Amidst all the news about Steve Jobs' passing, you may not have heard that Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and one of the original designers of Unix, also passed away this past weekend.

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Unusually for me, this post will be almost entirely links to and quotes from articles by others. But I should explain briefly why I'm linking to them and quoting them. It's not to set the stage for my own comments about Mac OS X, or about iPods and iPads and so forth. I made comments about OS X in an earlier post, and there's no need to rehash them here. Nor do I have any personal anecdotes to share. My reason for linking to these articles, and quoting briefly from them, is, quite simply, to draw attention to what they say.

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I've seen a number of online articles and blog posts recently with the common theme of being uncomfortable with Facebook. For instance, this at Slate, or this from a programmer, or this from a Facebook developer.

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Unless you're a Linux nerd like me, you probably didn't hear that the kernel.org site, the "home" of the Linux kernel and the "official" place to get a copy of its source code, was recently cracked. As far as I can tell from the Internet oracle, this hasn't made the news outside of the Linux developer and distribution community. If you're a conspiracy theorist, you might be thinking that this not making the news is some kind of nefarious scheme to hide flaws in the security of Linux. When a bank's server gets cracked, everybody finds out in a New York minute. Why should Linux's kernel source be any different?

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I just came across an article that shows I'm not the only one who thinks that US Constitutional law has gone a little overboard in its interpretation of the Marbury v. Madison Supreme Court decision.

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In a previous post I mentioned the Protect IP Act as an example of government making things worse instead of better when it tries to censor the Internet. Today I came across an article talking about another very bad effect that the Protect IP Act would have if it were passed: it would break DNSSEC, which is a key security mechanism that lets your computer validate DNS records, so that, for example, when you type your bank's URL into your browser, you know that you're talking to your bank's server, instead of some rogue site that has been set up to impersonate it.

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Twenty years ago (yesterday, to be exact, but cut me some slack here), Linus Torvalds posted a message to the Usenet newsgroup comp.os.minix, announcing that he was working on a free operating system and wanted to know what features people were interested in. The original message is on Google Groups here. So it's time for another brief nerd interlude:

peter@localhost:~$ uname
Linux

At some point I'll do a longer post on why the above is true, but for now I think I'll just let it stand by itself. Thanks, Linus, for starting it all 20 years ago, and thanks to all the developers and distributions who have kept it going.

I've already referred to my favorite Heinlein quote once, and I'm sure I'll be doing it again, so I figured I might as well lay it out in full and unpack in detail why it's my favorite quote. Here it is, from Time Enough For Love, as noted on wikiquote:

The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire. The former are idealists acting from highest motives for the greatest good of the greatest number. The latter are surly curmudgeons, suspicious and lacking in altruism. But they are more comfortable neighbors than the other sort.

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After posting last week about how the Supreme Court's role has evolved since the US Constitution was adopted, I did some more poking around on the Charters of Freedom site.

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After I posted my independence day post, I spent some time browsing around the Charters of Freedom site at the US national archives, which is where the transcript of the original Declaration of Independence is hosted. I noticed that, along with the pages on the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, they have a page there on the Marbury v Madison Supreme Court case.

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