It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration.

  -- Dijkstra

I will give it straight to beggars and homeless that I meet in my travels.

My donations will not be lost in inefficient administrations, dodgy contracts, or long-term investments you insensitive clod.

Closed source software stinks. Microsot Windows crawls. Anything good by Microsoft is purchased from a former developer. Adobe is not only slow to fix security holes; it continues to distribute software it knows has holes that are actively being exploited. At work I'm exposed to corporate shit by IBM that is used in every incorrect way possible (arguably IBM is a contributor to this problem). Closed source makes me want to vomit. No privacy. No security.

But then there's Opera: possibly the only closed source project that genuinely competes on quality: accurate, good interface, efficient, and even good security? Who knows.

But then I don't use anything closed source anymore, so perhaps I'm missing some other well deserved programs.

This will be conveniently incomplete, ignoring data identified as contrary to popular political opinion.

But I'm a climate change denier and therefore a conspiracy theory nut and other carefully selected categorising terminologies in the politically correct nomenclature.

And suddenly I'm censored. Because democracy is fine, for a while. We can be trusted to decide things for ourselves. Most things. Until the issue is bigger than any person. Dammit it's our children and our children's children who stand to lose! And we cannot be trusted to make the right decision anymore.

This sounds like a valuable lesson. Next time this happens, simply don't do the job at all, because it's a no-win scenario. Instead, immediately start looking for a new job.

Good advice. I had a similar situation: brought into an already doomed project. I made my disclaimer, did my best (and pretty well) and copped shit at the end. Thanks for nothing.

Is laws that make it difficult to violate existing laws.

Child pornography: illegal. But let's make it more difficult to break this law. Oh, and btw, here are some freedoms you used to have.

Apparently there are still early light bulbs in museums that still work.

They fail not too quickly, but quickly enough to create a false economy.

... Because 51% can oppress the other 49%. This is why we need protected freedoms outside the reach of Government.

This is a nice accomplishment, but L4 is such a minimal kernel that some folks argue that it's not even a microkernel. It's a picokernel.

Microkernels provde:

• address spaces
• threads
• IPC

L4 checks these boxes. Nanokernel and picokernel are poorly defined, emotive terms. Not reasonable criticism.

It came crippled. Sony sucks.

I had to boot a DOS disk and change a single flag in the address space mapped to flash for BIOS options.

That was easy. It took weeks to find the correct flag however. NEVER buy Sony (though I'm sure most nerds knew this already).

They're all sitting down watching like zombies at a Hypnotoad exhibition. What's to monitor?

I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to imply that Firefox is a part of Linux, but you did.

And this is why I have arguments with my Windows admin friends (I'm Faust) about how many security flaws "Linux" has. Arrrrgh!
But I don't need to preach this to the /. crowd. Just be careful with this stuff.

I use PostgreSQL daily and I love it. The window functions are an enormous boon! It's still the best.

We need some distribution happening a la Netezza, Greenplum, etc:

• pgpool-II: old Oracle-style partitioning on a single column with fixed partition values
• GridSQL: stuck in 1.1beta for a long time but promises Teradata-style shared-nothing parallelism

Anyone know better?

And for some reason marijuana is an important issue? Are you kidding me?

It's because FREEDOM and MINIMAL FOREIGN INTERVENTION used to be prized amongst your people, and some of your brothers still care for this.

IBM sold adding machines - they'll count anything - and the Nazis used them to count Jews (and others). That's the Nazi's bad.

The difference here is that IBM supported an enemy Government in time of war.