The current mess this country is in is pretty much the result of an incompetent back-and-forth between elected governments that always try to push through some bullshit to get re-elected. Several years back, a "left"/green coalition (the chancellor from back then coincidentally got into a leading position at Russias gas racket Gazprom when he was done with that) actually decided to phase out nuclear power with a set timeframe. Nobody in the industry gave a shit by then, because everyone banked on the next government reverting the whole thing. There were also enough loopholes in there to drive the entire US nuclear arsenal through without anyone bothering: stuff like transferring lifetime from new, safer reactors to old crappy ones that were already beyond their planned lifetime. Why? Simple: the old ones were fully written off, and everything they produced was pure profit.

Some years later, enter right-conservative/capitalist government (the one we have now), the whole thing was actually scrapped for good! The industry rejoiced, but of course they continued generating income through the financing plan for renewables. Politics didn't care: they actually tax the tax, so more taxes on top of higher fees!

Some years later, enter the tsunami and upcoming elections, it was, of course top priority for our current ruling fascists (actually those are the ones at least partly responsible for some Greek islands having no water sometimes, austerity measures can be fun) to make it their idea to phase out nuclear power. Now. No thought, no brains, just now. Of course, in the past years, nobody bothered to invest in the infrastructure because the whole thing was canned earlier in the legislative period.

Oh, of course we also stopped paying for ITER, so we will always need to import some fossil fuel, preferably through the new pipeline from Russia, to meet base demand, so that was a smart move.

That "plan" deserves shooting of everyone involved, not recommendation.

Code editors (at least most of them) are still stuck in a dark age where everything comes down to hand-crafted ASCII-art, which is complete and utter bullshit. Editors could and should work much closer, if not directly on, the AST of the language in question, and completely abstract away all those pesky details like indenting scopes or formatting comment blocks "properly". That stuff should be left to user preference and style sheets.

But I guess that would put an immediate end to the religious zeal displayed in tabs-vs-spaces (it's of course ts=8 sw=4 noexpandtab, noobs!), would not mask syntax errors in gobs of meticulously crafted gunk, and take all the "fun" out of programming.

It's bullshit like that which makes the Linux biotope unsuitable for the desktop and other fields, and shows why the GPL is destructive, not useful for anything interesting, and generally not a well thought-of concept.

It shows why extremism is destructive in any field.

You may all bitch and moan about "proprietary closed shit", but at the end of the day, that very shit provides viable and accessible interfaces for people to do interesting stuff with.

"We will just use the moon as a projection surface to gather spectroscopic data from a tiny speck moving across the sun. Because we can. We're that awesome."

Men and their toys ;-)

The official Google party line is "we want the best of the best (of the best, SIR!)". As such, having a quota would be complete and utter bullshit for them, since it'd artificially bias their hiring process.

The GPL traditionally can't deal with any language "above" assembly and maybe C. As soon as a language allows "modern" features like generics or even crazy stuff like open classes, it becomes impossible to draw a clear line between projects. This effectively means that GPLed code really becomes a fast-spreading plague.

Stuff like the Asshole GPL don't really help acceptance, creating infection vectors across service boundaries.

All in all, it was fun while it lasted. Some highly encapsulated projects like the Linux kernel may stick with an old, benign version of the license, but it doesn't have a future in today's environment.

TL;DR: Never before in history could we have slacked off in hedonism as much as we could now, and here we are whining that we aren't able to work our asses off!

That burning feeling? That's your body telling you not to eat that.

You eating that anyway? Bannable offence.

I'm blacklisting *.facebook.com, their CDN (fbcdn.net), and connect.facebook.net in ABP (the connect rule is older since it used to break a bunch of sites when the service started and was even more unreliable than it is today). The other solution would be to just make my home DNS auth for those zones, which I've done for a bunch of other crap like doubleclick, making that stuff NXDOMAIN.

Additionally, unplug it and make make sure to stick the doors open!

That way you'll have a nice, defrosted, functional fridge and freezer when you come back, and not a furry mold incubator that was taken out by a surge then the mains came back on at 40V over specs. Take the chance to rub it out with some good household cleaner, and refill.

Also holds for student apartment fridges over longer breaks. Been there.

Ride the wave, get some public exposure, but in the end they just spouted some rubbish.

I wonder what the carbon footprint of all that fake research is.

Right now, the whole "Linux on the desktop" brouhaha is failing at the point where I have the choice of either

• using a pre-3.0 kernel and having my desktop "experience" freeze for up to 30 seconds every time an application does something graphically challenging like, say, drawing a 32x32 icon, or
• using a current kernel and at some point have X corrupt random drawing surfaces until the whole thing is entirely unusable.

And that's not even starting with the overly half-assed state most "desktop" applications are in. Most of KDE is a pile of ugly hacks that manages to get worse with each iteration, only to be beaten by whatever cruft Mozilla is shoving out the door, actually losing features with every "release". Gnome is quickly going towards a point where they will be a sad imitation of an Apple UI without any usability or skillful design. The office suites are trying to rip off their commercial counterparts, but mostly fail because they suffer from an extreme amount of legacy ballast.

This is not about "arguments", this is about failing to get the basics right. Linux doesn't belong on a productive desktop by a long shot, unless your idea of a desktop still is a bunch of terminal windows running vim/emacs/ed (or if that meets your requirements).

Really, the most annoying part of a mumorpuger is the "community" that forms like an accretion disk around the game itself, usually a bunch of pushy whining kids who won't ever be satisfied, will always feel underpowered with their favourite in-game character, and threaten to leave to other games for years instead of packing up and leaving.

If there was a technology to eliminate actual players from those games, it would improve the communities a lot. We are finally getting closer to a point where it becomes possible. Exciting times.

I fully endorse obvious warning badges like that.

It would be immediately obvious when someone performed a MitM attack using a valid certificate for "webmail". Why? Because the real certificate is signed by a ghetto CA that isn't trusted by any of the "major" vendors, and both the certificate and some of the intermediates have long since expired.

I'll be worried if I can access that site without a bunch of ugly warnings popping up.