Submit Good Quality bug reports. Bug Reports are 10 a penny. Submit Good ones.

• Be exact about versions of the software and related software (distro, kernel etc.)
• Produce the smallest possible test case. NEVER say "it just happens when I do something with this 10000 line document I can't let your see."
• Be responsive in answering queries in the issue tracker for that issue. Try out patches and workarounds suggested and give feedback.
• Report the problem to the correct forum. Understand which is the correct forum. Understand the differences between distros, distro versions and original developer. Try work out if it's a packaging problem or a software problem.
• Try the latest version from the original developer. If that fixes the problem, reports this in the distros issue tracker as well.
• RTFM.
• Report bugs in The Fine Manual, preferably along with a suggested rewording.
• Test and Report bugs in Beta releases. Critical bugs reported then will get fixed before release. Bugs reported after release will probably only get fixed in the next release.

She can't break out the knife and do surgery at home....

Just don't piss her off Mr Bobbit.

The Gnome team is working with several university neurology departments to develop a patch for human nature that fixes this problem. It will be included in Gnome 4.

Don't you mean "Genome 4"?

Just imagine a drive-by printer return via truck mounted Trebuchet.

Oh the Geekiness!

Now you know what to do with a Trebuchet.

...why did we ever move away from statically linked binaries?

I waded through the replies with a fist full of mod points hoping to mod the cluefull up... but there weren't any!

The internet and especially all the Linux nodes on the internet are designed from the ground up to have a static IP addresses and IP names and be their own DNS and own Mail smarthost and web server and ....

Between the control freaks, the clueless, and the bean counters in Microsoft and the ISP's we have an internet with...

• an artificial scarcity of ip numbers and ip names that the ISP's can rort a fortune out of their users for a service that costs them less to provide than the cost of billing their customers for it.
• the vast majority of machines being dumb emasculated drones begging for content from the big media industries.
• an a tightly controlled web where peer to peer traffic is being squeezed out.

IPv6 will _never_ be allowed into the current mix.

AC said.. Last I checked we only had man eating birds, and the odd man eating Maori.

Yup,...it'd be a pretty Odd man that eats a Maori. Pretty tough buggers those. :-) A bit of a step up from Pit Bull I tell you!

...so you can't do your own RF development work...

So how do you know this even works? And you have already filed for a patent. No wonder you use to work for Microsoft.... you are really going about this arse about face!

Understand the market (who will buy it, what are you competing with, how much money will it save them, what are the laws)

Make it.

Make it testable.

Make it work.

Make it manufacturable.

Take out unit cost.

Start producing it....

Start marketing it, and if you have time patent it.

Hmm...

> Butterflies. What the OP needs are butterflies.
> http://xkcd.com/378/

XKCD doesn't seem to know emacs key chords very well. C-x M-c doesn't do anything useful....

Curiously enough
  M-x butterfly
does amazing physics.

;;;###autoload
(defun butterfly ()
  "Use butterflies to flip the desired bit on the drive platter.
Open hands and let the delicate wings flap once.  The disturbance
ripples outward, changing the flow of the eddy currents in the
upper atmosphere.  These cause momentary pockets of higher-pressure
air to form, which act as lenses that deflect incoming cosmic rays,
focusing them to strike the drive platter and flip the desired bit.
You can type `M-x butterfly C-M-c' to run it.  This is a permuted
variation of `C-x M-c M-butterfly' from url `http://xkcd.com/378/'."
  (interactive)
  (if (yes-or-no-p "Do you really want to unleash the powers of the butterfly? ")
      (progn
    (switch-to-buffer (get-buffer-create "*butterfly*"))
    (erase-buffer)
    (sit-for 0)
    (setq indent-tabs-mode nil)
    (animate-string "Amazing physics going on..."
            (/ (window-height) 2) (- (/ (window-width) 2) 12))
    (sit-for (* 5 (/ (abs (random)) (float most-positive-fixnum))))
    (message "Successfully flipped one bit!"))
    (message "Well, then go to xkcd.com!")
    (browse-url "http://xkcd.com/378/")))

Almost more, ahh, umm, curious is the existence of...

M-x animate-birthday-present

I'm using a fairly recent "bleeding edge" version of emacs, so your mileage may vary substantially.

...is going to work for a bunch of self-declared viciously stupid assholes and risk jail time for doing their job right?

If you read /. at 0, you get everything that any two mods shat on. Now suppose you're a Pez dispenser nut, and suppose you had previously rated a comment on Pez heads as Important and user X had rated it as Unimportant and user Y had rated it as Important. Then the next article to go by that had the signature of X says it's unimportant AND Y says it's unimportant... then probably it is and should be low ranked. Then the next article to go by that had the signature of X says it's unimportant AND Y says it's Important... then it should be ranked as Important level 2 (one for Y and one for -X who has an opposite bias to you) Now scale this up to many users and you need some serious vector maths plus some fuzzy stuff to cope with edit wars. To cope with edit wars I suggest this. Basically each edit would create a new page (old one still exists) with a slightly higher rank * the vector of bias for the editor than previous... So an edit war will merely result in a fork... with the branches essentially invisible to those of other biases.

According to my set of biases you have proved that crowd sourcing really works and improves accuracy and completeness. :-)

I hope they understood that a crowd sourced "source" does not reflect their Professors biases and hence shouldn't be used to extract approval from crusty old bastards.

<i>Do you never go anywhere without the Internet?</i>

As often as possible.

However the set of places that don't have my desk is even larger.