It's not wrong if you're using git to do it. :)

I don't know what kind of environment you work in, but in my experience you really need something like git's staging area if you are doing any major application work. Most developers are working on multiple things at a time, and they don't want to just commit everything at once, or even every modified part of a given file. Without that, you are forced to either hold off modifying some files, or keeping multiple copies lying around. (Git also supports the latter via stash, if that's your preference.)

Managing this via a command-line interface is excruciating, though. I stick to a GUI for daily work and use the command line only for deeper repo analysis and to feed programs that script git to do something.

SmartGit, Git Extensions, the GitHub for Windows client, and the git functionality built into things like NetBeans all make using git on Windows pretty straightforward.

I've spent the most time using Git Extensions as it seems to support the broadest set of git commands, but I'll grant that it doesn't have the friendliest interface.

Then I suppose all the IRS would need to do is state what cash value they determine Bitcoins to have for a given tax year, so you can pay tax on them appropriately.

Again: not complicated.

This is a lot easier than you think it is.

If you hold Bitcoins, they have no cash value, and thus are not taxable. If you cash them out into USD (or any other official currency), that is taxable income--or capital gains. That part is not clear, but you'd have to pay taxes on it either way.

If someone duped D3 gold and managed to cash it out to the tune of $100K, then yes, they would have to pay taxes on that. Income is income.

If homosexuals had their way, no one who denigrates homosexuals or denies them the same rights as everyone else would ever get elected.

The problem, then, is not homosexuals themselves.

Given that there are plenty of good alternatives, it seems that the real value in MySQL is the branding. Oracle could've bought any DB engine they wanted, but which open-source one has the most name recognition? Sometimes, "what's in a name" turns out to be "everything."

Parent and grandparent post make the right points.

The US has opted to spend less money building and supporting the middle class, instead spending more money instruments of state control: prisons, police equipment, military hardware (the latter two being less and less distinct as time goes on), surveillance. Educating the public simply isn't a priority. The continued rise of anti-intellectual politicians has certainly nurtured this, but there's also a very utilitarian government interest in having a cowed and uninformed populace. You'd think having a more dynamic, informed, educated, productive economy would more than outweigh having a complacent, idiotic populace, but it turns out the latter is a lot easier to do than the former, and politics is nothing if not pragmatic.

It's not even "the government" that's militarized--as in the feds and states--but police. Our police have adopted military hardware, tactics, and attitudes. Even on the local level, this is commonplace. A lot of it comes from the "War on Drugs," which called for military-like tactics since we were dealing with highly organized and capable criminals such as drug cartels. Then we had the WTO riots in Seattle in '99, which demonstrated just how unprepared our police were for that kind of chaos. It shocked them out of their complacency and accelerated the militarization of our police forces. Finally, 9/11 put it all together, bringing boatloads of federal money and input into local police forces. Americans have often worried about the federal government running amok and using the military to suppress insurrection and dissent. Well, they don't even have to. Your local cops will happily do that. These are the same police who shoot folks who are unarmed or lightly armed, who tase virtually defenseless individuals who fail to comply by even the smallest margin, and who respond to peaceful, non-violent protests with pepper spray, tear gas, and physical force. You're damn right that people are afraid of the government, but it turns out you don't so much have to fear the feds knocking down your door, just the local cops who've been trained to view almost everyone as a potentially lethal enemy.

Yeah, that was surprisingly good. Seems he actually can be a competent director, when he feels like it.

And yet the prevailing political philosophy I see expressed by Slashdot commenters falls somewhere in the anarchist/libertarian area of the political graph, where there's little to no government and virtually unfettered personal (and corporate) behavior. In concept, it's nice to imagine a world where everyone can do anything they want as long as it's not harming anyone else. In practice, we find that "harm" is not always easy to see, and can result from complex sequences of events and interactions that are not individually problematic but nevertheless result in systemic harms.

I am by no means saying that government is the perfect solution to every problem. In fact, there is no perfect solution to most problems. There's only bricolage and compromise. Some things are better managed by government. Some things are better managed by the private sector. Both need to be accountable, though: the business world is accountable to the government, and the government is accountable to the people. When any of those mechanisms fails, the system has failed.

That is to say, I am deeply unhappy with the current state of US politics, since any efforts at accountability for government are stymied by the total lack of accountability in the business world.

But there's no way I'm going to take that and conclude the option is to nearly get rid of the government and just trust the market to work everything out. That way lies insanity, or at least a whole lot of misery.

lolwut

Is encrypted data just gibberish until it's decrypted, at which point it becomes information? No, it was always information, it was just hidden or impractical to get at without the right tools.

Same with human iris patterns. It's been information all along, it just wasn't easy or cheap to extract.

You'd have to be working with a definition of "information" so narrow as to be useless.

Indeed. If you only have one highly-qualified nurse on-staff, you've got a big problem in the first place. You should have several, and they can rotate which holidays they work.

This is how it works in other industries that may require on-call staff during holidays. It's a solved problem.

If you're staffed entirely with n00bs who don't know how to do their jobs... good luck with that.

Auto-parked the heads, I meant. I need to proofread more.

Oh, yes. We always did that, too. I remember when I later got a 386 and was astonished that it auto-parked the heats when you shut it off. SORCERY.