Google should give the user control. In my estimation, someone who puts up a profile photo giving the viewer the finger is likely to be a jerk that I'll have no interest in, so I'll avoid that person, and would like tools a la the old newsreader killfiles so that I'm not troubled with that person's output, be it visual, text, or audio-- but that's just my opinion; I'd rather a social network that I use not make that decision for me or other users.

Actually, Jon McCann, in an interview, seemed to say that user configurability is a bug, detracting from GNOME presenting a single face to people who might consider switching to GNOME. "And I think there is a lot of value to have that experience you show the world to be consistent. In GNOME2 we didn't do that particularly well because everyone's desktop was different."

Shame on me for typing literal greater than and less than. That should have been "g/<regular expression>/p".

"Catenate" is actually a word and means the same thing as "concatenate". Unfortunately, 1 - epsilon of people associate "cat" with F. domesticus, so "cat" was a really lousy choice.

Alas, history and lots of shell scripts have probably made existing command names unchangeable. History in this case goes back to the time people got RSI from ASR-33 Teletypes and didn't want to have to type very much, and names that make sense only if you know other programs (in ed, "g//p" prints all lines containing the specified regular expression, hence the name "grep").

That said, we programmers are users of programming languages as much as Joe Sixpack is a user of the desktop, and surely we deserve good design as much as they do, so we can get things done rather than taking perverse pride in mastering needlessly ghastly syntax.

..if the government will pay me $30/hour or so to do it.

Um, if their OS were secure, why would they need antivirus software?

"What's the point in locking yourself in if there isn't anything special about the hardware in the first place?"

Don't you remember Microsoft's campaign against "naked PCs" (i.e. computers sold without an operating system)? I'm sure that we'll see a similar campaign for OEM systems and motherboards set up to preclude installing a non-MS operating system.

Even if that were the case, it doesn't mean the compiled program will exhibit the same behavior:

#include

int
main(int argc, char **argv)
{
        assert(sizeof('a') == sizeof(int));
        return 0;
}

Yes, but you can't blame dmr for that.

I'd suggest reading the interview with Jon McCann, who heads up GNOME3 development and who brought us the "user configuration is bad, because the user will do evil things" gnome-screensaver. Note particularly the following:

"And I think there is a lot of value to have that experience you show the world to be consistent. In GNOME2 we didn't do that particularly well because everyone's desktop was different."

Neunundneunzig Muellbeutel?

Don't forget it's also a way to get someone else to do the work of indoctrinating the next generation into Windows.

I recommend Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Pay particular attention to the part where Mycroft is taught the difference between "funny" and "funny only once".

Yeah... It looks like I will end up going with Android for my next phone, even though its UI stinks on liquid helium compared with webOS's. OTOH, someday I may be able to buy a refrigerator that's easier to use than my phone. Great work, HP--and given that they're going for those niche markets, I presume they won't be open sourcing webOS either, which would be the one thing they could do to redeem themselves.