incompetant or stupid - we just think you are greedy and unethical.
This seems to be the point of his article. He obviously was caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. Now he wants to tell everyone how dull the truth is. He has set himself up as a poster child for the saying, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Time will tell how successful he is explaining his stupidity. Maybe be can win that campaign. He did not want to see the truth before and that reminds me of another saying, There are none so blind as those...
I very much disagree with the premise behind these statements. You seem to be ignoring the very existence of Asperger's Syndrome.
Although I have not officially been diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome, I can assure you I am well aware of it.
It is not sad that Asperger's is so prevalent in our community.
I never said it was sad that it is so prevalent. I said the lack of social skills is sad. You are free to disagree, but I doubt you understood my premise. Perhaps you assume Asperger's == lack of social skills. But I propose that symptom != cause. And you also fail to notice that I never said to "add an extra requirement for face-to-face meetings" for DDs. My intent is to improve social skills, but there are many ways to accomplish it. Different people may use different methods. I think recognizing the problem is a first step. As a project, we are looking for ways to deal with it.
Debian should never hold face-to-face meetings, something bad always happens
The lack of social skills is a really sad aspect in our community. I suspect it is at the root of your comment. Some geeks take a long time to mature (and some never do;-). You had your shot as DPL, and the recent voting for SPI director suggests there is still room for improvement. Claiming that we should never meet seems defeatist to me. Meeting together and working on our social skills looks like a better choice to me. If we start out by recognizing we need to practice our social skills, we can improve.
Times have changed. The old joke about no one on the internet knowing you are a dog still applies. But our respect is still based upon skills and knowledge. We just need to augment our view of what a person accomplishes to contain a social aspect too. The process may not be pain free. If we must deal with
expulsion requests or a myriad of flamefests, then so be it. The Debian core values remain intact. We need to learn how to scale to larger numbers without diluting them.
I *thought* the great strength of OSS was the ability of the community of users to contribute directly to its development either by direct development or by conversing with the developers. When some says "Linux would work for me/my company IF..." the development community really needs to sit up and pay attention if they want to continue to grow their userbase and be taken seriously.
Yes, this is a strength. But an even greater strength is the ability to take the source code and fix it to do what you want. Who says
to continue to grow their userbase and be taken seriously is a goal for me. It sounds to me like the author wants someone else to fix his problems that are directly related to his insistence on using Microsoft products. It took him 10 years to figure out that Microsoft actively works against this?
There are too many leeches already in the OSS community. They expect someone else to fix things for them and complain when things do not work the way they expect them to. If you want to use Microsoft products, continue to pay their never ending bill. If you do not have the technical skills to scratch your own itch, you can pay someone like me to write the code for you. But if you ask me to deal with Microsoft products, I can assure you that they will put roadblocks in the way.
And for those of you who expect me to fix these problems for you on my own time, here is another chance for you to complain. After all, this is Slashdot...
you'll remember that PJ has been the target of considerable mud-slinging from SCO: she was just a paid shill for IBM, that sort of thing.
That is a pretty mild way to put it. I would say they attacked PJ and even went to the point of hiring investigators to look for dirt. While the paid analysts like dIDIOT lost all their credibility on this case, PJ has been an honest kindred soul who used her background and understanding of the legal system to explain what was really going on. At one point, they even questioned whether she existed. Having exchanged email with her, I can state that I found her to be a wonderful person who is living out her life and just trying to make a difference.
I urge each and every/.er to sign up for a Blue Frog account RIGHT NOW (or whenever they're not getting DOSed) and simply forward your spam to yourusername@reports.bluesecurity.com. You can wait a day or two and send many spams as attachments in one email, or you can let the resident client do it for you. It's so easy and the headlines prove that it really does make a difference.
They are not ready yet to accept new accounts. It has been days and I still have not gotten their validation email. They do have their forums working where you can check status and read comments from the community.
Sign up for a Blue Frog account ASAP and encourage your friends and family to do the same, as I have.
It may be possible to sign up now, but you cannot validate your email address. I have already informed them that it leaves a bad first impression letting someone download the software without the ability to use it. If they are really having networks problems (as opposed to configuration issues), it would make sense for them to conserve resources by not downloading software they cannot currently support.
While we are waiting for Blue Security to get back on their feet, we probably should complain to TUCOWS. If enough people tell them they will never be considered because of this willingness to dump a legitimate customer, they may get the message.
Scouring the net to try to learn what I could about their throttling practices, I found the following site: "An Analysis of Netflix's DVD Allocation System"
I too have been looking for data about this practice. I found hackingnetflix where there were plenty of complaints. One person sent back 5 DVDs in the same return slip. When Netflix got them, they sent an email saying the first DVD arrived. On the next day, a second email arrived saying the second DVD was received. On the third day a third email was sent even though all 5 DVDs arrived on the first day. I will check out the link you provided to see if more of this deceptive behaviour is documented. Netflix is free to run their business in any way they see fit, but they should not lie about limiting the rentals through these throttling techniques.
I can personally testify about how slow they are now compared to the first few months. Last week it took them over 7 days to record the DVDs I sent back. I actually reported one of them as lost and they sent an email acknowledging receipt of it a few days later. This compares to the overnight delivery I previously saw.
This bait and switch tactic seems to be well documented. During the trial period, the service is great and the expectations rise. After a few months, they decide you have been getting too many DVDs and the service slows down. Now the DVDs come two or three days late. I wonder if the account is permanently tagged or if we can hold the DVDs longer to return to the previous higher quality service;-)
I spent the first 23 years of my life as a Jehovah's Witness. I do not believe I am scarred in anyway because of it. If anything, I think I have a lot more respect for my fellow human beings and in general have a deep desire to be a good person.
O'Gara is totally clueless. I am sure that plenty of people here have relatives, neighbors, coworkers or other JW associates. If anything, O'Gara convinced a lot more people to listen to PJ. Few people like it when a JW comes calling on a Saturday morning, but they do have a reputation for honesty that precedes them. O'Gara does not understand that a JW expects to be persecuted. This type of Ad Hominem attack would just convince a JW they were doing the right thing. Ah the irony, PJ is doing the right thing by publishing the truth while O'Gara dishes out tripe.
Either way making up juvinile insulting variations on the name doesn't help your cause, it just makes you look immature. I mean I could call Linux Linsux, but it's not likely to endear you to my point of view.
You may call it immature, but I call it creative expression. When I talk about MicroSloth, I do not need to worry about lawyers coming after me for improperly using a trademark. It also highlights the lumbering, slow nature I see. If you want to jump to the conclusion that I am immature without knowing anything about me, GO FOR IT. You can feel secure in your belief that you are better off than me because you are not so immature;-)
No mention if this is the lowest turnout after 1/3 the time had past, or if she's comparing 3/3rds of the other times with 1/3 of the time this year...
It is amazing what passes as insightful commentary now days. Others have commented on the statistics. I wanted to point out that Manoj is male. Perhaps you just assumed a female would occupy the Secretary position. We are underrepresented by female developers. We even have a dedicated mailing list to encourage more women to get involved with the Debian project. There are some very talented women already contributing to the project. We would like to see more though.
Whether any of this causes people to vote earlier remains to be seen. We use a Condorcet voting system and our typical motto is to 'vote early and vote often' which obviously has not been followed. We do have scaling issues with all our new developers over the last few years. The New Maintainer process is evolving to meet our needs. Maybe we just need to add another question asking the applicants how they feel about voting;-)
If you want to give a discourse on why the legal system enables them to do this, I am all ears.
It doesn't. Paper doesn't refuse ink, of course, and anybody can file an action any time they want. But rational people won't do it, because tough lawyers like me will grind them into the dirt when they try that.
But you seem to have this fantasy that court documents for current cases are hard to get, expensive or particularly valuable. Anybody can buy, for pennies, a Pacer account and can get electronic copies of most every document filed in a federal action sent to you by e-mail (actually, just the url to the pdf is mailed to you). You can then take the PDF acquired thereby and publish it and republish it at will.
I need to find a ticket to the world you live in. You talk about rational people and lawyers suffering sanctions. I cannot offer direct experience to contradict your rosy outlook. In my fantasy world the lawyers do not have such glowing reputations;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It may be just a Pavlovian response, but twinkies were cheap in my childhood and lots of parents handed them out as treats when the kids were good. I doubt that I am the only one with fond memories of eating twinkies. The current iteration does not live up to my memories, but Woody Harrelson captured the essentials with his role in Zombieland.It may just be a cultural thing but watching that movie may help make some sense of it.
While I feel sorry for the workers who lost their jobs, there was no way they could continue to operate at their previous costs. There is a side of me that is relieved to know that I can still buy a box of twinkies to enjoy with one of my favorite Zombie movies.
Too much of my childhood was spent with twinkies and it was depressing to think that future generations would be denied that opportunity.
I fail to see why this is such a big deal. This type of approach has been used for years. I am most familiar with the Oracle ILOM but IBM, HP, and others do something similar. I guess when they do it on a chip basis people treat it differently than when they do it on a system. When I first started working with computers, the machines would use multiple boards to implement the cpu. Now people act as if the world has been recreated because we have System-in-a-chip technology. While I recognize the progress and agree that things have improved, the approach is still the same when you think in terms of functional units.
I never received any training, and I've worked at multiple agencies, and I still have active clearance. Maybe the process isn't as robust as you'd like to think?
While I have no problem thinking that the system is not robust and can be improved, instead I think about what Occam's razormight contribute to your claim. Maybe you have no idea what you are talking about.
And those for whom 'a security clearance is available' will recognize what was said here.
I disagree. And instead of trial by media, maybe we let due process take it's course. Because I assure you, there are people much a smarter than us, who hate Clinton much more than anyone here, and they want blood.
I am curious about what you disagree with. Do you disagree that I attempted to add something to the discussion? Or perhaps you disagree that false claims are being promoted?
If you are foolish enough to think that the laws about handling classified information have not been violated, your problem is much worse than simple false claims. There are plenty of people here who have held security clearances (some still with an active clearance). There is a lot of training that goes along with that clearance.
I say she's fine and will survive intact and be the next president. You may not like that, but it won't make it any less true.
I would remind you what you posted above about "maybe we let due process take it's course". And hopefully anyone seeing this information will not be thinking they know what I personally like but will be in a better position to know what is less true.
I don't know what the real story is
So instead, you make your own childish comment about them not providing any references and you provide a Wikipedia link that proves their point. If you had read your own link, you could have noticed a reference to emails that "were classified from the start." and "born classified". But since it seems to be too much effort to look at reference #90 in that sea of information, I will simplify it for you by providing that link here.
But perhaps your goal was to sound informative and hope that the truth would be buried too deep for most people to actually understand it. Just my attempt to add something to this discussion. The false claims still seem to be promoted but evidence clearly shows the laws about handling classified information were broken.
So, when they say her e-mail has classified information... I say: No doubt!
Now, if they say she sent information that was MARKED as classified at the time she sent it... Yes, that's bad! She should be penalized for that.
I am waiting to hear what you say when you realize that "they say" some of the classified emails were born classified.
he has a hate-boner for Obama and a political axe to grind
The fact that this is what you take away from the article speaks volumes about you.
For those who actually work with classified data, it does not matter what classification is used. Call it Secret, Top Secret, or any other term but the obligation to protect it is universal. There is no RED vs BLUE political discussion when it comes to protecting classified data. Any professional working with a clearance understands that.
And to address the point that Aighearach makes, sometimes there is a time sensitivity to classified data. It does not relieve you of your obligation to protect that data just because you know it will become unclassified in the future.
In 2008 and 2012 we elected twice.
And in 2010 and 2014 Congress was elected. And in 2009 Obama clearly espoused that "elections have consequences" so it should not be surprising that this situation exists. It seems that many in the cherry picking crowd fail to comprehend that others might like a different cherry flavor.
And some consider 2008 an especially good flavor with the big D controlling the Presidency, House, and Senate.
This is not the only attempt to say that NASA can't afford to continue to use resources they've already developed and launched.
If you look at the SOFIA Project, you will find that the aircraft recently reached a fully operational status. This is a platform that should run for about 20 years collecting data and expanding our scientific understanding. They were scheduling and assigning people time slots for years on out before this budget release.
The budget proposal shows other priorities. NASA has been asked to mothball this platform to save the money that would be required to operate the airplane.
In the spirit of full disclosure, I am not an uninterested party. My spouse is a civil servant working on that program. We are close enough to retirement to handle these types of priority changes. But I do feel sorry for the younger people who moved from AMES and bought a house here expecting to collect scientific data for years to come.
...I get to reply next with my 5 digit id, and only then do you post with 4 digits...
Well, if you insist.
AOL
It is possible that different Centers have different codes, but Dryden (or should I now say Armstrong) does not enforce a dress code. I wear a tie for personal reasons but that means I am overdressed.
ACES typically sends out low skill people who can swap parts. The brighter ones realize that their customers may be engineers who would be considered power users in any organization. When the ACES people listen to their customer, they frequently find a good solution. But then they have to go back to their pointy-haired-boss and explain what happened. Their is no escaping the bureaucracy though.
the level of animosity directed at OWS is more telling about Slashdot than about the movement itself.
So what does my animosity tell you? I find it hard to parse your comments. I may see myself as part of the 99% who will struggle making a living for the rest of their life, but that does not mean I will turn a blind eye to the stupidity involved in the OWS movement. I do think about how OWS is relevant. I enjoy reading the comments from others about how it is relevant. But then again, I am only looking at 148 of those comments since 412 are too abbreviated for my consideration as it currently stands.
Of course your MMV and you are free to set your threshold wherever you want.
What it comes down to is that people on this site believe themselves to possess a God-given right to enjoy other people's work without paying, and they'll demand that "right" be defended by any means necessary.
Thank you for letting me know what kind of person YOU ARE.I will now judge you by your own words. And for those who may want to condemn me for my righteous indignation, I cannot tell you how many times I had to respond to my ISP because I believe running Tor is a good idea.
This seems to be the point of his article. He obviously was caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar. Now he wants to tell everyone how dull the truth is. He has set himself up as a poster child for the saying, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
Time will tell how successful he is explaining his stupidity. Maybe be can win that campaign. He did not want to see the truth before and that reminds me of another saying, There are none so blind as those ...
Although I have not officially been diagnosed as having Asperger's Syndrome, I can assure you I am well aware of it.
It is not sad that Asperger's is so prevalent in our community.
I never said it was sad that it is so prevalent. I said the lack of social skills is sad. You are free to disagree, but I doubt you understood my premise. Perhaps you assume Asperger's == lack of social skills. But I propose that symptom != cause. And you also fail to notice that I never said to "add an extra requirement for face-to-face meetings" for DDs. My intent is to improve social skills, but there are many ways to accomplish it. Different people may use different methods. I think recognizing the problem is a first step. As a project, we are looking for ways to deal with it.
The lack of social skills is a really sad aspect in our community. I suspect it is at the root of your comment. Some geeks take a long time to mature (and some never do ;-). You had your shot as DPL, and the recent voting for SPI director suggests there is still room for improvement. Claiming that we should never meet seems defeatist to me. Meeting together and working on our social skills looks like a better choice to me. If we start out by recognizing we need to practice our social skills, we can improve.
Times have changed. The old joke about no one on the internet knowing you are a dog still applies. But our respect is still based upon skills and knowledge. We just need to augment our view of what a person accomplishes to contain a social aspect too. The process may not be pain free. If we must deal with expulsion requests or a myriad of flamefests, then so be it. The Debian core values remain intact. We need to learn how to scale to larger numbers without diluting them.
Yes, this is a strength. But an even greater strength is the ability to take the source code and fix it to do what you want. Who says
to continue to grow their userbase and be taken seriously is a goal for me. It sounds to me like the author wants someone else to fix his problems that are directly related to his insistence on using Microsoft products. It took him 10 years to figure out that Microsoft actively works against this?There are too many leeches already in the OSS community. They expect someone else to fix things for them and complain when things do not work the way they expect them to. If you want to use Microsoft products, continue to pay their never ending bill. If you do not have the technical skills to scratch your own itch, you can pay someone like me to write the code for you. But if you ask me to deal with Microsoft products, I can assure you that they will put roadblocks in the way.
And for those of you who expect me to fix these problems for you on my own time, here is another chance for you to complain. After all, this is Slashdot ...
That is a pretty mild way to put it. I would say they attacked PJ and even went to the point of hiring investigators to look for dirt. While the paid analysts like dIDIOT lost all their credibility on this case, PJ has been an honest kindred soul who used her background and understanding of the legal system to explain what was really going on. At one point, they even questioned whether she existed. Having exchanged email with her, I can state that I found her to be a wonderful person who is living out her life and just trying to make a difference.
They are not ready yet to accept new accounts. It has been days and I still have not gotten their validation email. They do have their forums working where you can check status and read comments from the community.
Sign up for a Blue Frog account ASAP and encourage your friends and family to do the same, as I have.
It may be possible to sign up now, but you cannot validate your email address. I have already informed them that it leaves a bad first impression letting someone download the software without the ability to use it. If they are really having networks problems (as opposed to configuration issues), it would make sense for them to conserve resources by not downloading software they cannot currently support.
While we are waiting for Blue Security to get back on their feet, we probably should complain to TUCOWS. If enough people tell them they will never be considered because of this willingness to dump a legitimate customer, they may get the message.
I too have been looking for data about this practice. I found hackingnetflix where there were plenty of complaints. One person sent back 5 DVDs in the same return slip. When Netflix got them, they sent an email saying the first DVD arrived. On the next day, a second email arrived saying the second DVD was received. On the third day a third email was sent even though all 5 DVDs arrived on the first day. I will check out the link you provided to see if more of this deceptive behaviour is documented. Netflix is free to run their business in any way they see fit, but they should not lie about limiting the rentals through these throttling techniques.
I can personally testify about how slow they are now compared to the first few months. Last week it took them over 7 days to record the DVDs I sent back. I actually reported one of them as lost and they sent an email acknowledging receipt of it a few days later. This compares to the overnight delivery I previously saw.
This bait and switch tactic seems to be well documented. During the trial period, the service is great and the expectations rise. After a few months, they decide you have been getting too many DVDs and the service slows down. Now the DVDs come two or three days late. I wonder if the account is permanently tagged or if we can hold the DVDs longer to return to the previous higher quality service ;-)
O'Gara is totally clueless. I am sure that plenty of people here have relatives, neighbors, coworkers or other JW associates. If anything, O'Gara convinced a lot more people to listen to PJ. Few people like it when a JW comes calling on a Saturday morning, but they do have a reputation for honesty that precedes them. O'Gara does not understand that a JW expects to be persecuted. This type of Ad Hominem attack would just convince a JW they were doing the right thing. Ah the irony, PJ is doing the right thing by publishing the truth while O'Gara dishes out tripe.
You may call it immature, but I call it creative expression. When I talk about MicroSloth, I do not need to worry about lawyers coming after me for improperly using a trademark. It also highlights the lumbering, slow nature I see. If you want to jump to the conclusion that I am immature without knowing anything about me, GO FOR IT. You can feel secure in your belief that you are better off than me because you are not so immature ;-)
It is amazing what passes as insightful commentary now days. Others have commented on the statistics. I wanted to point out that Manoj is male. Perhaps you just assumed a female would occupy the Secretary position. We are underrepresented by female developers. We even have a dedicated mailing list to encourage more women to get involved with the Debian project. There are some very talented women already contributing to the project. We would like to see more though.
Whether any of this causes people to vote earlier remains to be seen. We use a Condorcet voting system and our typical motto is to 'vote early and vote often' which obviously has not been followed. We do have scaling issues with all our new developers over the last few years. The New Maintainer process is evolving to meet our needs. Maybe we just need to add another question asking the applicants how they feel about voting ;-)
It doesn't. Paper doesn't refuse ink, of course, and anybody can file an action any time they want. But rational people won't do it, because tough lawyers like me will grind them into the dirt when they try that.
But you seem to have this fantasy that court documents for current cases are hard to get, expensive or particularly valuable. Anybody can buy, for pennies, a Pacer account and can get electronic copies of most every document filed in a federal action sent to you by e-mail (actually, just the url to the pdf is mailed to you). You can then take the PDF acquired thereby and publish it and republish it at will.
I need to find a ticket to the world you live in. You talk about rational people and lawyers suffering sanctions. I cannot offer direct experience to contradict your rosy outlook. In my fantasy world the lawyers do not have such glowing reputations ;-)