Well it works ok because men in that situation tend to be willing to put up with it. Women won't, and as women make gains in IT, Linux will ultimately fall a bit behind for the loss of their talents.

Binary formats had only one advantage, and that was that you could read them directly into a C struct. But even then, that advantage disappeared when portability became an issue. That elegant fread into a struct, whatever, turns into a rat's nest when you have to deal with big endian vs lil endian, differing integer sizes... parsing text is a pain in the rear, but it is a less of a pain in the rear than looking at some binary data in the debugger wondering what went wrong.

It is a -fact- that even if we completely cut global CO2 emissions to zero, it would take at least 1,000 years for CO2 to revert to pre-industrial levels. So, yes, while the right wing is looney, they are right on one key point - within our lifetimes, massive CO2 cutbacks will not accomplish anything, other than to make more people poorer.

Because Windows 8 desktop is better than Windows 7 desktop. The file dialogs are better, file copying is handled better. customizations are better. It's just better and in a lot of nice and subtle ways. If MS had just not done the tile thing, and added the store as an icon on the desk, windows 8 would have been a nice upgrade.

Because anyone good enough to convince you to buy a car is someone who is by definition entreprenuial and doesn't want to be a schmoe in a chain.

I have to admit I'm using Windows 8 right now and I just adore it. I love the Metro tiles and I also love the numerous improvements to the desktop. But I'll tell you, the reason that it works for me is because of the way I use it. I have Windows 8 on a Xeon box hooked to my family room TV. When you do that, suddenly, all those live tiles and the whole metro look makes perfect sense. The entire old desktop stuff feels antiquated and looks bad, but the newer metro stuff has transformed my PC into a workable media center. Granted, as a developer, I still spend a lot of time in the desktop, but, a lot of times that's only because I'm living with a lot of ugly applications being not-metro. I say this, of course, in total hypocrisy, because my soon to be released shareware app is certainly non-metro given the popularity of Windows 7 and that I just know the old school SDK.

I'm generally pro-gun but there are some items on both sides that I find absolutely ridiculous when it comes to debating guns:

a) The 2nd Amendment / Constitutional Miscast -

The 2nd amendment has to be taken in conjunction with Section 8 of the Constitution itself. The intent, and the mythology of the American revolution was that an armed citizenry rose up and overthrew the mighty British Empire by pioneering guerilla warfare and turning America into a pro-VietNam or Iraq. The fact is, it was a regular, professional army, that did much of the job. But, be that as it may, the idea of turning America into an uber viet nam in case we are invaded could certainly work in this day and age, and so to that end, it follows, in the minds of the framers, that yes, we, the people, all of us, are the militia, and yes, we are all by the 2nd amendment allowed to have not just guns, but military style rifles if we are to judge the intent of the militia by the standard of the day. So on that point, liberals are dead wrong. But, on the flipside of the coin, having an armed citizenry also meant that there would be no standing army at all. No bases overseas. No invasions of sovereign nations. So, for both sides of the aisle, if we were going to be constitutional, we'd -eliminate- the standing army, let states control the tanks and heavy stuff, and then, the citizenry would be armed to deal with invaders. Liberals and Conservatives are both right, for pieces of the argument, but both lie as well.

b) The It's Not Fully Automatic Strawman

Has anyone who has ever made this argument every really tried to shoot an assault rifle on full auto - if they had one? Bottom line is, full auto fricking sucks. The barrel climbs, you waste rounds. You have to change magazines more often and you aren't as effective. So saying today's semi-auto assault rifles aren't as good as their military counterparts is a bit of a strawman - fully auto for a rifle in a 30 round mag simply isn't as good for many defensive purposes, except for suppression of enemy fire, and for that, chances are, that's probably not as good as a belt fed minigun or a .50 cal.

c) The gun deaths vs violent crime statistic

Gun control advocates like to show lower gun deaths in gun control countries. But violent crime rates also tend to soar in gun control countries. Home invasions, beatings, etc. The advantage is that, to the left, less people get killed is probably better than more people getting robbed or rate. Conservatives would be tempted to disagree, but their own stance on rape and abortion is so ridiculous ...

d) The "mentally ill" red herring.

The vast majority of gun deaths are not caused by some crazy guy going postal. For the most part, gun deaths are usually caused by a guy whose poor, in a relationship breakup, and is looking at child support, losing his kids, and what not, and he flips his shit. Or, he's in a gang fighting over turf. Most of the time, drugs or alcohol are involved. Screening for mental illness, saying say that, bipolar people should not have guns, isn't going to make a statistical dent in anything. There's no reliable test that can say "hey, are you going to gun down a movie theater".

e) The "we can actually ban them" argument.

The USA cannot even ban fricking illegal drugs. If people want them, people will get them. You only need to buy a gun once, and then hide it. Heck, they are easy enough to make.

In a meritocracy, you don't have entrenched elites because somebody better can come along and either usurp them, replace them, or uproot them entirely. Our PC revolution is a case in point. Computers were first IBM, then Apple, then Microsoft, and now cell phones. Whatever's best wins. Yes, that rutheless approach to the economy has its social ill effects, as we say "oh jeez, the idiot that invested in that startup should now have nearly the limitless power over all of society because he or she picked the right cell phone stock". To a certain extent, the great debates over left vs right have to do with society's powers being vested in a constantly churning entrepreneurial and investment class versus a more fixed academic class, the former claiming objectivity through test in the markets as a mark of better human understanding, and the latter, testing through selection of peers through rigorous examination. Both though, think they have the best process for determining what is merit, and what neither get, is what to do with society when you have an increasing population that doesn't give a damn about either, either because they can't win under either set of rules, or they just don't give a damn.

I believe the right wing retort would be that liberals are stupid. Oh, go ahead and experiment with that new thing and screw the world up with your dumb new ideas. It would be almost ok if you didn't have to ram it down everyone else's throat. Change? for who? for what? Why bother? We have our lives to live, and don't be stepping on them! Your evolutionary ancestors might have gotten lucky trying out that new berry to eat, but you had plenty of evolutionary cousins that didn't.

I'll just throw this out there, I think all these limitations on immigrants and travellers is a crock of shit. My ancestors came over as white trash during the great era of immigration at the turn of the last century, Irish, Hungarians, Russians... Polish. Yet, somehow, America managed to do pretty damn good for itself in the last century, at least until it started flexing in the goddamned mirror and all over the planet too much. I say we go back to humble America, the one that works, where we tear down our own fences and dismantle our own army, observe strict neutrality, and let anyone who wants to work come to this country, and let the chips fall where they may. God was on our side the last time we did it, and I suspect He'd be on our side again.

Why have jobs?

GM bet the farm on robotics famously in the early 1980s, as did many American firms, but the technology was simply not there. there's a great story about how GM spent 1 million bucks to get a robot to stick stickers aligned right on the dash for speedometers, but Toyota spent like 500 bucks coming up with a guide and had a person do it. It's not that the USA didn't do robots, in some ways, it did them too soon, spent too much on them, and failed.

In any case, saying that robots will bring "jobs" back is kinda weird anyway. Why have jobs to begin with, if you have robots doing all the work... just saying...

I could see prosecutors bringing the heat down on the kid, pushing him over the edge, just to try and score political points...

Can you really think you can compare a jack of all trades master of none half witted rendering engine that is html 5, coupled with a dull language that isn't even type safe and costs a comparitive fortune to debug, vs well, a -modern- language. I agree plugins can be hokey but html5 sucks.

That's the point that you miss... effectiveness is in the eye the beholder, and that's what politics is for. Sure, you can scream bloody murder about a coal mine operator in Kentucky funding opposition to AGW, but, by the same token, he's under no moral obligation to care that New Jersey's coast might get battered by rising seas when he chose live on top of a mountain. Politics recognizes this, and science doesn't.