For now. US and Iran used to be allies too.

Hmm, I might have to look into that. The old laptop got scrapped by the repair shop (motherboard was fried, new parts unobtainable) and they sent me a new one. That touch pad sucks donkey balls (also Synaptic), but I never read the manual, just figured they did their usual thing and fucked up a good system in the name of $whatever.

My old HP laptop had the best touch pad I've ever come across, made by Synaptic. The beauty of it was that it had a designated area for scrolling and could be turned off completely with a button at the top. The software "driver/spyware" that came with the laptop though was shit, I agree, the touch pad worked just fine with standard drivers installed.

Fucking spot on. Have a... uhm... well, I guess a redundant comment is all I've got.

Open source in all the places where it does not matter. When they release their ranking algorithm we can talk.

Not likely. Even if they were serious scientists, they're still working within the confines of an amusement park. They have bean counters to answer to, and to them the "science" derived from keeping the animals is a slight PR bonus, not their reason to exist.

Serious, non-hyperbolic, gets-stuff-done developers? Shit, I dunno, maybe you're right...

That was the point though. But software engineering is not treated with respect because 90% of the product is invisible. With regard to the reply you've made below about aerospace engineering, you're right, that is a new field too - but the product is visible, you can see what your money is buying. And even though it's flight, it still builds upon engineering principles accrued over a much longer time span than software engineering does. There no MBAs heading up engineering teams designing and building planes. There are very, very few amateur plane builders selling their rickety winged contraptions (at least not ones made for passenger flights).

Software Development is still a young field. Someone who wants a bridge built can look back in history and see all the horrible consequences of not shutting up and listening to the people who know better than them. There are strict regulations, there are guidelines to follow. Humans have been building stuff since the first ax hit a tree, while the consequences of faulty software has just recently started to manifest itself to the general public. Comparing software engineering to regular engineering is an unfair comparison when regular engineering is built upon hundreds, if not thousands, of years of experience.

I heard a saying once, maybe it was here on /. The reason an older programmer is slower than a younger one is because of the number of answers he has to the question "what could possibly go wrong?". That is true on a larger scale for engineering vs. software engineering.

Most large software projects are run by people who have fuck all clue what it entails to produce good software, people who don't see the value in spending another couple grand on a few more weeks of design, people who have clients they sold vapor to and now need the product yesterday. Software that works is easy to produce, and nobody can see the rickety scaffolding underneath, so it is really hard to argue with a non technical manager that something needs to be changed - after all, the shit works doesn't it?

I would, if Chrome supported a NoScript type plugin.

Right, because billions of individual bags of almost pure protein exist as an isolated island in the food chain - bats, fish, frogs and toads, to name a few, all feed on mosquitoes.

The obvious solution is for OP to just stop eating. It can't be that hard, millions of people starve to death of their own free will every year.

Except that this does not get rid of the mosquitoes, only one mosquito species - the rest are perfectly fine. This "solution" does not solve the problem, it just shifts which species carry the disease at the cost of unknown damage to an ecosystem - who knows, the locals might be part of that chain somewhere along the line, and you end up killing the same number of people for a different reason. You can't remove an entire section of the food chain and expect nothing to change - best case scenario is that another species of mosquito takes over. As the quoted ecologist says, there is already a species prevalent in the area, that is also a carrier.

I was asking a question you fucking dimwit - nothing gets in the way of spewing more poorly thought out garbage for you does it?

Says the oil lobby?