I have come to detest the people Bill Clinton brought to power in the government (by appointment) when he was elected and ripple-effect their proclamations and policies have had in the popular culture and mainstream media (who loved him and took cues from his administration) and the resulting destruction of intelligent dialog in America. Before "Bubba" elevated Donna Shalala from the PC hell hole that is the University of Wisconsin, Americans were free to speak their minds on any subject; people who heard what you said might not LIKE it... but everybody had been raised on the old rhyme "sticks and stones" and you were free to say it. NOW in post-Clinton America we have the "political correctness" of the UW speech codes. If you say something a leftist/liberal/progressive disagrees with he/she/it reverts to some infantile state and accuses you of "hate". like some 3-year-old, they say "why do you HATE me so much?" or they scream "you're just a HATER!" The nation has become a place where half the population seems to need diapers and pacifiers and cannot tolerate exposure to grown-up dialog.

GROW UP.

There are still some adults around. If somebody says something you do not like or that you disagree with, DEAL WITH IT. Grow up. Learn to tolerate disagreement. You are not a fountain of perfect knowledge and wisdom. Sometimes you are wrong, and there is NO HATRED INVOLVED when somebody disagrees with you. Wanna see actual "hatred"? Go to a holocaust museum and spend a few hours looking at what the NAZIS did to the Jews. Go look-up some of the grainy old photos of the innocent black men who were lynched by the Democrats in their KKK sheets. If you MUST see things in color, go back and review the video of people leaping from the WTC towers and the ghastly video of Palestinians and Iraqis celebrating.

Somebody being critical of Elon Musk's wunder car (rightly or wrongly) has NOTHING to do with HATE

Tesla is a hybrid vehicle: half political prop, half toy for the rich.

It's designed to prove that an electric car can look great, ride well, and go fast (to mislead the public into imagining an easy affordable and comfortable path to a fossil-fuel-free future). Any good engineer knew full well that an electric car could be made (some of the earliest cars were electric) and knew that modern tech and materials would mean it could now be made fast, stylish, comfortable, etc. The problem is that even with today's tech, it cannot be made cost-effective and it cannot easily be made to be as convenient. It's also likely not very "green" given that a battery is not a power source... when you plug one of those babies into the grid, there's a fair chance it's being pumped up with power generated from burning coal. It deceives gullible people into thinking it is "emissions free" because it has no tail pipe; the tail pipe is actually the smokestack of a nearby power plant (the very same smokestack whose smoke they curse when they see it on TV or the web or in print depicted as an example of big evil corporate pollution).

It's also designed to be the good-looking show-piece 4th, 5th, 10th, or 20th car of a rich person; the car you use when you want to impress certain people but that you can bypass in your big garage as you step toward your Lexus, Hummer, etc when you really need to go somewhere and your Tesla is not fully-charged or unable to complete the entire trip without a re-charge. (people take trips in cars that need a re-fill during the trip because it's a very short minor interruption in the trip to re-fill)

It's NOT something an average middle-class person could afford (in many senses of the word) to buy and have as his/her only car.

The worst part is that each and every one that rolls off the line is so cost-ineffective that it carries a taxpayer subsidy. NOT the sort of "subsidy" that "big oil" is always accused of getting (tax deductions, which most businesses can get and Tesla is probably also able to get) but actual subsidy (cash taken by force from a taxpayer and given to a politically-connected and favored business). The tax money should have been left in the pockets of the taxpayers so they could afford to pay the nearly $2.00/gallon "Obama tax" (price hike largely driven by his energy policies and money-printing Fed) that they have been paying nearly the entire time the man's been in office an funneling their money to guys like Musk

In both situations, the advocates for the tech proclaim its perfection and superior features... and when confronted with claims of its inferior performance/user-experience in the hands of a typical (non-advocate for the particular tech) user, the excuses and accusations about the user ensue. The user just did not use it right! The user is just an idiot! The user is too used to some inferior (but ubiquitous) tech. The user mislead people about his experience!

Every EE knows full-well the problems an electric car will have, most-particularly in a cold place. A proper electric car design will take these into account. This includes not only the fact the the cold batteries will under-perform, but also that the driver will want a toasty-warm cabin, may run the wipers, may use the headlights and the defroster, me use the heaters in the glass (if they exist) to melt ice accumulation, etc. It's also well-understood that, unlike a gas tank being re-filled, no car-sized battery pack will fully re-charge in a couple minutes in any climate. Why do I suspect all the "green energy" advocates would be ranting against "big oil" if they had to cool their jets for an hour or more every time they re-filled the gas tank of a car?

With both Linux and electric cars, the advocates need to drop all the defensiveness and learn from their critics.... and FIX the problems; the end-result will be a far better product that both the average user and the advocates like a lot better. There use to be a common phrase in American business: "The customer is always right". This was a very smart (in many ways) statement in a free-market economy. It was not just an admonition to employees that they should bend-over backwards to make customers happy (simultaneously keeping them from going to competitors AND creating positive word-of-mouth) but it also meant that when your customer complained about problems with your product/service you should pay attention and FIX IT. If something upsets/annoys one typical user then it will probably also affect other typical users similarly... and if you intend to sell to other typical users (who tend to be in the majority) then you are going to face the same opposition/anger/frustration/hostility over and over and over again if you insist on not fixing things and just blaming your critics.

In this case, Musk's defenders are missing the entire POINT: it's a CAR. It's advertized as a superior car. If the thing is a CAR, it ought to perform like a CAR (including being as tolerant of the imperfections of a typical human operator). If it's a superior car, then it should be even LESS demanding of its users and require FEWER specific instructions for how to use it to get from point A to point B. If you cannot use it in the same environment as a CAR to do the same things as a CAR with the same convenience as a CAR .... then it's an inferior product and should cost LESS than a CAR not 2X or 3X as much. PERIOD. Full-Stop.

Sure, metric makes everything simpler and it's a great benefit to idiots who failed basic math classes ....... but it continues to fail in the US after even an organized propaganda effort in the schools for one very basic reason: SIZE

Simply put, an inch and a foot are very natural and convenient SIZES; we like them; they're convenient. If the guys who came up with the metric system had simply defined a cm to be the physical size of an inch, then the cm would be a handy size... a decimeter would be about a foot long (another human-friendly size) and a meter would be about 10 feet (so things like levels of structures would be by rule-of-thumb approx 1meter..... another friendly size for quick estimates) They chose, however, an arbitrary cm size that is stupidly inconvenient and unnatural and then later tried to pass-off the story that a meter was defined as a particular fraction of the circumference of the Earth, as though that meant anything or added some legitimacy (they got it wrong anyway). People who keep trying to push metric in the US always seem to think it's just a cultural issue that will be overcome by "education" .... it's not. Education is for introducing new ideas, not for training people to give-up something that works and which they like, in favor of something that somebody else thinks those people need to learn to like more. Average Americans tend to just be practical and they have a system that works fine and has convenient sizes ..... and it was good enough for us to use as we invented aviation, the light bulb, radio, tv, the internet, etc and as we won some World Wars, put a man on the moon, etc (in other words: the system is not just comfortable, but it has been perfectly adequate for everything we've used it for). We buy inch-thick lumber (we don't want to need to by 2.54cm-thick lumber). We like to use two-by-fours .... 5.08-by-10.16's would just be strange (while providing not enough benefit to offset the annoyance).

The simple truth is that now we all have computers and/or calculators that can easily do the math for us to convert from any system to any other system and most modern engineering is done with CAD systems that support both inches and meters, so the supposed advantage of just being able to move the decimal pt are not that important.

"Republican party were behind the legislation that created this artificial fiscal cliff as an act of political brinksmanship to impose their policies into the budget"

Not so much. President Obama had borrowed and spent more money than any president in history and he maxed-out the national credit card. When he came back for more money and demanded a rise in the "debt limit" (the limit on the national credit card) they insisted on some assurance he would cut back on the spending so there would be something left for the grandkids to inherit. As part of the compromise that gave him a higher debt limit to allow him to get through the 2012 election cycle without a government shutdown, Obama demanded the massive defense cuts in the sequestration package .... and Obama has been demanding for four years now that the nation must end all the Bush "tax cuts for the rich" (which were actually tax cuts for every taxpayer) .... and all the new healthcare taxes are part of "Obamacare". In summary: Almost everything that is part of the so-called "fiscal cliff" is something Obama demanded .... and that's why the Republicans have not been able to make a deal with him (if there's no deal, most of what happens is what he wanted in the first place).

The nation is severely divided because about half the population wants the small government the Constitution provides, and the other half thinks the Constitution is an out-dated obsolete document and wants the government to do everything the majority wants; these positions are not reconcilable and the smaller government people have just recently realized that the bigger government people will never compromise (no proposed compromise ever includes smaller government or government at least not getting any bigger ..... EVERY proposal by Harry Reid and President Obama has included GROWTH and TRILLIONS in new debts being heaped upon our kids and grandkids)

In previous generations, such impasses were much less severe because government was smaller and involved in less of our lives; A citizen might not like some of the things Jack Kennedy or Ron Reagan did, but most of those things had no direct impact on the citizen, who could ignore stuff and go-on with his life. Now, however, government is so huge and so involved in everything .... and president Obama is using it to force his beliefs and positions onto his opponents. Obama is leaving his opponents no way to peaceably disagree with him and ignore him. He has forced government into our healthcare, into religion (both with HHS mandates and "gay marriage") and much further into things like energy resources than previous presidents did. Under Obama, the very air we exhale is not regulated by the EPA and while they are only using that new power to kill-off the coal industry and try to slow natural gas, the power and the precedent they have set has no natural limit that will keep them from regulating everything from cow farts to bad breath. If your religious beliefs are that artificial birth control is wrong (not my personal position, but a good example), then under Kennedy or Reagan you'd not be forced to use it or to provide it for anybody else (though others might well have the freedom to get and use it) but Obama is now demanding you give-up your beliefs and provide it to others. In the past, two Americans who disagreed on that subject could agree to disagree .... but under Obama, the government is forcing one of them to violate his beliefs and pay for the other. Before somebody tries to claim he is being forced to subsidize religions he disagrees with, allow me to point out that a tax EXEMPTION is NOT the same thing as funding... a tax exemption is simply allowing some person or organization to keep his or its own money; the federal government has never required all citizens to, for example, pay tax dollars to a Methodist or Catholic church. I am not Catholic and I would be outraged if the government was requiring me to fund the Catholic church .... but I have no problem with the Catholic church being tax exempt; the government has no claim on their money. That's how such disagreements USED to work in the US. Obama supporters might think this idea of the federal government forcing people to buy stuff they find objectionable is really great (now, while their guy is in office), but they'd be outraged if G.W.Bush had ordered every American to buy every Rush Limbaugh book or buy something REALLY objectionable like CDs of country music ....

Are you truly who you think you are when you are addicted to drugs?

Are the pleasures a drug-affected brain feels to be equated with other forms of pleasure?

It would be one thing to wipe-out part of a healthy brain (thereby permanently altering it) like this but it might be another matter to make such a permanent change to a brain that has already had permanent, and negative, changes made by "modern chemistry". Of course, the presence of any pre-existing damage from drugs also raises questions of true consent. Not sure how I feel on this one, but given that this is on brains already affected by drugs the morals and ethics are a bit cloudier than they might otherwise be. Personally, I find the idea of depriving a person of the ability to experience pleasure both creepy and dangerous. Should we expect future headlines about "zombie" violence in China?

All terrorism is done by people ..... so by your thinking, we should ban people

First, WHAT people believe is every bit as important as THAT they believe. There are a great many religions (particularly when you count sects/denominations) and of those VERY FEW have any tie to violence.

Second, some violence commonly blamed on religion (like the violence in Ireland) is not religious at all. The troubles in Ireland fall along religious lines BUT these are actually political lines that line-up with religious lines. To massively over-simplify: The Catholics tend to be for separation from the folks in London and the Protestants tend to want better relations with those folks in London (see King Henry VIII and the CoE for some of the context). AFAIK nobody has ever seen a member of the IRA screaming his disagreements over interpretations of the writings of the Apostle Paul as he fired his weapon and I doubt there have been any protestants there who shrieked about their disagreements with a papal decree while shooting at an IRA member....

When the state casts a suspicious eye upon somebody, it has an obligation to narrow the scope as much as possible ..... and in the current era nearly all religious violence on the surface of the planet has been committed by members of one particular religion. Nobody should "ban" that religion (and indeed, thoughts and beliefs cannot ever be "banned" anyway) but it means that if any special scrutiny must be applied it should be to followers of that one faith ..... and to the extent possible only to the smallest subset of those that is practical.

You are correct on your history of US school violence however .... a bomb not an "assault gun" and although I think you are correct that the perpetrator was Catholic (cannot recall and do not wish to google it) I do not recall that THAT was his motive.

... did not also publish the data from the thousands of documents the Obama administration is hiding (and that Atty Gen Holder is in contempt of congress for withholding from a lawful subpoena) about the thousands of assault weapons they transferred to Mexican drug gangs

"We the people" need AR-15s, big magazines, hollow-point rounds and body armor etc .... to defend ourselves from the criminal gangs that our own federal government has been supplying with crate-loads of "assault weapons". These are the same team-Obama chuckle-heads who are calling for "gun control" to take guns away from our law-abiding citizens. Some of those guns were used to shoot-up a school in Mexico ..... Oddly: President Obama did not go on TV to cry over those school kids .... I guess there was no way to use it politically, particularly because HE was the supplier of the so-called "assault weapons"

Try READING what our founders actually WROTE! They wrote a LOT about this stuff ... it was VERY important to them.

The founders of the nation wanted the people to have both rifles AND pistols (Washington himself made this point in writing) and they wanted those to be the EXACT military weapons that the government had. They did NOT define a "militia" as an organized uniform-wearing national-guard-type force that was under ANY form of government control (if it's controlled by the government it can hardly be expected to deter the government) .... they defined the "militia" as ALL able-bodied competent adult men who were not consciencious objectors (and that's still actually US law ... US military regs up until only a few decades ago called this the "inactive reserve" force. it might still be in there .... I have not looked lately).

Nobody on the pro-gun side is "cherry-picking" anything ..... we are DEPENDING on the strict construction of the constitution and those original meanings you so clearly dislike. Unfortunately for people who "think" like you do, our founders were rather prolific writers and they were very thoughtful ..... they left us with many volumes of writings about exactly what they thought and believed and WHY. There is nothing frivolous in the Constitution and none of the words are just accidental. They very specifically did NOT write the second amendment as: "For the security of the nation, the states shall maintain armed organized militias. The citizens may each have one basic rifle for hunting and one basic pistol for duels". The founders INTENDED that nobody would be able to tell the the so-called "gun nuts" what to do .... they established a clear chain-of-command for the Army and Navy (note: the Marines are part of the Navy, and the Air Force was formed as the "Army Air Corps" (and for benefit of Barack Obama, that's pronounced "core" not "corpse")) but did not establish ANY chain of command for the "militias" ( doing so would have meant ALL adult men were in the Presidential chain-of-command and we would have a police state). The true "Neanderthals" as you put it (and IF they exist), can only be the people like yourself who want to turn the calendar back to pre-Constitution days. It's shocking that we have produced a generation of people so poorly educated, so completely ignorant of history and political theory, and so completely devoid of the intellectual curiosity required to READ what's freely available that they "think" the sort of things you wrote AND believe themselves well-educated!

Sure, the firearms were simpler then, but so were all the other things, like the vehicles (ride a horse, ride or sail a boat, or ride in a horse-pulled cart).

If you actually read all the other stuff our founders wrote, you see that the 2nd amendment had nothing to do with hunting or recreation; they assumed any free people could obviously do those things. Their reasons for the 2nd amendment were:

1. 1. To deter any foreign power from invading (because every adult male citizen would have a front-line military weapon and his own ammo supply) Note: the founders approved of women having guns, and although women participated in the revolutionary war, they simply did not presume women would be in any militia.
2. 2. To remove any justification the federal government might have to keep a large "standing army" on US soil "to protect from invasion" (see point #1) where [a] a tyrannical leader might someday turn it against the population (as had happened in the past in "the old world") or [b] it would enable a leader to get us entangled in unnecessary foreign wars. (Bush could not have invaded Iraq if he had had no standing army because every competent, law-abiding adult American had an M-16, body armor, boxes of ammo etc instead of a big permanent army)
3. 3. To deter the civil servants from oppressing the people. Consider: in a country with a king and an unarmed population, a tax collector could abuse a citizen knowing the citizen was powerless to push-back and the full might of the kingdom was behind him. That same tax collector facing an armed population will tend to restrain himself a bit and may even refuse to carry out some particularly tyrannical order because he knows that a cornered citizen might shoot back and that nothing his boss does will protect him from that personal blow-back. This is not to say that our founders wanted us shooting at government employees, but rather to say that they had lived under various royals and they saw value in the idea of self-restraint which the very knowledge of an armed populace would impose upon the minions of the government

All of these reasons for the 2nd amendment are undermined if you allow the government to control who has weapons, how many they have, what type they have, how much ammo they have, where they keep them, etc. (and that's why every tyrant tries to impose some or all of those things). The simple fact is that our founders made it very clear that they intended the citizens to have the front-line weapons (and the guns the Americans had in the revolutionary war were actually superior to the weapons of the British troops .... which meant that our founders wanted "the people" to have guns that were BETTER than the guns of the front-line troops of the best military on Earth.

If you insist that the founders only intended the citizens to have single-round muzzle-loaded flintlock rifles, then for the sake of consistency (and so the 2nd amendment can still fill its role) you must also insist that the government:

1. 1. may have not have guns that are better than single-shot muzzle-loaded flintlocks
2. 2. may not have body armor or modern medical aid
3. 3. may not have radios, computers, satellites, etc
4. 4. may not have any troop transport capability superior to horses or rowboats, etc

For the Constitution to work, the power must be balanced as it was designed to be ..... and as the past few decades are demonstrating with ever-increasing clarity, our government is becoming increasingly bloated, expensive, inefficient and bullying as the power balance between the citizens and the politicians in DC gets further out of line. The entire POINT of the "right to bear arms" is that the citizens are SUPERIOR to, and in control of, the federal government and the CITIZENS are the ones with the power; in the U.S. the PEOPLE are sovereign. People who push the "hunting" argument are usually intentionally trying to distract from this basic idea, generally because they want the federal government to have powers and do things it was never designed nor intended to have/do and they do not want people to have the power to push back; they WANT the bureaucrats to feel invincible as they bully the public into obeying every new mandate.

It was not just an innocent mistake

There are some specific bold rules for kernel devs ... and he broke one. And then he tried to blame other innocent parties for it. Finally, (though I do not recall if Linus mentioned it) it was all completely unnecessary! If the guy saw a big problem here (and if you read the entire thread, you might end-up thinking he had a good, or at least reasonable, point) he was about to commit a change that broke one of the big rules ...... so the obvious thing to do was to contact others (including Linus perhaps) to float the idea; It was simply inappropriate to boldly move-forward with a code-checkin that broke other people's stuff.

As always (see: "Watergate", or "Bill Clinton") the cover-up attempt only made things worse

One of the things I have always liked about coding apps on Linux is that I've never actually had to code-around any buggy kernel behaviors.

hmmmm.... I guess I've been doing something wrong

Just admit it: AFTER you open a file or device and you are then using it, NOTHING you do to it should result in a returned error code of, in-effect, "file not found" ... and if you ever DID see that you'd be mighty annoyed to have somebody claim it was all your fault. You'd probably note that as a "buggy behavior" that you'd have to code-around ......... Oh, wait.......

Sorry, but computer users are a subset of the general population, and the ones who care at all about the actions/behaviors/attitudes of any of the developers of the software for those computers is a subset of that subset. Within that set, the vast majority have never even heard of (nor do they care about) any kernel mailing list nor do they care about e-mails that have nothing to do with them. They just want their systems to work and do the things they need them to do. Period.

I am NOT a Linus fan-boy, but the man was absolutely right here:

Linux suffers far more in the public view when it looks unstable or incomplete than it does from any other peripheral matters. Given that most of the developers of the code that sits on top of Linux are also unpaid volunteers, it's doubly-bad to make changes under their feet that keep breaking their code. Developers of good applications get very frustrated by unstable platforms where the rules keep changing, and the sort of change that Linus attacked here is just plain BAD. The fact that a kernel developer risked making a bunch of apps look bad (and without good justification) is a major problem and actually a symptom of a severe Linux-on-the-desktop problem: too many people making too many poorly-thought-out changes (often where not needed) while neglecting many of the things that are in serious need of fixing. Unfortunately, when everyone is a volunteer and working for free, it's hard to find competent people to do the un-popular grunt-work to fix many long-term usability issues - but there can be a surplus of people who will happily change lots of other stuff on a whim (because it's interesting to them, or because they think they've had a clever idea and they don't feel like "running it by" other people FIRST). Some might want to complain about Linus's tone here (which did no actual harm to anybody, but might have gotten the attention needed to avoid repetitions), but the real offensive act was by the guy who decided to break other peoples' stuff without consulting anybody else first; that's borderline narcissism.

KDE and Gnome are excellent examples of this general phenomenon: neither one became fully stable with all advertized functionality "just working" before both teams made major changes in the look-and-feel of their projects ..... and then they repeated this idiocy! Sure, both Gnome and KDE are visually much more shiny baubles, but they are much more obnoxious to adapt to and use. They are still both loaded with confusing and/or redundant garbage, and they still lack some basic functionality that Windows (dating back to Win95 or possibly even Win3.11) had. This is dumb, and much-more deserving of attention than Linus's latest (and this time, at least) barrage.

An average user (not a geek) needs to be able to sit down at a Linux system and easily manage printers (add them, test them ,use them, remove them - locally AND on the local network) manage files (find them, use them, edit them, copy them etc on the local machine AND the network) adjust things like the time and date and screensavers and power-management, manage network connectivity (config firewall, ping hosts, get MAC and IP numbers, etc) without a manual and without any hand-holding. This is what enables them to become happy with their primary use of their computers: getting installing and using the applications they need to do e-mail, web browsing, office tasks, etc which in-turn enables them to do the activities they actually care about. As long as any of this is a problem, most developers need to focus on these things before doing other less-necessary things.

If the guy Linus blasted is too "hurt" by this to go-on, then he was not worth having around. If, on the other hand, he was a productive "good guy" who just screwed-up, then this will improve him and he'll be even better in the future. People need to stop wringing their hands over the wrong stuff.... if the guy's an adult, he'll be just fine.