While in the US there is a generally accepted right to self defense, the legal theory in the UK is that fighting crime is the police's job.

This brings up a question. It's well established in the US that the police have no responsibility to protect your life; if you call 911 when the Bad Guys show up and get killed before the police arrive, your next of kin don't get to sue the cops. (Look up Warren v. District of Columbia for an example.) It's not that much of a problem here as you have the right to defend yourself, with deadly force if necessary. In a legal environment where that right to self-defense isn't guaranteed, as it isn't in the UK, does that then imply a potential liability if their police don't do what has been decided is their job? (I suspect it doesn't, but I could be wrong.)

Like others I found the headline confusing. I read it as "Researchers are predicting the use of Wikipedia as a vector for the spread of disease". This may mean that:

• Disinformation and ignorance are diseases.
• Memes and computer viruses are diseases.
• Wilipedia contains information that leads to depression.
• Instructions on Wikipedia lead to substance abuse.
• This is getting entertaining, fill in your own reason here.

12 Power Cycle Count is relevant on the EZRXs (greens); that keeps increasing unless you do certain things to prevent it, and I think (this is murky) I saw a weak correlation between this going into way up, and the drives failing sooner.

I've not done anything special with the two that I have in a media server at home. This stat is at 5 on the older drive and 4 on the newer drive. By comparison, a Seagate Barracuda LP in the same box is at 128 (it's quite a bit older than the WD drives), and the boot drive, a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 I grabbed out of the unused-drive box when whatever drive it replaced failed, has 365 spinups logged.

(Looking at the stats for all of my drives, the outlook for that 7200.11 isn't so good. :-P )

Eight years ago, Ruby Raley and I published (in Cutter IT Journal) an article entitled "The Longest Yard: Reorganizing IT for Success" (you can read it here). Our basic premise is that the current "industrial" model of IT hiring/management -- treating IT engineers like cogs or components -- is fundamentally flawed, and that a model based on professional sports teams would likely work much better. Having spent 20 years analyzing troubled or failed software projects, I believe we need a significantly different approach on hiring and retaining the right IT engineers. ..bruce..

The "programmers" can scream all they want but VB with Access did one job and did it VERY well which was allowing anybody to build single function programs quickly and easily. VB code was very human readable

I'm stuck maintaining some Access projects. "Readable" isn't an attribute I'd apply to most of the VBA "code" I've run across.

One of the definitions I found was:

One who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.

I am sure that fits. While SpaceShip II is mainly intended for a non-exploration purpose, the program has resulted in some significant advances in rocketry and White Knight II has significant non-tourism use. These pilots have been involved in other space efforts, I remember the one who was injured from the Rotary Rocket test flights. There are lots of safer ways for these folks to make as much money as a test pilot is paid. They do what they do to advance our progress in aeronautics and space.

Martyrs? Who killed them for their beliefs?

Go away, troll. They certainly died while pursuing something intensely important that they were willing to risk their lives for. The fact that you weren't around to pull the trigger makes them no less martyrs.

That's probably a ClearQAM signal that he is receiving. Most HDTVs in North America have dual-standard 8VSB/QAM64 tuners so they can receive both broadcast and cable channels. No CableCard required.

It's more likely that it's a mix of that and analog. In Las Vegas at least, Cox makes all channels below 100 available as unencrypted analog video, receivable by pretty much every TV built since the '40s or so. Local channels (including the subchannels many of them have offered since the digital transition) are also available in unencrypted digital form. It works out to probably somewhere around 70-80 channels, with maybe a half-dozen in HD, a dozen or so in digital SD, and the balance in analog SD.

I cut off TV service about a year ago, switching to data-only service. They've not bothered blocking these channels, so they're still available. My TVs are set up to tune them in, but I can't remember the last time I watched something that wasn't streamed from across the Internet or played back from the file server on my LAN.

The military and corporate planes have had rear facing passenger seats for ages. It certainly doesn't affect babies being carried in rear facing car seats. There's all kinds of safety reasons why this is a good idea, but I can't find anything substantial to back up your claim.

I've flown on 737s with rear-facing seats. Southwest used to have them...last time I recall seeing them was in the mid-'90s:

http://www.blogsouthwest.com/flashback-fridays-southwest-airlines%E2%80%99-interiors-over-years/

They blame changed safety regs, strangely enough:

When Southwest introduced the 737-700 in January 1998, new federal safety regulations doomed the lounge areas. No rear-facing seats could meet this new safety requirement, and the -700s were delivered with all forward facing seating. Lounges in the -300s and -500s were phased out, and only the -200 retained lounges until they were retired at the start of 2005.

Anyway, I have better uses of my time than to waste another minute with you.

We knew what was going on when you ran your anti-IBM campaign, sometimes even positioning yourself as arguing on behalf of our community. It was a way to lend credence to IBM and MS arguments during the SCO issue. To state otherwise is deceptive, perhaps even self-deceptive.

Florian, you would not be devoting all of this text to explaining yourself if you didn't feel the need to paint your actions in a positive light. That comes from guilt, whether you admit it to yourself or not.

Go write your app, and if you actually get to make any money with it you can give thanks, because it will happen despite what you worked for previously. Keep a low profile otherwise because your credibility is well and truly blown and you can only make things worse. And maybe someday you can really move past this part of your life. But I am not holding out much hope.

I am convinced it's a mistake for this non-profit to create a software development team from a rotating pool of volunteers to write software upon which it is critically dependent.

Yes, it is, for a whole host of reasons that I'm sure will be expanded upon here shortly. I've spent 20 years dealing with troubled and failed IT projects, and one of the biggest mistakes I see time and again is an organization trying to create a mission-critical project, often in a compressed time frame, using developers who are not an experienced, functioning team. You can usually throw into that first-time adoption of some silver-bullet technology and/or methodology. So, what you get it, "OK, let's get 10 random programmers who have never delivered a working system together as a team, and they're going to develop this mission-critical system from scratch in 4 months using Swift and Agile, even though none of the programmers have ever used either. And we can add more programmers if we start to fall behind."

Having the programmers be volunteers is even worse, since they are now self-selecting based on their own interest, instead of being chosen for, you know, actual skills, talent, experience, and so on.

Sigh. ..bruce..

So, I see this as rationalization.

The fact is, you took a leadership position, and later turned your coat for reasons that perhaps made sense to you. But they don't really make sense to anyone else. So, yes, everyone who supported you then is going to feel burned.

You also made yourself a paid voice that was often hostile to Free Software, all the way back to the SCO issue. Anyone could have told you that was bound to be a losing side and you would be forever tarred with their brush.

So nobody is going to believe you had any reason but cash, whatever rationalization you cook up after the fact. So, the bottom line is that you joined a list of people who we're never going to be able to trust or put the slightest amount of credibility in.

And ultimately it was for nothing. I've consistently tried to take the high road and it's led to a pretty good income, I would hazard a guess better than yours, not just being able to feel good about myself.