Well, the fact of the matter is that Google isn't forcing anyone to do anything.

As an experiment: try to get by without using google. The argument is that by being so successful and ubiquitous, people are forced to use it, giving google powers that society might not want to give them for very specific reasons. If it's "their fault" or not is completely besides the point.

If Google was a German company we wouldn't be talking about this.

Because if Google was a German company, it would have never been allowed to become the privacy busting, surveillance octopus from hell it is now.

When will we finally get to a ruling class no longer pining for the pre-civil war days?

From opinion polls and actual voting results It seems to follow that you will have to exchange a large portion of the populace, too.

Of course I didn't use the word "F******" in my submission, but I suppose Slashdot must be couth.

I hope you don't come to regret your bravado.

Not because there will be any retaliation (they don't give half a rat's ass, as you very clearly demonstrated) but because what you did was the proverbial wrestling with pigs - with the inevitable result of ending up covered in shit. Now you stand there, and it is not unlikely that people will remember you first and foremost for publishing a paper filled with foul language in a crap journal.

And what have you won? Certainly nothing for academia nor for you academic career.

The whole point of incorporating is to separate one's person from the running of the company. If the company does wrongdoing, then the individuals involved are protected.

Uh, no, that's not true. Incorporation allows to move around companies independently of the people owning and/or running it. Also, they protect the individual to some degree from bad luck affecting the company. Obviously, if the company does something illegal the people behind it will be prosecuted, too. At least, that's the way laws are constructed, so for example, if you incorporate a company in the US that trades cocaine with Colombia, don't expect to be immune from prosecution when the company gets caught.

There are two types of reviewers: The valuable ones that actually read a paper and try to understand it, and the worthless ones that look at title, abstract and who wrote it (usually easy to find out even in anonymous review).

And then there's The Third Reviewer.

Fools fooling fools in bitcoinland. Shocking!

Who gets to decide what qualifies as trolling?

I have a feeling that there are some people who would take a polite "You're wrong and I disagree with you for the following reasons . . ." as trolling. Sure the "I hope you die in a car fire" and "I'm going to kill your animals" are low-hanging fruit, but there's a line there somewhere and it's not always easy to find.

This being Britain, I'm sure it will be an awful mess of a law dripping cruelty and class discrimination like ASBOs and other recent British laws.

It can work, however. In Germany, insulting someone is a crime. Threatening rape is a crime too, of course. There is a well established and accepted law practice regarding the interpretation and implementation of such laws. The fact of the matter is that there is ample support and acceptance of them in the population, and the upshot is a comparatively civilized and objective atmosphere in public discourse.

I'm not very comfortable with laws that require some form of human interpretation

Most laws are like that, and have always been so.

"We used to have an entry in the preferences for that but people thought that âoeSSL 3.0â was a higher version than âoeTLS 1.0â and would mistakenly disable the latter."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why security is so hard. You have this chaotic ape in front of the keyboard making a mess of everything. Now excuse while I go fetch me a banana.

I wonder if part of this PhD glut is a delayed effect of the recession, which decreased employment opportunities over the last 6 years or so.

No. This has been going on for a long time and is getting worse by the year. From the linked article:

What is happening now is that the situation is becomming more extreme, and so even the best efforts at denial are crumbling.

Language design matters. This is why.

According to a study by the CDC, 51.9 percent of surveyed women and 66.4 percent of surveyed men said they were physically assaulted as a child by an adult caretaker and/or as an adult by any type of attacker.

I suppose that these figures make sense - but only after you include almost any inuendo as an assault.

Basically, I call bullshit. These numbers are way to high. I suspect they equate large swaths of inocuous stuff with real rape in order to furhter an agenda.

Congratulations on employing the bottom of the barrel.

Now you know how the bottom of the barrel makes a living: by working for the bottom of the barrel. There is something like a Zen riddle somewhere hidden deep within this simple fact.

Even in industry, people get dismayed to the point where they leave.

No, people in the sciences don't leave because they are dismayed. It usually is because the money runs out.

The three services are actually needed. [...] centralized management of date/time and locale changes were long overdue. Linux is pretty much the only OS remaining, where application, if needed, can't really know if/when date/time or locale has changed.

Ah no, you are bringing facts into this discussion? How dare you! :-)

Thank you, actually.

I've studied the language pretty well. I've read the Standard enough to know that a lot of stuff is well defined, and when I go through the program, I see only constructs I recognize as defined (or implementation-defined, or unspecified, and we won't write code that depends on anything unspecified).

Or, put another way, you have spent a very large number of hours to master this stuff. This is a failure of language design, as it is known that you can write languages that do not require such a high time investment.

It is possible to write conforming C++ programs

I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you on this point. The critique is that is needlessly difficult. Even an expert has a bad day now and then, and when that happens, in C++ he is exposed to a much larger number of pitfalls and traps than in other languages.