I agree, but I do think it is reasonable to protect people from other people doing stupid stuff.

You are over-generalizing. Think of the pioneers of the industry: Don Knuth, Nicklaus Wirth, John McCarthy, Richard Stallman, Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Grace Murray Hopper, and others. They were all doing innovative work after age 60 or (in some cases) are still doing it. If you had told Amazing Grace that she didn't know the difference between a hard drive and the Internet in 1966 (when she turned 60) she would have laughed in your face.

When I was a commercial software developer I did this religiously. Once my supervisor told me “I cannot believe that adding a one-day item to the project causes the delivery date to slip by a day.”

There are two good things that managers do: get their people what they need, and shield them from upper management.

A manager once found us a System/360 with a paper tape punch in Detroit so we could recompile the software we was installing at Michigan Bell. We had to use it on third shift, but it sure beat having to come back to New Hampshire for every bug fix.

A different manager told us that one of the mechanisms he used to shield us from having our priorities changed so frequently that we never got anything completed was "That horse has left the gate." He took the position that once we had gotten a project to a certain point, we were going to complete it and deliver the product, even if Marketing no longer thought it was the most important product we could be working on.

I heard a rumor about the Amiga clock virus when I was an Amiga dealer in the 1990s. I didn't believe it, because I knew that the clock had too little RAM to hold a virus. Your description is much more believable.

Would you be kind enough to share the brand name(s) those USB drives are sold under, or some other way to identify them in the marketplace? I am assuming, of course, that the hardware write switch cannot be defeated by re-flashing the drive's firmware, or, if it can, that firmware flashing is also protected by a physical switch.

A third possibility is that the NSA and their friends abroad might have pressured the manufacturers to remove these security features. The pressure might have subtle, like pointing out "good" places for cost savings.

Historically, that isn't correct. File extensions were invented in the 1960s to distrnguish files for the same program but with a different purpose. For example, I might have a program named FOONLY. It is written in Fortran, so its source file is FOONLY.FOR. When I compile FOONLY.FOR the output of the Fortran compiler is FOONLY.REL. When I link FOONLY.REL the output of the linker is FOONLY.EXE.

In a system like this, hiding the file extensions would be counter-productive.

I first encountered filename extensions in 1966, on a DEC PDP-6. We had 36 bits (six characters) for the file name, and 18 bits (three characters) for the extension. Early extensions were .FOR (for Fortran) and .REL (for relocatable binary). The .EXE extension on executable programs was invented in the late 1960s for the Execute command, which would compile and link your program if your sources were newer than your executable.

Android's version of the kernel is available in source form, and there are rumblings of an effort to integrate it into mainline. Even if this doesn't happen now, it can happen in the future because the source is available, unlike computer manufacturer's proprietary versions of Unix.

I don't know anything about Oracle's kernel, but unless they are violating the GPL their source is also available.

And yet today GNU/Linux is the premier Unix-like system which everyone targets, after Microsoft and Apple. IBM actively supports it, even on their mainframes, though they haven't forgotten AIX. Dell advertises GNU/Linux on some of their offerings. Oracle offers a distribution of its own, though it hasn't forgotten Solaris. HP offers GNU/Linux on their Integrity servers along with HP-UX. Because of the GPL, GNU/Linux does not fragment, as Unix did.

The standard example is Unix. Each computer manufacturer ported it to his computers, then improved it to make his product (hardware plus software) more appealing in the marketplace. The improvements weren't shared, so there was fragmentation: applications would run on some Unix systems but not others. POSIX and Single Unix System were attempts to fix the problem by standardizing certain parts of the user-mode API, but they weren't enough.

The problem was finally solved by a clean-room reimplementation of the utilities (GNU) and the kernel (Linux). Both are available under the GPL, which requires improvements to code to be released in source if the binary is distributed.

If you enjoyed playing blackjack, and had a good time with the hookers, your money wasn't lost, it was well spent.

Interesting that the special formatter is only available for Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh, and apparently only in binary form. Even if I had such a computer I would not be comfortable formatting my disk with non-free software. Who knows, it might be putting an encrypted child porn picture on a hidden part of the disk, exposing me to the risk of prosecution. No thanks.

A very thought-provoking post. I had trouble understanding why Bob would pay $100 a month to have his car washed, until I realized that washing his car is a euphemism. Upon realizing that, your argument became much more persuasive.