corbet

The documentation update has been applied, you'll see it in linux-next; it should move to the mainline in the next few days.

We can't email a PDF now, but it wouldn't be that hard of a feature to add; I've put it onto the list.

Nobody has ever asked us to do that; I take it you would prefer a larger line spacing?

If nothing else, we can easily add a customization option for that.

If we can grow the number of subscribers, we don't need to raise prices for the ones that have supported us all this time; I would find that preferable. Besides, who doesn't want a broader reach?

I doubt it. The scraper botnets aren't going to bother with niceties like APIs, they just come in over HTTPS and grab anything they can.

I am hard put to defend reddit and a lot of the things they do ... but I can attest, from personal experience, that scrapers are a huge problem for anybody trying to keep a complex site working. Withholding the display of the comments will significantly reduce the database traffic needed to satisfy a request; I can see why they would want to do that for anonymous readers.

Very little of it. When you see a million IPs systematically working their way through your URL space, it's pretty clear that there's a central control node behind it all.

It's an experiment. Compared to the text-obscuring popovers that are prevalent elsewhere on the net, it seems pretty low-key; as far as I know, this is the first complaint I've seen. I don't know if we will continue experimenting with those or not...better ideas for getting people to subscribe to the site would be more than welcome.

The kernel does not copy every page, but it does have to copy all of the VMAs. Setting memory to COW (which can involve changing a lot of page-table-entries) is not free either. I guess I could have mentioned copy-on-write explicitly, but I do not believe that what I wrote was incorrect.

Being used to validate stolen card numbers has long been a problem; we've had to put in a number of defenses to fight our way off whatever list of "easy sites" these folks maintain. I hadn't thought about the "change card" path though...another bit of time spent away from what our business is really supposed to be doing...

I'm not sure what you're reading; there is a distinct lack of GPL advocates in that conversation.