Of course this is an attempt to get people to buy Oracle. And not just any people: the US government. And not just any part of the government, the DoD in particular.

For example ... Lots of defense systems run on Solaris. Those servers are EXPENSIVE. But now there's a massive push to virtualize everything onto cheep x86 hardware and run Linux. Oracle Database is getting similarly attacked.

Take this as evidence that sequestration hit some defense budgets pretty hard -- enough that they're looking for reasonably-priced solutions and getting pushback from big vendors shouting "TCO! Surely we're actually cheaper!"

And documentation for closed-source commercial software is better, somehow?

I'm working with a handful of closed-source products right now. None of them have any worthwhile documentation beyond a basic API description. The vendor barely supports us. At least with open-source I can see what the software does if all else fails, and there's usually a community to offer support regardless of what the project itself offers.

Science Fiction is a sub-genre of Speculative Fiction. The idea is to twist a few things from reality and then make a story about it. With SciFi, those twists are usually related to technology or science (speculating on what might happen in the future at technology develops, for example). Fantasy is another sub-genre, where the twists are more supernatural. Of course, I'm making broad generalizations here, but the concept should be about right. All fiction is speculative to some extent, of course, but Speculative Fiction tends to alter something rather fundamental about reality.

So, ask yourself ... what exactly did Gravity speculate about with science or technology? "What if we hadn't shut down the Shuttle program" might work, but hardly seems to be enough to separate it into Science Fiction rather than just Fiction.

As an author establishes a new reality, the audience must suspend their disbelief to accept it. I have a theory that the closer the new reality matches real life experience, the less willing the audience needs to be (and the less willing they will be). Thus, Gravity needs to be much more faithful to science than, say Star Wars.

xkcd 404

Thanks to --trace ... we both get our way.

I like your thinking ... the GPL needs a voodoo doll sharing clause. There's more than one build system that deserved it.

Three reasons:

1) It's a feel-good. I'll admit it -- you don't strictly need that line.
2) It gives an indication of progress. I can see that things are progressing. I can see what files are taking forever (rare but informative). I can tell where in the build process things are (and therefore how much time is left.)
3) I can see what is being recompiled and gain a better understanding of the build dependencies.

And yes, I do "read" the output of the build process. Seeing build warnings and errors at a glance is essential. A good IDE is even better, of course (it basically parses out the build garbage for you), but that's not always available.

Clean build output is like syntax highlighting -- not strictly necessary to do your job, but it makes finding and fixing errors much easier, in my opinion.

-- Jack Sparrow

At which point you type 'make --trace' and figure things out. But in the general case, it is completely pointless.

You've never done a parallel build on a large project, have you? The output gets disgustingly obnoxious (the include path being the worst offender). You can't see what the compiler is doing, and that's the point.

Instead, it's better to just print a simple line like "Compiling File1.c" -- that's 90% of what you want to know anyway. If something goes wrong, use the -n option to see the compile line. The --trace option is even better.

A common workaround up to this point was to conditionally define a variable like QUIET=@, and then use that at the start of any actions ($(QUIET) $(CC) ...). Redefining QUIET to empty lets you see the line. I prefer the -n option, but it might not be as portable.

In reality, you only care about the compile options when debugging the build process itself. But in normal usage, get rid of the internals and just let me see the results of the compilation.

http://www.dailydot.com/business/silk-road-dread-pirate-roberts-interview/

That's exactly what seems to have happened.

It means the same thing, for all intensive purposes.

You forgot a big one (that nobody seems to talk about):

D) Lots of more serious offenders are actually caught by routine traffic stops. Timothy McVeigh comes to mind as a famous example. Get the police out in public, make them visible, and interacting with a random smattering of the population and they're bound to come across something interesting eventually.

"License and registration, please?"

I can't tell if this calls for a "whoosh" or a history lesson.

No, I'm not getting them confused. It's unfortunate that MB and family got an overloaded definition, but it's something that's been with us for a long time. MiB is a relatively recent invention that tries to resolve this. Nobody uses it. Except a few pendants here and there like you.

The fact remains that many people are surprised that the hard drive industry uses a different unit (sometimes even mixing units, as was the case with the 1.44" floppy) than just about everybody else (including operating systems). People have been confused many times. Hence the fine print.

I can't help but think of the fine print on hard drives: "1 GB = 1000 MB."

He already got egg on his face. Having a cow is perfectly permissible now.