I suspect that the law actually has more to do with the incredibly vindictive, recent initiative to completely outlaw homelessness within American cities. This is another means of criminalising dumpster diving.

I can't remember the last time I did a Linux distro install, where I did not use the minimal net install image, when one was available. I always expect any distro's large default install to be full of superfluous crap; so I do not necessary resent Debian because theirs also is.

My philosophy is that there is a direct relationship between the quality of anything I receive, and the amount of work I put into it myself. So if I get something where all of the usual decisions have been made for me, then I consider it only natural that it will be horrible.

While bash is by far my favourite UNIX shell, I've seen various bits of evidence that have indicated a need for major refactoring, for quite a while now. I would look into it myself, but there is always the risk that whatever changes I proposed would be rejected. Perhaps I should think about creating a fork, although that would be a lot of work.

Again, more elitism that is being modded +5, Insightful. Your bias is showing, Slashdot.

This is one of those guys who jumped on the "I want to be a web designer" bandwagon many years ago when the field was hot and it was easy to churn out crap and make money at it. He learned (by cargo cult copypasta and/or Whatever for Dummies books?) to get by in PHP and Javascript over the years. But he never really understood what he was doing.

So...

An Anonymous Coward responds to the OP article with an extended string of smug, elitist ad hominem, uses this to construct a strawman argument, and gets modded +5, Insightful.

What are we to make of this, fellow Slashdotters?

The Aesir already have women among them. What about Freya, or the Valkyries? Marvel don't need to do this.

I'd actually be interested to know the opinions of any genuine Asatruar who read these comics, about this development. Do you consider it sacrilege?

I have overwhelmingly observed that the majority of computer users, do not want a truly free, democratic, autonomous, or self-empowering scenario, where their use of a computer is concerned.

With computer use, we now essentially have two groups of people. A minority of specialised, elitist programmers who write software for an almost completely unskilled, disinterested, and technophobic majority; and said technophobic majority themselves.

It seems that the proverbial "owner driver," of computers (a group among whom I gladly self-identify) are becoming a dying breed. I sat up all night last night, until 7 am this morning, compiling and re-compiling sources for my new NetBSD/amd64 vm. I have found use of that system tricky; and the current install is my third attempt. It is uneven in some areas, and there are many jagged edges. Nevertheless, I am determined, and while it has been somewhat frustrating, I have enjoyed the process; to the point where I have since only had six hours' sleep, in part due to my level of enthusiasm to get back into it.

People need to understand that maintaining their freedom requires vigilance, personal initiative and responsibility, and active defense. The psychopaths are tireless in their attempts to take it away from us; and more, to convince us that we should actually want them to take it away.

Learn to program yourself; but when I say this, I do not merely mean the new languages that are popular, which will win you approval from a manager. I mean the old languages, like C, FORTH, Tcl/Tk, shell, awk, m4, and LaTeX. Learn simple HTML, and use RMS' own web site as a code example if you do not know how. Java might bring you money, but in my observation at least, it will not bring you joy.

Use the BSDs. Get comfortable with compiling something from source code. A lot of applications are designed much more smoothly than they used to be, so this is nowhere near as difficult as it once was. Get VMware Player, and install an Open or NetBSD guest. Use it to teach yourself the command line and shell scripting, and then realise that there is no reason for you to pay hundreds of dollars to Microsoft for Windows if you don't want to. You can buy a perfectly good computer from here, which has completely Free Software compatible hardware, and then run one of the BSDs natively, and dual boot it with Windows if you want. I don't hate Microsoft at all; I just think people should have that choice.

In addition to your use of Twitter, consider downloading XChat 2 and discovering Internet Relay Chat. Many open source software projects have IRC channels, so if you do start using *BSD, that will also be a good way of getting help if you need it.

In addition to your use of Reddit, get Forte Agent and find out if your service provider maintains a Usenet server. If they don't, Forte sells Usenet access at $3/month for 20GB.

I know many of you want the new, shiny thing; but voluntary simplicity is becoming a major movement in other areas of life as well, and truthfully I really think it's time we brought it to computer use as well. I am certified as a Permaculture designer, and I truthfully view use of the BSDs as being as close as I can get to using a computer in a Permacultural manner. The word Permaculture is short for "permanent culture," and UNIX is timeless.

I salute the German government in adopting this measure, quite seriously. I am migrating to virtualised NetBSD/amd64 myself, and aside from using pkgsrc in order to install Xorg, am probably going to rely on manual installation of packages in named directories in either /usr/local or /opt.

I fully believe that maximising simplicity, to the point of adopting seemingly primitive solutions, is the most effective means of maintaining reliability and security. There truly is no school like the old school. Others can call me a Luddite if they wish, but that is a title that I will wear with pride.

Better that, than what the likes of Verizon want. While they are not always, in this particular debate, the Randian demographic are my enemies. This is one case where the corporations have to be stopped, and I am entirely willing to see government or any other available means employed in order to do so.

After all, everyone knows that drones are intended exclusively for performing targetted assassinations, not potentially beneficial, civilian applications like advertising.

What on Earth were those real estate people thinking?

The haters and trolls notwithstanding, Minix was a worthy accomplishment; and may yet prove more important in the future than first thought, given Red Hat's ongoing destruction of Linux.

Professor Tanenbaum is a great man; and truthfully, I have always wished that Linus Torvalds had been kinder to him. Not all of us are necessarily meant to stand fully in the spotlight, and although perhaps both history and the debates proved Linus right, it would not have cost anything to allow the Professor to keep his dignity.

May he have as much time with his grandchildren as he wishes; and when the time comes, an easy and joyous passing.

Because the only people who claim that have "harming the US" as a goal.

I don't think anyone should have harming the American people , as a goal, at all. The complete abolition of the American government , on the other hand, is a goal which I think is overwhelmingly in the interests of humanity as an entire species, and in seeking such, the American people themselves should be leading the charge.

> I think this entire discussion suffers from survivor bias: those who advocate strongly for Fortran have not given serious consideration to anything else.

I've just honestly never heard of OO being used anywhere, where it wasn't a crutch for bad programmers; with again, the appeal to modernity fallacy being used to justify it.

I consider computer programming in its' current form, to very largely be a field in serious decline, and ruled by baseless hubris, to be honest. That is also the reason why I'm so wary of the appeal to modernity. Most of the time in my observation, newer methods are actually markedly inferior to older ones, rather than an improvement.

I think a big part of the reason for this, is because the emphasis is constantly on reducing programmer effort. What nobody seems to remember, however, is that needing to apply effort, is how you become good at something.

So we now have spoon-fed, degenerate Millenials, awash in cheap CPU cycles and coding in C++. They don't need to learn efficiency; they don't need to learn how to do things truly well. The complexity of the software they write, also perpetuates their delusions that they are skilled at what they do; when the truth is the exact opposite.

And that was a shame, because many new generations of scientific programmers did not get exposed to new languages with new expressive power (such as OO) that could solve new problems.

I've only ever seen two groups of people, who advocated OO as some sort of inherent virtue in itself.

a} Psychopathic, buzzword-obsessed, clueless IT managers.

b} Elitist, equally clueless programmers, who mainly advocate OO and related languages, (such as C++) because they enjoy ego tripping about the fact that they can write code that nobody else is able to read, rather than actually getting real work done.

The main argument that both groups use to advocate OO, is the appeal to modernity fallacy. I.e., the idea that "modernity," is an inherent virtue, purely for its' own sake.