Did you actually believe someone was serious in stating that "Mobs of people are the most rational..."?

I see your sarcasm meter is busted. Would you like to borrow mine?

Postgres has become the Oracle of yesterday. Now the new shiny is MongoDB and Hadoop.

Couldn't even ping 8.8.8.8, so I suspect it was more than just a problem turning URLs into numerical addresses.

It was so weird to have problems and still have all the lights on the modem lit up (except standby).

Unfortunately there's no novelty factor in having problems with it in general.

Well it could be if it were not for an unholy alliance between Intuit and Grover Norquist.

In the US anyway.

I started in on Linux a year later after buying my first 386-40(?) system and wondering what I'd install on it. Wound up with Linux after trying OS/2 and kinda avoiding the *BSDs because that just looked like a cluster----. Got a small stack of floppies and my career from there was set.

I've done a lot in that time - three books, two computer-based training CDs, lots of work on the LDP, was at Red Hat going for my RHCE the day they had their IPO, worked for VA Linux, designed and ran rather large HPC environments for two Major East Coast Universities(tm).

I haven't studied systemd in too much detail (consider me old school as I just started year 22 of using Linux). dbus? Really? Jeezus.

There's plenty of embedded systems that reboot frequently and need to boot quickly (think Raspberry Pi)

Documentation? A large portion of the packages out there aren't documented and it's still being distributed. Debian and Ubuntu are prime offenders of this when they not only distribute packages without documentation but when they do distribute something with documentation it's for the software as released, not after it got heavily modified to work as a package and following their usage standards.

As a non-programmer, Java stinks.

The idea of it being sandboxed and thus 'more secure' is blown out of the water every time there's an update, of which there are many. Each update from Oracle wants to install the Ask toolbar.

In its earlier days applications had to be distributed with specific versions of the JRE. Even more recently there were plugins that only worked with Java 6 and the vendor had no intention of getting them to work Java 7. The idea of 'write once run everywhere' is mostly dead.

On the server side (Tomcat) it's okay. On the embedded side (Android) it really seems to have finally found its stride..

Yes, it would, because the infantile mind doesn't recognize a power grab or the early steps of establishing a soft tyranny when they happen before its eyes.

I'd recommend a copy of Jeffrey Grupp's book The Telescreen if you want to know what's really been done to this culture.

It is, actually, and it's a subtle one. In the face of all evidence, the dogma of political correctness dictates that men and women are exactly the same and should want the same things. Therefore, using this twisted excuse for logic, anything that is done primarily by men must be portrayed as inherently sexist and actively excluding of women. That's what happens when masses of soft-minded people use low-quality logic on "sacred" conclusions they refuse to question.

The idea that it's good enough to have open access for anyone who wants to do something (and when has a wider variety of games been more available than now?) and then those who are interested can participate is anathema to this mentality. There's nothing for them to do in that scenario, no soapbox to climb on, no social engineering to perform, no downtrodden victim to pretend to champion (while actually changing nothing).

You may find this an interesting article. They were going to metaphorically roast a Harvard professor for daring to suggest men and women have different interests and priorities. He hadn't actually done anything to discriminate against women and showed no hostility towards them. He just didn't hold the "correct" viewpoint.

Identity politics has taught people to exaggerate these differences, that it's "normal" to worry about things like which demographic is doing what activity. It's just so damned useful for divide-and-conquer purposes for anything from voting to marketing. TFA is merely following what the rest of the media has done for a long time now.

If women want to play games, they will. If women don't, then they won't. To me it's as simple as that. The "magic sauce" is the bullshit concerns of politicians, media personalities, and marketers. It's not normal to share in them. One has to be conditioned to do that.

That depends on whether you have a life in meatspace including meaningful quality time with loved ones.

If you do, you'll never miss the online tracking.

The principle here is that generally anything pathological, like the desire to track people without regard for their consent, requires some kind of unfulfilled need or other problem to provide fertile soil in which it can fester and grow. Otherwise it wouldn't be tolerated because what it offers in return is not tempting.