You're complaining? I've been here fifteen years, and I've never had a submission accepted either!

Strongly agree about safe-disconnect connectors. I think my next laptop will probably be a MacBook, even though I'll just strip MacOS off and put Linux on, simply because of MagSafe. I've wrecked two laptops, one from tripping over the charger cable, and one from it falling of the arm of a chair and landing on the charger connection. Both times, it resulted in motherboard damage.

OK, you can say I'm clumsy - but laptops are designed to be used on the move.

And Bing is better because it is those nice trustworthy people at Microsoft who are watching everything you search for ?!?

Damn, why don't I have mod points? I may have to tweet that.

Out of curiosity I've just tried, with every terminal application I have (xterm, lxterm, uxterm, gnome-termonal, konsole...). I can't do it. Perhaps I'm incompetent? Or perhaps it's a bug in some specific window manager? Or perhaps Guy Harris is special?

Not in my experience. Over the past twenty years I've run Linux on a large number of designed-for-Windows laptops; I've never seen worse battery performance under Linux than under Windows, and on some machine (including my current Asus Zenbook) considerably better.

The fact that

1. This patch was sneaked into CVS bypassing the proper channels;
2. The submitter identity was (allegedly) forged;
3. The UID assignment was surrounded in parentheses to prevent a compiler warning

strongly suggest that this was a deliberate feature, and not a casual error. I've done a lot of security audits of mission critical systems in my time and I've seen a lot of potentially catastrophic casual errors. You can always see what (innocent) thing the programmer intended to do. There's no 'innocent' thing this change could do. This is intended.

Who intended it? That's another question.

Why have a solar powered CO2 remover when we could use solar (or wind, or tidal, or geothermal) energy and never release the CO2 in the first place? Continuing to burn fossil fuels is unbelievably stupid.

This is a very good reason not to trust any closed source browser, actually. If the source is closed, how the heck do you know what it's doing to show you that nice, safe green password icon? Of course, actually ploughing through and understanding every line of the SSL implementation code in your browser is a lot of work and 99.9% of us haven't done it, but if there were anything dodgy going on in an open source browser it would pretty quickly hit the headlines on Slashdot and we'd all know. Of course again, you don't actually know that a browser (or any other program) was compiled from the published source code unless you compile it yourself.

Gentoo, anyone?

If you're working with an application which hasn't been engineered for database portability, yes, it can be a complete pain. Which is why a good software engineer, embarking on what may be a long-lived application, designs for database portability. You know those 'special features' your favourite RDBMS offers? They're called 'vendor lock-in', and you should avoid them.

To be honest, I still have Ubuntu on one computer but on the whole I've moved back to Debian stable. I did try Mint, but found it sufficiently broken in minor ways to be just irritating. Yes, Debian is broken too, in as much as installing codecs and playing media is a complete pain, but it's broken in ways which don't greatly influence things I actually want to do. For my everyday use - writing software, browsing the web, reading email - Debian stable is rock solid and unannoying.

Yes, just occasionally I curse because something I need to use is in testing, but for all my Clojure stuff I simply bypass the Debian package system and use Leiningen.

The real joke of this is that Postgres has been, by any measure, a better database than MySQL for twenty years. Back in the early 1990s when we were running on i386s and Sparcs, there was some argument for using MySQL because (in those days) the fact that it didn't have proper transactions and proper reverential integrity, it was faster for simple queries from single tables. Now, even that isn't true any more. Postgres is just the best engineered RDBMS out there bar none, and it's free.

Designs, like MP3s, are digital data which is by nature infinitely reproducible. You can only build an industry on selling designs if you introduce legally sanctioned mechanisms of artificial scarcity. Which means a bunch of lawyers will get together calling themselves the Design Industry Association of America. They will argue for a tax on raw plastic, to be paid to them; and will sue anyone they think might have a 3D printer stashed away in the attic. Of course they won't actually have any connection with real designers any more than the Recording Industry Association of America has any connection with real musicians, but that doesn't matter because as everyone knows it's the lawyers who get to keep all the money. They are, after all, the only people (apart from bankers) who actually add value in this economy.

Cynical? Moi?

You won't text on it, that's so last century. You'll talk to it, and it will send text. Standard Android speech-to-text is very good these days.

Italy gave Europe the Renaissance, but the Enlightenment was the gift of the Dutch, the French, the English and later the Scots.