Does that mean I should steal food, shelter, clothing, water, power, and internet access? After all, who are those people who think they should get paid for providing this shit?

I installed MATE 1.8 last night a System76 Pangolin Performance laptop last night, and everything just felt right. Since I had used GNOME 2.x for a long time, using MATE felt like slipping into an old pair of boots.

Were I a neoconservative, I'd bloviate about the lack of a shared culture and sense of history -- but I don't get paid to care. Our fragmented culture means I have a better shot at finding an audience for my own work than I might if I had to appeal to the gatekeepers of a unified mass culture as 20th century writers were obligated to do.

I don't, but I don't anticipate getting 4m of rebar up the pooper for tyranny, financial faggotry, and other crimes against humanity.

If people grew up literate, numerate, and capable of logic then our existing society would have no hope of survival. There'd be riots in the streets, and legions of politicians and corporate executives impaled on rebar as if Vlad Tepes had risen from Hell to claim revenge upon the world.

Being a professional programmer is similar to being a janitor in one respect: You spend a lot of time dealing with somebody else's shit, and it stinks.

I hope you told them it was DOS on steroids instead of being a condescending prat. :)

Take a look at our governments and corporations. At least half of 'em are run by sociopaths.

Some kids will become good and responsible coders, but not all kids. Some will be artists, musicians, mechanics, farmers, etc., and for the rest of the world that doesn't code, a heavy responsibility is placed on the FOSS community to do code reviews.

And some will also write for TV and movies. If they know how to code, they'll have no excuse for some of the really shitty depictions of computers and hacking we've seen on TV and in film before. :)

Most of the general public can't tell a compiler from a Cuisinart. We can eventually fix this by teaching kids to code, which has the additional benefit of showing them that their feelings don't matter to anybody else.

.45 ACP! Apply directly to the forehead!
.45 ACP! Apply directly to the forehead!
.45 ACP! Apply directly to the forehead!

After all, the people who blame victims are just begging for a bullet to the head.

Hi, I work with Nerv, and I'd to hear more about your angel-killing keyboard. How do you manage to pierce their AT fields by typing?

It's time to make peer-to-peer mesh networking a viable technology.

If Infosys is in fact guilty of discriminating against American workers by refusing to hire American workers for American jobs, then such malfeasance should be punished by confiscation of all of Infosys assets located in the United States, and by banning Infosys or any subsidiary of Infosys from operating on American soil.

Unfortunately, we can't just kill Infosys because they are a foreign corporation based in India. But we can damn well kick them out, and we probably should.

Considering that most people have enough trouble governing themselves, I'm not convinced that letting people govern other people is ever a good idea.