He goes into a level of needless detail that makes it obvious how he can be obsessive and self-absorbed. He uses paragraphs to say what a sentence could. He focuses on little distractions and loses sight of how people actually work. It reflects a lot of problems with the FSF's approach and RMS's shortcomings as a public face.

This is a man who eats things off of his foot while giving a speech. He's shockingly out of touch with the world and sometimes all you can do is laugh.

That's why there's a one-house exemption in capital gains. If you have multiple houses that you're buying and flipping, it's different than your primary residence in the tax code. Investments are different from a primary residence.

There are a couple of problems with this:

1. Everybody thinks they're the highest performers. You have to be smart enough to know when you're being dumb, and most of the dumb performers aren't smart enough to realize it.

2. You assume there's a good reason for doing things a certain way, and that reason hasn't been invalidated. Programmers used COBOL, FORTRAN, and Assembly for a good reason, and now very few programmers use them, for smaller good reasons. This is a move to a higher level language. People did raw pointer math in C, in part because it was fast and in part because there wasn't a better way to do it. Now we have higher-level languages that handle that material, and they are slower to run, but much faster to code.

The basic fact about higher level, more insulated languages is that programmer time is much more expensive than computer time, and programmer mistakes are even more expensive. The narrowing opportunity that this produces means less ability for high-performance, hacky, unmaintainable code that no one else is smart enough to understand, but much more opportunity for building powerful applications. The explosive growth of web apps is directly tied to the power of the languages they're built on.

I know nothing about this particular implementation, but the concept of protecting the programmer from himself is actually a sound one, and I think you need to avoid being so defensive about it.

...They can do what they want with it. Generally, code that you created while employed by a company, on their time, becomes the property of the company. Because they own it, it's their choice whether to license it out as open source or hold it as proprietary. You're not at the company any more, so you have no leverage of being a part of the company, leaving your complaints as your only tool at this point. You can approach your former bosses and coworkers (assuming you left on good terms) and remind them of why you thought it was valuable to release it in the first place. You can go public with a name-and-shame campaign. (but that may burn bridges) Or you can fork the old version (since they can't retract the license already granted) and move on with your life.

http://bible.cc/ezekiel/23-20.htm
Ezekiel 23-20:
"There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses."

Editing could be anything from changing color levels and cropping to full-on forgery. Simply the fact that some software was used doesn't indicate that it was maliciously edited.

I've researched this topic before. Not all Voip providers support T.38 and the availability of SIP doesn't mean they have T.38 support.

You can't fax over a standard VoIP connection - the compression is meant for voice and won't reproduce the data.

Those unfunded liabilities are spread over many years, so it's disingenuous to compare them to a single year of GDP.

You're actually thinking of something that appeared in "The Way Things REALLY Work".

I could use company paper and company pens to write my letter, and mail it with a company stamp. I would be misusing company resources for personal business, but that doesn't give the company the right to read its contents. I could sit on the company toilet and use company water to take a shit, but that doesn't give them the right to watch. I could even be masturbating in there, misusing the time, and they still wouldn't have the right to monitor my activities. They would be in their rights to discipline an employee for taking long breaks and doing who knows what in the restroom, but they wouldn't be allowed to watch their employees to check just how they're spending their time in there. In this case, they can discipline her for misusing company resources, but can't violate the privacy that she has a reasonable expectation of.

On a closer note, it's the same privacy standard as if she'd had the conversation with her lawyer on the company phone -- a misuse of resources, but not within their right to listen in.

The article linked is spammy and terrible. For the actual information, see the newsitem on the xprize site or the linked details. Basically, there is no prize yet but they had a workshop to begin working out A. Rules for a prize and B. What is achievable. The actual prize would be announced in about 8-14 months.

It's a style issue because they're collective nouns and could go either way: Wikipedia goes into detail

Monty Python, when it started, was about doing something different, absurd, and rebellious. Humo(u)r was stale and repetitive at the time. The devolution of their innovative comedy into a mine for endlessly repeated quotes is antithetical to its spirit. That's why my favorite Monty Python sketch is their performance of the Dead Parrot Sketch at the Secret Policeman's Ball: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTV3lQc4AmQ