I drove cabs for 3yrs, never, ever, gave "quotes", I gave estimates but made it clear you were on the meter since half of what was on the meter wasn't mine to give away in the first place. Very rarely someone would give you a big bill to drive their elderly mum home, in those cases the meter wasn't switched on ;)

Do you still get your 50 cent astroturf fee when you post AC?

Boot sector attacks have been a malware vector since..well...forever, back in the DOS3.x days we had Norton disk doctor to remove them manually.

AFAIK, the most popular RDBMS by installed base is still SQLite which the authors released into the public domain many years ago. It won't keep up with oracle's performance on very large data sets but it's a hell of lot less complex to set up, and as you say most business/consumer applications simply don't need the performance (and price tag) of something like Oracle or MSSQL.

""Societies grunts" don't have jobs" - You must have a very different definition of the word "grunts"?

Long post for someone who doesn't care?

... look it up, because no matter how well that creep plays the victim, he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

Apples to Orangutans - Uber don't have "walk ups", a fair comparison would be between Uber and a booked taxi.

Do Uber have hidden mics, panic buttons, and radio code words for trouble? Taxi's in Oz had all those things when I was a driver back in the 80's, nowadays they also have cameras. Everyone talks about passenger safety, the fact is drivers are at least an order of magnitude more likely to be attacked than the passenger.

Preferential voting gets some strange results, we have it here in Oz and it is not uncommon to see someone get into the senate who had less that 5% of the primary vote. This often gives a handful of independent the balance of power, meaning when ever the two major parties disagree in the senate the only vote that counts is that of the independents. After half a century of this I'm still not sure if it's a good thing or not, independents are more often than not fringe dwellers, radicals, and religious nutters.

Compulsory voting doesn't bring good governance (as the current mod proves on a daily basis), however it does do a very good job of capturing what the whole country thinks on election day. The fines are trivial and it's very rare for them to be issued, let alone enforced, yet we always have a turnout well above 90%. Also why does the US insist on having an election on a Tuesday when everyone is at work, that's just fucking bizarre, it's like you don't want societies grunts to turn up.

Drugs and sex slaves are both illegal now, if you legalise drugs how on Earth does that affect the current demand for sex slaves? Do you expect junkies to wake up the day after prohibition is lifted and think to themselves - "Now that I have legal drugs, I can save my pennies for that sex slave I've always wanted"?

Your story has as much to do with open source as the brand of car that this creep drives. Freedom of association cuts both ways, deal with it.

Indeed, I installed Epic's UDK recently purely out of curiosity. All the tools you need to make high quality 3D graphical applications with an emphasis on games. Automatically installs the free versions of visual studio, (yet another great example of free tools from a commercial software house). The only "catch" is that they will take 5% of your revenue if/when your app/game exceeds $3k per quarter. I recall the days of CD distributors that would charge up to 60% of revenue just to print and ship the media. All the hard problems of creating tools to create apps are gone, and yes it mainly due to the open nature of the profession as a whole, not the rants of one noteable pioneer.

Of course large companies like MS/Epic/NVidia/IBM are not giving their tools away out of the goodness of their heart, their aim is to hook devs early in the process and milk them when they succeed. Unlike the recording industry who have a similar business model, the "talent" gets to keep the cream, the company risks nothing, it's a win-win that has become the norm in our industry, rather than the exception.

My personal favorite however is a true OSS hero, sqlite, the licence is a prayer that puts it into the public domain, it is the world's #1 RDBMS by install count. Another is a "maths toy" called "fractint" from the late 80's(?), the license said something like "Got money, want admiration". These two licenses sum up the attitude of most devs that I have worked with over the years. But hey, if a mechanic mate won't help me with my car, I certainly not going to help him with his computer

lol - The croc bait is criticising Aussie beer and intelligence.

Yep. The other side were so busy fighting amongst themselves they gave Abbot a free ride. Now he is PM we can all see that he didn't actually do any work on his own policies when in opposition, he's still stuck in opposition mode, ie: simply making shit up on the fly and hoping nobody spots the absurdity of his rhetoric.

BTW the mining unions were the force behind the demise of Rudd in round one of the leadership brawl, they are just as anti-AGW as the mine owners themselves, and for the same reason. Getting rid of rudd turned the ETS into a "revenue neutral" tax and diluted the Mineral Resource Tax to the point where it had no effect and raised nothing in revenue. Abbot was on a winner fighting these tax because, aside from the voters natural aversion to new taxes, the miners (Labor), mining unions(LNP), and Rupert's newspapers(ordinary punters), all desperately wanted those taxes dumped or neutered.

The end result is that Australia is now an international piranha when it comes to climate change, it even has a multi-billion dollar "direct action" scheme that in effect rewards companies for polluting the atmosphere.

Neither side actually wants to implement this stuff, the only reason either party bring up these ideas and have long running inquiries is to buy the votes of independent senators on other matters, particularly those senators from the far right minority parties such as "family first". Even if Brandis pushed a bill thru the lower house the senate will drag out voting on it until the next election and then start all over again, with a new set of nutjob independents. The same pattern has repeated itself every election cycle for the last 20yrs, longer if you count video recorders and photocopiers. No matter who is in power the govt always plays bad cop on this issue, the opposition always play good cop because they cannot push legislation thru the lower house and therefore have little to offer in exchange for said senator(s) votes on other matters.

I made the same prediction about Conroy's filter and most of slashdot laughed - this proposal will go nowhere and be will forgotten before the next election, especially now that we have a communications minister with a functioning brain and his eye on the top job.

Yes, but now you know who to vote against in the senate. :)