They also slowly "boil the frog," getting the public more and more used to not having control of their (alleged) property.

Many are clamoring to bring about a "future" in which unclean hands are forbidden from owning general purpose computers where all software is locked down for approval by state/megacorp. Centralized control, centralized extraction of value from the market, monopolistic dominance and pervasive monitoring.

Exactly.

A more likely outcome is sufficient number of people abandon Windows forever allocating more resources for development of alternatives hastening a future in which MS is no longer relevant. I fully expect Microsoft will "die trying" to turn Windows into the next Apple iPhone.

I wish I could be so optimistic!

You should be aware that you don't need to be an engineer to perform most work. The exceptions where you do need to be an engineer are things like designing industrial machinery and bridges.

Or medium- to high-voltage electrical equipment, which is what anyone claiming to be an "electrical engineer" is asserting that they're competent to do.

Really, it should be required for anything where poor design can negatively impact the public. At a minimum, that should include safety-critical things like the software running on medical equipment, but I would argue that the scope should be much broader, e.g. by holding IoT device makers accountable for their product's lack of security.

So because of falling bridges, you can't solder your own radio?

That's a strawman argument. You can solder your own radio all you want, obviously.

What you can't do is offer your radio-building services to the public, claiming that your expertise as an engineer means they can trust that the radios you create will be (a) electrically safe (which is an issue once you're talking about stuff with more transmission power than a cellphone or walkie-talkie) and (b) comply with FCC regulations.

such for specific projects rather than for extremely vague words such as "engineer" in a broad sweep?

Except for low-voltage electronics (that have only become prevalent relatively recently -- i.e., in the least few decades), the vast majority of things engineers do are safety-critical! Claiming to be an "electrical engineer" is claiming to be competent to design things like high-voltage electrical substations, or (if you want consumer product examples) at least cathode ray tubes, microwave ovens or switching power supplies -- i.e., stuff that actually can kill people if someone screws up the design. It's not just about insignificant shit like integrated circuits and PCBs.

and saying "I'm am engineer" to lend his letter more weoght.

AND THAT'S THE PROBLEM!

If you haven't proven yourself to be competent (e.g. by earning the license), you don't deserve to have more weight lent to your opinion. Claiming to be something you're not in order to gain advantage is fraud.

About to start hacking horizontal blinds with motors now

What brand/model?

Yep. We'd better scrape and mirror it anyway, just in case.

It's quite a bit more than that, at least if you're talking about pure functional programming. You also have to get rid of most all of your old notions of flow control. Imperative programming is about defining sequences of steps, some of which are conditional. Functional programming is all done with nested transformations; there are no sequential steps, there are no branches, there is no iteration.

If you think about it, those are inevitable consequences of the constraints I mentioned. However, it's good that you highlighted them.

If this sounds freakish and impossible to someone raised on imperative programming paradigms... yes, it is. Functional programming requires thinking in an entirely new way.

Yep, both recursion and constructs like map/filter are incredibly useful (even in procedural/OO languages) once you get the hang of them.

Yes, it means your functions aren't allowed to have side effects (i.e., all parameters are passed by value and the only result is the value returned to the caller).

Personally, I like it because it's a good way to manage complexity -- kind of like the encapsulation of object-oriented programming, except applied to the verbs instead of the nouns.

Raspberry Pi has proprietary binary blobs; it is not a solution.

The other thing which bugs me is the white washing of old news articles how often that trick gets pulled, I might personally remember an event but find the contemporary records are missing that happens a lot especially in Politics when a past stance becomes embarrassing and then you get told black was white...

This is the single most important reason there could ever be!

Copyright is for the profit of the creator

No, copyright is for promot[ing] the progress of science and the useful arts. Enabling the creator to profit is only a means to that end.

So what? Merely being a derivative work is not a sufficient condition to make it "illegal;" it should have been ruled to be Fair Use.

GPL isn't about freedom. It's about control

Bullshit. The GPL is about freedom; the difference is that it treats freedom as a positive right while things like the BSD license treat it as a negative right.

Windows is only viable if:

• You can trust it -- and you can't. Period.

In other words, if you can't deal with Mac OS or Linux, there is no "viable" OS anymore.