How isn't it verifiable? The whole thing that made this extra, extra evil was that they were deanonymizing their clients for everyone to see. Run a web server? Access it from your phone, see if your subscriber ID is still there in a header.

Don't SAP have their own RDBMS, called SAP DB or MaxDB? It was even released as free software a few years back (then they changed their mind and went back to proprietary). Do you mean that despite that, the only database backend that works well with large SAP installations is Oracle?

Thinking that farmers from Ghana will not be able to make a rational decision between buying industrial seed every year or saving whatever strain they have already from year to year is a not so subtle form of racism.

Or maybe what is or isn't rational varies based on local conditions. Capital availability is a concern. Distribution infrastructure (and differences in cost based on same) is a concern.

Ghana is one of the best-governed countries in its region, but even so, there's still an infrastructure gap -- a decade ago (which is as recent as I had knowledge) you had daily rolling blackouts even in the capitol as a matter of course; electrical generation capacity wasn't growing with demand.

Accusing those who disagree with you of assuming anything other than rational behavior in light of full knowledge of local conditions strikes me as starkly unreasonable.

Sorry kids, Library use is copying. Copying is not a bad thing, you save a lot of time by doing it.

Shared libraries or static libraries?

Static library use involves copying at the link phase. Shared library use doesn't. Depending on your license, the distinction can be legally significant.

And, well, that's the thing. Those of us who are professionals think about liability... which is why we can actually find a large company willing to buy our startups without doing an absolute freakout (or requesting a huge discount for cost of reimplementations) analyzing the codebase during due diligence.

"However, I do like other people paying for things I can use. You know, good roads, schools, a health service, mass transportation and so on."

Well, uhh, yeah. The whole point is that that kind of thing is so expensive that no one person can pay for it alone.

Is this supposed to be controversial?

Isolation. The same reason you want different apps to have their own processes instead of having the whole of userspace in one big blob. You can give processes reduced privileges to reduce the scope of exploits, hangs and crashes don't take down more than they have to, and leaks don't force you to restart the entire system to recover resources.

Plus it makes for simpler concurrency. Kind of handy when you've got a stop-the-world garbage collector if you can just split the world into many smaller independent units, each able to run at the same time and each with an order of magnitude less work to do and no synchronisation to worry about.

ASLR is a fuckload more effective when it has a reasonably sized address space to work with, and 2^32 is miles away from being reasonable. It's the difference between an attacker having to guess one of 8 locations and one of 8 billion. Plus, memory mapping things is awesome, and also a fuckload easier with a reasonably sized address space.

And hey, some of us actually use our browsers quite a lot. Mine's eating 5.5G right now. So many windows and tabs, and absolutely no fucking reason whatsoever why that should be considered even slightly unreasonable.

Your company doesn't have a gym? And what do cycle commuters do?

When I didn't live a few blocks' walk from work, I wouldn't even start to consider an employer that didn't have showers at work.

Boredom is a big human factor in many accidents. We *should* be making a big deal about the boredom of people in charge of some incredibly dangerous weapons. Certainly in other safety related fields, boredom has resulted in serious fatal accidents (for example automation in airliners leading bored crews to trying experiments, leading to a crash). Attributing it to the "pussification of America" just shows this opinion to be rather ignorant of the serious consequences of ignoring human factors.

On the pussification of America, bring it on. If it makes the US a more peaceful place, and a country less likely to start wars, this bodes well for the planet. Pussification is good for our long term survival as a species now we have developed nuclear weapons.

I suspect we'll figure out how to transfer the contents of a human mind to a machine before we have the means to colonize Mars. I have the feeling that manned Mars missions similar to the Moon missions are still decades off, and an actual colonization attempt would be nothing short of centuries off.

Unless it's upwards of $5.3M in value, the estate doesn't even need to file.

I think he'll be okay.

In terms of sheer numbers, I'd guess you are right: more Win32 applications have been written since 1995 or so than there are apps for iOS. Especially if you include in-house software.

In terms of applications to do something most people want to do, which is a subjective measure I admit, iOS may have the lead. Particularly so if you look for software that's optimized for tablet use: there are a lot of very capable Windows programs which are rather less usable on a tablet than with a physical keyboard and mouse, whereas iOS apps are all designed around touchscreen use.

For example, I've been looking for a map program (similar to Google Maps) that runs on a handheld Windows 7 PC with attached GPS. It's surprising how few choices there are that do the basic function of showing your GPS position on a map, and aren't some crusty thing last updated in 2004. True, if I included Windows 8 "Metro" apps there would be a wider choice, but still it is dwarfed by what you get on Android or iOS. (FTR - in the end I went with Anquet Maps for hiking maps and Mapfactor PC-Navigator for city use.)

I owned a little Piaggio MP3 at the time -- that was my drive vehicle if for some reason I couldn't bike -- and yup, it's a great option... but, well, there's something to be said for arriving at work having just finished a nice workout as opposed to having just spent time breathing fumes on I-35. Did wonders for my stress level, and no better way to get exercise than to have it be over the course of accomplishing something you were going to do (and spend time and money on) anyhow.

Did you actually read my post at all? You're not getting any exercise on a Vespa.

On an Opti, you get where you're going, and you're maintaining an 80-100rpm cadence getting there.

The test pilot who unfortunately lost his life knew the risks. No one forced him to take the job. Equally no one should be able to tell him he couldn't do it because all he was testing was an aircraft to give rich people thrill rides. The article is just asinine.

Most users don't want to go that far on a bike.

Really? Where I'm from, "range anxiety" is a thing -- people buying an electric vehicle don't want to run out of power off in the middle of nowhere.

I was an Optibike owner back in the day, and active on their mailing list -- one of the questions we got most often from folks deciding on whether or not to buy was how realistic the range numbers were (something like 47 miles in economy mode on the internal battery alone, and 105 with the external touring battery). It's a very real concern to folks who haven't yet bought in and realized how little of that range they'll habitually use. :)