Disagree. Large-scale habitats/SPS/O'Neill Colonies have always been the best option. No huge gravity wells to deal with, since rotation provides your G's, and, while they are extraordinarily expensive, they cost nothing compared to a full-scale terraforming effort, and can provide a shirt-sleeve environment in basically no time flat. The one remaining big knock on them was the issue of radiation shielding, and now, that may be solved.

Yup. Knotweed is fairly common in the area, but there's none in my back yard.

Indeed! In our back yard, they are losing the battle against the ivy and bamboo! :)

I do know, but nobody's complaining. I only know because one time, when a guy changed desks, he complained that it was too cold at his new location, and the building maintenance guy came up and tweaked his vent, which fixed the problem, and since then, nobody else has complained.

Which doesn't really leave me with anything to chose on this poll, but oh well. Par for the course. :)

Would violate clause six of the Open Source Definition (and the Debian Free Software Guidelines): No discrimination against fields of endeavor.

I find quite the opposite. The simplest case is one user, and a "distributed" VCS is clearly the easiest option in that case--no central repository needed, no environment variables to set, or separate paths to worry about. Just say "init", and you're off and running. (At least with Mercurial or Git, the two DVCSes I have experience with.)

With more than one user, it's slightly more complicated, but not enough to worry about. It all boils down to the distinction between "save this change" and "share my changes with my co-workers". Having those as separate commands really isn't that confusing, and once you're used to it (which should not take long), you'll have a hard time remembering how you lived without it! And that really is the entire difference, fundamentally, between distributed and non-distributed VCSes.

(Most of the things that are great about Git are unrelated to the distributed/non-distributed aspect, or at best tangential to it. For me, the big wins of either Git or Mercurial over, say, Subversion, are how much better/faster/easier/more powerful branching is, which doesn't really have to do with being distributed or not, and how much faster the whole thing is, overall, without all those network round-trips, which does.)

I started out somewhat skeptical, like you, but after my first pilot project, using Mercurial, I was a complete convert! YMMV but it Works For Me(tm)! :)

That's because TFS is the usual slashdot idiocy, and TFA is simply bad reporting. This report tells quite a different story:

...and...

So yeah, I'd say it sounds like a lot more than I'd expect was being shared.

A Facebook "like" button is different than a local-to-the-site "like" button. It only works if you have a FB account, and uses the clearly recognizable FB logo. Anyone who uses FB recognizes the button, and expects it to work the same on all sorts of different sites.

The apparent problem here (according to what I've heard) is that the FB "like" button on Hulu didn't just share your like of the movie with your FB friends; it shared your entire viewing history! If that's actually true, then I definitely have to side with the plaintiff on this one. That's not what anyone would normally expect. But if it just shared the fact that he like that movie, then it's exactly what he should have expected, and he should lose the case big time!

Your friend is ignorant. Goto is a powerful-but-dangerous tool that should be used with extreme caution, if at all. However, to say that it's the mark of a bad programmer is insanely ignorant. It is often the mark of a bad programmer, but it can also be the mark of an exceptionally good one. The key is in knowing when you use it and when not to.

If your friend thinks he's a better programmer than Donald Knuth, then he's almost certainly suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. If he hasn't read Knuth's "Structured Programming with Gotos" (a direct response to Wirth's original "Goto Considered Harmful" paper), then he's not qualified to opine on the subject.

That said, probably 90% of the time (if not more), your friend will be correct. In the last over-a-decade, I've used goto once. And that lone case was after nearly a dozen attempts to find a way to around it that wasn't worse. I don't like gotos, and feel a little dirty that I ended up using it even that once. (If I'd been working in C++ or Java or Python, I would have used an exception, but I was writing in C.) A goto usually makes your code more difficult to read, and more fragile, and you should never use one unless you can prove the alternatives are worse. Which probably takes a lot more expertise than it sounds like you currently have, so avoiding them completely is probably the best plan for now. For you.

Some idle speculation has finally been confirmed.

Not really. There was no particular reason to think this was impossible. We just didn't have any evidence it was possible.

Not to any useful theories. Theories like the Electric Universe have one more thing added to the list of things they can't explain, but that's no surprise. :)

That's a fair point, and if he really wanted to sue Mozilla, I'd expect that would be his most plausible angle to try to exploit. However, A) I don't think he wants to sue Mozilla, which makes the whole question somewhat moot, and B) he's still primarily a techy, not a professional CEO, which might well have made a more tech-oriented position attractive to him if the issue had actually come up before he resigned.

If you support trying to hurt (a set of) people, you shouldn't be surprised if those people (and their friends) start to dislike you and act accordingly.

What alternative do you offer? Forcing people to buy bread from the bigotted baker at gunpoint? Or forcing people to keep using Mozilla even though it's represented by a man who tried to take away their rights?

It would be nice if the world could be broken down into nice, neat piles of black and white, good and evil, but the real world is inevitably more complicated than that, and pretending otherwise is not useful or productive.

I notice you carefully avoided answering my original question, though. Is that because you didn't understand it, or because you couldn't?

If it was a serious offer, and the company could show that was the position he was best suited for, then no. Otherwise, it would clearly be a ruse to try to force him out, and the law actually takes such things into account. (Which makes your suggestion a straw man.)

A serious offer, for a job that would suit his skills would easily defeat any claims of unlawful termination. A insult obviously intended to pressure him into quitting might not. If you can't figure out the difference between the two, then I recommend you stay away from any job that involves interactions with the law, or the public.

The key word there is "lead". Show me where it said he should leave the company, rather than merely take a different role within the company, and I might concede you have a point. But if mere employment is equivalent to leading, then my employers are going to be in for some big surprises tomorrow! :)

How did he attempt to limit the rights of others?

Duh, by attempting to take away the rights of people. (Same-sex marriage was legal in California at the time.) I don't know how much more obvious it could be. The fact that he has the right to say it doesn't mean he wasn't attempting to limit the rights of others.

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from all consequences. If your local baker were campaigning to repeal the 19th amendment, would you argue that women (or people who like women) who refuse to buy his products are infringing his rights somehow? If so, you have one of the stupidest definitions of "I'll defend to the death your right to say it" I've ever heard.