I don't know where you're posting from, but in the UK, the protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya were/are running as lead items on the main TV news. It's major news and being treated in the same way the Orange and Velvet revolutions were.

I was going to point out the danger of quoting a couple of verses from the Bible without establishing context, but even taken on its own, Mark 10:29-30 isn't advocating the sort of disconnect being discussed.

Try reading it in its context: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:17-31&version=MSG

(using a modern paraphrase, The Message, because it gets the point across in everyday language. If that bothers you and you want a more literal translation, try this: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:17-31&version=NIV)

Dear Slashdot Readers

This article (and subsequent posts) have demonstrated that the once trusted car analogy is no longer in favour and from now on, complicated subjects should be explained using balloons instead.

Thank you for your co-operation in welcoming our new balloon overloads. Or something.

You might not be racist, but using the BNP website (the UK's far right - and generally loathed - political party) as supporting evidence doesn't do your argument any favours...

I'll try and answer but bear in mind this is the perspective of a single European...

While you are mystified about the European attitude towards guns, many (most?) Europeans are equally mystified by the American attraction towards guns.

Guns are rarely encountered in everyday life over here and many people would become concerned if that changed. For us, the lack of guns reduces the amount of gun violence (check the per capita. The US isn't the top, but it's just below places like South Africa, Colombia, Zimbabwe and others (source: http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_wit_fir_percap-crime-murders-firearms-per-capita)).

In the UK, when gun crime does happen, the police armed response units appear to adopt a tactic of shoot to kill. The last two instances where there was a stand-off, the gun wielding individual ended up dead. Whether this is a deterrent or not is arguable, but gun crime is pretty rare (although regrettably, knife crime is on the increase because more young people are carrying knives).

Hope that makes sense.

It never ceases to make me smile that any discussion about BASIC invariably brings BBC BASIC fans out of the woodwork, and I'll add myself to that list.

To be honest, BBC BASIC spoilt me. I was familiar with the concepts of using procedures and functions, but never progressed to the built in assembler. The thing is that BBC BASIC and the sheer power (for the time) of the MOS (operating system) was so far advanced of the other 8bit machines available at the time. I then moved to the 32bit Acorn Archimedes range which also features BBC BASIC. So, when I got my first PC it was a complete shock - there was QBASIC, but it didn't work the same way and seemed far more limited. It didn't integrate so elegantly with the operating system.

For me, BBC BASIC and the MOS is a truly amazing piece of work and went with a truly revolutionary piece of the hardware. As an example, the BBC B hardware (the most common computer to run BBC BASIC in the early 80s) has a built in floppy disk drive port, parallel and serial, a programmable ADC port, a digital "User" port for controlling mice etc, a 1Mhz(!) bus for controlling other devices such as sound synthesisers, the ability to add an Econet module to create a local network and the "Tube", an interface/protocol for interfacing with a second processor (the first ARM processor was designed using the Tube interface). How many other 8bit machines in the early 80s could do any of that? The operating system also supported paged RAM/ROM and a very sophisticated display driver (called "VDU") where screen co-ordinates mapped to a virtual screen resolution, effectively allowing your routines to be resolution independent.

If you have an interest in old computers, or elegant design, but have never played with a BBC or even a BBC Emulator, you owe it to yourself to track one down.

Wish I had some mod points today...

Someone please mod the parent up as insightful!

Whenever mobile phones are mentioned on Slashdot, something akin to the following comment will inevitably appear:

'All I want is a phone that makes calls.'

I've never quite got my head around a tech site like Slashdot, where the demographic is almost certainly interested in new technology having such a negative response to technological advances in what our phones can do. You rarely [never?] hear this with other technology on this site:

'I wish Windows 7 had less features. All I want is the ability to write a letter'
'This 4Ghz Core 2 Due Hyperfighting Special Edition is too fast for me. I want a 68030 at 25Mhz'... instead we get 'Imagine a Beowulf cluster of...'

Is it because the non-techie crowd have embraced mobile tech, in some instances more than us (given that some teenagers seem to text more than they speak) and we've been out done? Are the non-techies better at mobile tech than us?

(Yes, I know that Slashdot doesn't speak with one voice, but I bet the comment appears somewhere in this article).

As others in this discussion have pointed out, if the concern about Oracle close-sourcing components of MySQL, then why not fork it now?

Also, beyond the large installed user base, is there anything particularly important about MySQL as a database that other open source databases cannot do?

But for me, the biggest frustration is that while there is all this concern about MySQL, the lack of direction is really damaging Sun who make excellent servers (SPARC and x64), software (Solaris 10/Open Solaris with ZFS, Dtrace, Containers etc. etc, OpenOffice, Glassfish, Virtualbox, Sun Cluster (free), QFS/SAMFS (cluster FS)) and many more interesting technologies).

IMHO, the existence of Sun is a positive thing for the open source community and MySQL is a small and largely unimportant part of Sun's inventory.

Many people are capable of thinking for themselves, and in fact you are advocating a new priesthood.

People who don't wear the white collar that is awarded to scientists are not all morons, and many of them have serious problems, grounded in both logic and mathematics, with the so-called science that has been revealed as of late regarding global warming. The economic solutions appear even worse.

So, adjust your attitude or prepare for a wave of Calvanism.

The value of OpenSolaris to Sun is the same as Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux; it's the cutting edge release that allows the new features to be added without compromising the stable release. It's improving as a desktop operating system, but that's not the real point of OpenSolaris. Solaris is primarily a server operating system and that's where it excels. It manages to include things today such as ZFS and Dtrace that will one-day have equivalents in Linux. These technologies are already mature on Solaris. Code from OpenSolaris is also used by the Sun OpenStorage platform and presumably will be the basis of the Sun OpenNetwork platform.

Before I'm modded down as a Linux-hating, Solaris fan-boi, I'm posting this from my home Linux workstation, sat next to my OpenSolaris server. Sometimes it's about the technology itself and not technology religion.

Although I'm a sat-nav owner, I have to agree with you; proper, paper based OS maps are fascinating.

I tend to use them when out walking but when planning a route, it's amazing how much detail is included that would otherwise be missed. I get involved in planning the occassional orienteering evening for our local chuch youth (teens) and it's suprising how many of them have no idea how to read a map. I guess it's not taught in schools anymore (we had the opportunity to do orienteering when I was at secondary school and it was there I learnt to read a map).

My Linux home directory is pretty tiny - only the dot files for my Linux environment (.gnome etc). I keep all my work documents and files on my OpenSolaris fileserver where ZFS provides resilience using RAID1 and point in time restores using the snapshot capabilities. I NFS mount the ZFS filesystem to my Linux box and CIFS share the same filesystem to my Windows PC and Mac.

My MP3 collection and photo albums are handled by iTunes and iPhoto respectively, syncing with my iPhone. The Mac backs these up to a Time Machine disk which in reality is a ZVol on my OpenSolaris server published as a LUN using iSCSI.

The ZFS filesystems and volumes are backed up to external USB drive using the "zfs send" command.

Blatant plug: I've documented most of the above experience on my blog.

For bookmarks, I use Xmarks to synchronise with the cloud, and take notes using Evernote.

I've got an HP ML110 G5 (dual core) with 1GB RAM running OpenSolaris and has 4 disks in. This is my "storage" server and runs ZFS, making it capable of serving CIFS, NFS and iSCSI. I've also got an HP ML115 G5 (quad core) with 5GB RAM running ESXi off a USB memory stick (internal USB socket). No failover in this configuration, but I'm able to run a complete test Windows 2008 domain (2 x DCs, 1 x Terminal Server, 1 x WSUS server, 2 x Vista clients and 2 x XP clients - all thanks to Technet).

The HP servers are cheap and relatively powerful. See my blog if you want more detail.