The IPCC's objective is to "change the weather", do you realise how monumentally ignorant that statement is? Science is not groupthink, it's just politically and financially inconvenient for some. I admire Patrick Moore and Jane Goodall but Patrick is wrong about AGW, and Jane is wrong about GMO's. Being a genius doesn't automatically make you immune to anti-science propaganda.

Dictators and demigods are the antithesis of democracy no matter which side they claim to represent.Blaming the "left" for Stalin and Mao makes as much sense as blaming the "right" for Mussolini and Hitler, none whatsoever.

When I went for my taxi license back in the 80's it was;
1. Pee in a cup. 2. Find an address in a street directory. 3. Calculate a split fare. 4. Memorise a handful of regulations, must display license, what to do if customer refuses to pay, etc.

Shit job, shit pay, but if driving a cab doesn't teach you how to handle random arseholes, nothing will.

If you read the statistical "signs" they all say the cab driver is in far more peril than the passenger.

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