All source is open if it's worth it to someone.

That's what disassemblers are for.

I reverse-engineered the old Microsoft assembler for CP/M to give it an advanced feature it lacked and did it strictly on my own time and for my own private benefit (pre-DMCA).

You can be certain that open or closed, SOMEONE whose business is penetrating security has people dedicated to ensuring that there's source code to pore over for exploits.

You're either in the 1% with bad tax advisors or need to look at how you're calculating things.

I haven't paid 35% since people had lifetime employment and could travel without stripping naked.

You want everything AND a pony. Most of us can get enough blood pressure off the reported Federal rate alone, which is all the 1040 is intended for anyway. If that's not enough, next time you buy gas, read the numbers printed on the fuel pump. The lowest one is the actual gas price, the next highest one is the gas tax and the shockingly big one is the sum of them, which is what you pay at the register.

My property tax I know because the annual statement I get gives me a number that can be used as a deduction off Federal tax. State taxes you do another form for unless you're one of the lucky states, sales tax is what makes everything not cost what the sign in the window says it does.

Merchants are at liberty to find whatever tax solutions they can, but don't expect them to itemize out what they spent or saved on your sales receipt.

How do I pay my taxes?

Grudgingly, of course!

It's been double-sensationalized. The headline would lead one to believe that the IRS could steal your refund to pay for what your brother-in-law owes.

Within certain limits.

There was a time when I ran Xen because a paravirtual VM ran MUCH faster than an VMWARE guest OS. Not so true these days and on modern hardware, but back then, the difference was immense.

Xen has always been reliable for me. The main problem was what it did to networking. And it added injury to insult by zapping the MAC addresses on my NICs on a routine basis.

Supposedly Xen4 fixes that. They make YOU do all the network setup. Which ordinarily I'd resent, but at least when magic elves aren't meddling around in the configuration, I have a much easier time of it.

And that goes for NetworkManager, too!

Not just hiring and firing, but anywhere where you wish to be accepted seriously based on how you write.

The problem is non-standard writing is that every deviation is "speed bump" to comprehension. Sure, my relatives in Kentucky may own "worshing machines", but it's one thing to hear them say it and another to see it in print. Bad enough dealing with tyres on the quay through the month of February on Wednesdays, but at least we are used to seeing this kind of slop and don't have to stop and double-check while speed-reading.

Silly rules are silly, but no rules are confusion.

Who needs to worry about competition when you own the pipeline end-to-end?

In the 1700s, people started seriously experimenting with electricity, magnetism and general chemistry (as opposed to alchemy).

By the late 1800s we had thermionic valves and semiconductor rectifiers.

In 1949 we figured out how to combine semiconductors in order to make a "transfer resistor" (trans-istor). Followed rapidly by integrated circuits and avalanching into sophisticated nanometer circuitry.

There are still people alive who grew up on farms thinking that diodes and triodes were pretty neat new technogy and you can almost construct stuff like that using bear skins and stone knives. The hardest part, in fact, is the glass-blowing technology required, assuming you don't opt for some other similar vacuum-tight container.

A lot of modern civilization wouldn't be that hard to re-construct if we had the resources available. The knowledge is what took us so long to get here, and unless we lose all the knowledge and the knowledge about the knowledge, recovery wouldn't be a problem. What would hurt more is if we lost our transportation services. Most of what goes into modern electronics is not locally produced where I live.

So one of the most valuable professions might very well be landfill-miner, since the easiest way to get materials would be to extract them from what is now often buried as garbage.

That's what potatoes are for.

Well, if I prefer it, I evidently don't consider it subpar. And I do use it for my business.

FTFY

Actually, I prefer GnuCash. It isn't perfect, but at least it's not welded into Windows to the point where even exporting to Excel requires that the Gnucash machine actually has to have a copy of Excel. Because Intuit likes to launch the *CENSORED* Excel instead of doing a CSV or XLS export like everyone else does.

But they do anyway. I seem to recall a situation where something like an aircraft carrier was malfunctioning while under control of Windows NT.

Granted, for stuff like this, MS would have a different license that would (if we're getting our tax dollars worth) would have included on-site dedicated systems support, but it was still Windows NT, and as the standard license points out, it wasn't designed for fail-safe performance.

And considering some of the things I've seen it do, didn't provide it, either.

I don't know that I'd use the human body as a basis for an encryption system.

Human bodies are constantly having their (DNA) codes cracked.

By viruses, no less.