This is the year of the netbook, the cheap car, and next thing you know, they'll be selling houses made out of cardboard for dirt cheap, too.

I feel the same way. I loved BeOS back in its heyday. Maybe you should check out Haiku. It is supposed to be an open-source re-implementation of BeOS in such a way that provides source and binary compatibility with the last commercial version of BeOS, and then to proceed from there with new research. It finally has GCC 4, as of January, which means that it's not stuck in the "classic" 2.95 days of GCC anymore. This will help speed along development considerably. I hope to see a great comeback!

You know what's incredibly funny? If they did use an evil tool to uncover every exploit in open source code, to make the FOSS community look bad, they'd be shooting themselves in the foot because the bugs would get fixed at warp speed. Beyond the initial "bad" publicity they'd generate for FOSS (there's no such thing as bad publicity), the joke would be on them because they'd still be stuck with their bugs but we'd be free of ours. :-)

Let me modify that suicide joke for the GP:

Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Friends do assist M$ addicted friends in upgrading to Ubuntu.

Heh heh... my favorite Linux distro. :-)

SVN runs under Windows. GCC runs under Windows. Gimp runs under Windows. Apache runs under Windows. Hell, just about any project with a configure script will either compile for Windows as-is, or will after slight modifications. FOSS has nothing to do with whether it runs under Windows or not.

Yes, it has merit. That is, it has merit if you're the one who somehow convinced the government (or other rich organization) to give you millions of dollars in research grants. You get a nice house, a nice car, send your kids to a nice private school, take a glance at the sky, and tell us that you're getting closer by the day to finding a twin planet. :-)

Mod parent up. This is a very good description of the issues affecting the possibility of locating a twin Earth. I, too, believe that you won't find a planet to match the conditions here on Earth. Maybe you can find something with a similar gravity and a similar atmosphere, so you'll be able to walk around on it without wearing a space uniform and your body won't get all messed up from being too light or too heavy. But then again, I doubt you'll have a similar enough climate. Or 24-hour days. Or the right temperature. In short, there are so many issues that you need to take into consideration. I know someone will find fault with what I'm about to say, but the general order of things here on Earth suggests that the whole system was created by God to operate in this manner. There are just too many variables, where any one of them being off by 1% would screw up the whole system, that you can't just write it off as being pure luck. And the parent is totally right about the moon, now that I think of it. If it didn't "chase" the sun at just the right speed, and if the Earth didn't spin at the right speed, then the phase of the moon would change throughout the night, and we as a civilization would have no concept of a calendar, except to the extent that we have the concept of the day and the repeating cycle of seasons.

You're right that 7 is leaner because Vista was a market flop. However I disagree that it flopped because it tried to do things people aren't ready for. People are ready for everything it was supposed to do. No. It flopped because of two reasons. First, it did not work properly. Second, it was painfully slow even on bad ass hardware. Vista flopped for these two reasons so 7 is a big focus shift to making things actually work and making the OS as a whole make more efficient use of resources. Nobody wants to sit around and wait endlessly while their Core 9 Septuagint with 50 exabytes of RAM chugs away to repaint a window because you had the audacity to move the mouse while it was processing something. That is why Vista flopped. That is why 7 is being made leaner. Netbooks have something to do with it, but not a whole hell of a lot.

Dude, you totally miss the point. In the Christian and Jewish religions, human life is THE most sacred and holy thing and when human life is in danger, whether from old age or from some other danger, you are supposed to do everything in your power to try to save that life. It has nothing to do with how much you really believe or don't believe, and everything to do with a deep-down-inside knowledge that life is so holy that every effort must be made to create life, hence religious families with many children and the aversion to abortion, and to prolong life as much as possible. Yes, when your time comes, it comes, but you're supposed to fight for your life to the very end. There is another factor: In both religions, there is the saying that God helps those who help themselves. If you're told you don't have too much longer to live and you say, "Oh well, I'm done for," then you can expect to die pretty soon because you've given up. It's like being in a race and giving up just because the odds are against you. But if you fight to the very end, then with your strong will to live and your strong belief that God will help you because you help yourself, you MIGHT get to live, but you DEFINITELY get the knowledge that if you die anyway, at least you tried. At least you don't die a coward. No such religious person will lie on their death bed and suddenly think, "Oh my God, maybe there's no God." On the contrary. As you get older, you'll have a tendency to believe in God, unless you're just plain dumb.

There's a billboard next to a highway nearby that reads, "ATHEIST: Someone who believes that nothing made everything. A scientific impossibility!"

You think about that now.

Sir, do not underestimate my knowledge of the Star Wars universe.

...

Oh, wait.

Just look at how DAMN long it takes people to get out of the plane when you've landed safely at the airport. If you're back in seat 34C, you can expect to wait for what seems like forever before the jerks in front of you finally move out of your way. Now imagine doing this when the plane is flying straight down with flames shooting out of the engines, with the screaming, yelling, parents, children, confusion, jerks, and all the other stuff the parent posted.

Let me get this straight. So you're not allowed to see which sites are on the blacklist but if you link to one you get fined $11,000 a day? How the hell are you supposed to avoid linking to something that you don't know you're not supposed to link to? All Australians are stupid and I'll justify that statement. Those Australians who work in government are stupid for putting together such a stupid thing. And the rest of the Australians are stupid for allowing such a government to exist at all.

Barges into the server market? This almost makes it sound as if there's something wrong with that. I'm all for as many players as possible in the market. Competition can only improve things for everyone.

You're absolutely right in what you say. Our lead programmer some years back was supposedly the biggest baddest programming genius on the planet. He didn't poop in the lobby or harass the women but he was definitely the person you did *not* want to talk to. He was cranky in the morning. He was cranky during lunch. He was cranky in the afternoon. Hell, come to think of it, he was always cranky! He pushed everybody away so that heaven forbid, you wouldn't touch the sections of code that he determined were for his magic touch only. Those were obviously the most critical sections of the code, in technical *and* in business terms.

Fast forward a few years. (Actually rewind because this is in the past.) He was let go. The company damn nearly fell apart because that software, the flagship product, was totally unreliable and customers were fuming. And it was because of the software. Somehow we survived, and along with several other people, I was put in charge of going through the code to determine what it would take to fix it. We looked through it and decided it would be better to commit suicide than to try to fix this thing.

Let me tell you a little about it. First of all, there was no organization. Unrelated functions would be located together, while closely related functions were strewn about across many translation units. Nothing was declared static. Many of the function prototypes and extern declarations did not match the actual definitions. But this is only the very minor stuff. Things that could be done in a single line of code were implemented in the most retarded way possible. (Think Rube Goldberg machine, only in software.) Error checking? Sometimes, and even then, wrong. Every imaginable problem related to the use of pointers, multithreading, files, you name it. And the worst part? He did not use any form of version control, so other than the current bleeding edge sources (what you would call the head of the trunk), there was no source for any other version.

And this guy was some kind of genius? NO! He didn't push us all away so we wouldn't "mess up" his perfect work. He did that so nobody would discover that his work was shit. Pure shit. It worked, this software. That's the miracle. But it only worked somewhat.

We described the situation to management and everyone promptly decided to throw the whole damn thing away and start over. The new system is just fine.

Somebody once pointed out to me that the cemeteries are full of irreplaceable people. In other words, in a world full of billions and billions of people, where to use computer related jobs as an example, so many people work in this sector that the small subset that participates in open source development is so enormous that you can find *any* kind of software in open source, and most of it is pretty damn clever *and* well documented, you can't convince me that there is nobody else who can do some programming job or another, even if the job is something outrageously complicated. You think skyscrapers, airplanes, hell why go that far, the computer hardware itself, you think all that got built because there doesn't exist another person on this planet smarter than irreplaceable Josh or our grumpy idiot programmer? I'm sorry but every single person in the world is irreplaceable. And yet we're all going to die one day. The certainty of that is just below the certainty of your taxes going up every year. When you have some jack ass like that working for you, you weigh all the options like a responsible businessman and then promptly get rid of him. As many here have already said, it's more important to be a pleasant person who can write software than some supposedly genius who nearly (or completely) destroys the whole company.

The solution to this problem is very simple. After you have an accident, you go to your social profiles and document, as accurately and as specifically as possible, exactly how the accident affected you, including the specific areas of your body that have been affected, how much each area hurts on a scale of 1 to 10, what activities you find difficult or impossible following the accident, etc. Be sure to mention the related expenses that you are incurring. To add a dramatic flair, motion to quash the subpoena that asks to see your profiles and produce them begrudgingly when your motion is denied.

Alternately you should always write your profile entirely in 1337 5p33k so that if such a subpoena should ever come, the court will have to obtain an expert witness to translate the content. |\/|y L1f3 ha5 b3c0m3 teh suxx0rz!!