I can only speak for myself, but the HP TouchSmart I bought in May this year has an ATI graphics card that was recognised by one system component and wasn't by two others. If it had not been recgnised at all, things would work, albeit without hardware acceleration. But things being as they were, I got non-working applications and error messages instead. Although I managed to figure out what went wrong, and got that fixed in the other two components (all three components had a hardcoded list of PCI IDs, and my device's ID was only present in one of them), I think that qualifies as a "pain" nonetheless.

What makes you think it will no longer be useful as an emergency fallback mechanism? Actually, what I mainly objected to, although I didn't state so in my message, was the "this is pointless since I won't use it". The code isn't written for the personal benefit of this particular Anonymous Coward.

If you don't use the console, this shouldn't bother you, since it shouldn't affect you.

Oh wait, if you meant your GRANT creates the user too, then I will certainly withdraw my objection. I see no harm in requiring a password when creating a user :)

Wow, I need to know a user's password in order to grant that user additional permissions? That's just stupid, I hope MySQL is alone in that.

That should work fine with Gentoo Prefix or NixOS.

Pre-emptive followup: admittedly they are both often (but not always) compiled from source, but it doesn't involve a manual configure && make && make install.

Which distributions are you using which let you install from the repositories without being root

That should work fine with Gentoo Prefix or NixOS.

I'd say if the reference implementation doesn't include those goodies (whatever they are), then those goodies aren't part of Java. Bundled with and dependent on Oracle Java, perhaps, but not part of Java.

No, that isn't what you said. Allowing Google to access your site and asking Google to access your site are two different things. By neither opting in nor opting out, you're allowing Google to access your site, because the default is to allow it and you haven't told Google otherwise, but that's not opting in. Hint: what does opt mean? Who has chosen that the default is to allow anyone to visit your site? If it isn't you, then you didn't opt.

No, that's not what opting in means. Opting in means you're asking Google to visit your site. Opting out means you're asking Google not to visit your site. When you're not asking for anything, merely hoping, you're neither opting in nor opting out.

No one's paid to do anything illegal. Is paying people to do the jobs they're supposed to do really covered by FCPA? It doesn't appear to be.

That's impossible. Where in heaven would Jobs have found a lawyer?

Adding -D command-line options is cheating, as it allows a single-character program to do literally anything: gcc -Dx='main() { puts("Hello, world!"); }' x.c where x.c consists of a single line containing the character x.

Huh? Whether the act is criminal will not be affected by a civil suit.

What's most wrong with that is the suggestion that one might use phpmyadmin for fun.