ultimately these restrictions serve no real purpose and just waste a lot of money in the form of time lost by both IT, administrative and research staff.

I'd be interested to see what evidence you have to support this claim. Dealing with e.g. the malware infestations and DMCA threats inevitably caused by people taking advantage of a network not blocking sketchy websites would probably also waste a lot of money and time.

Are you really claiming that there are more researchers legitimately investigating porn websites than there are horny frat boys who just want to jerk off in their dorm rooms and then steal a movie for later? More software companies who have not figured out a better way to deliver their product than emailing it to random employees than random employees who would install every "screensaver" emailed to them by a criminal? Really? Because that sure sounds pretty implausible to me.

Random Online Comp Shop Inc. isn't going to get the volume license discount that Dell/Lenovo get for shipping millions of licenses

See my post below. HP considers the additional cost of an OEM Windows license to be US$75 (Home Premium) or $100 (Professional).

Last I checked, HP was the single biggest PC manufacturer in the world. If there's a good volume discount going, I'm guessing they get it.

Now, maybe HP don't add as much crapware as more consumer-focused OEMs. But, well, I don't know how much the shovelware authors pay for each installation, but I really doubt it's more than a few dollars at most per program, and even Dell doesn't ship that many programs. They won't be offsetting a full $100 by any means. That, my friend is why the Microsoft tax is a real thing that costs real people real money if they don't want to use Windows. And that's terrible.

Does anyone honestly think that retailers would charge you $50 less (or whatever the cost of the Windows License is, probably closer to $15) if Windows wasn't installed?

Well, how about we ask the retailers?

I am looking right now at HP's "configure your laptop" screen in their online store.

The OS selection options they are offering me are:

• Genuine Windows 7 Professional 32 [add $0.00]
• Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64
• Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 [subtract $25.00]
• FreeDOS [subtract $100.00]

So, if you are right - if the cost of a Windows license is just $15 or so, there is no Microsoft tax, and computers are subsidized by Windows-only crapware - why is HP willing to refund me $100 on the spot if I choose not to have Windows?

I await your explanation with interest.

That's the precise problem. 1. the language was never designed, it accreted, and is mathematlcally impossible to describe fully in most sensible formats. 2. we can't throw it away because there's billions of words of text in it accumulated over ten years. 3. we can't throw it away because the existing editor base demand it stay because they're used to it.

Wait, are you talking about MediaWiki templating or PHP?

The ruling class of Japan is freaking the fuck out because they can't get their people to have kids.

That would be because the ruling class of Japan is a bunch of racists obsessed with the purity of Japanese blood.

So is a good chunk of Europe.

See above, but substitute "European culture".

Stop giving them fodder for their factories and machines.

And watch in amazement as they simply loosen immigration restrictions instead, and millions of Mexicans gladly rush northwards to a better life!

Seriously, the only reason Japan is hurting is because they make it so damn difficult for anyone else to settle there (even Chinese and Koreans, let alone anyone with a different eye shape or skin color), and the only reason western Europe is hurting is because so many of the immigrants offering cheap labor have the unfortunate habit of wearing a turban or headscarf. But it's the poor people in America who are virulently racist against Latin@s, not the rich ...

If the US cared about stealing oil, it would annex its main supplier ... which is, IIRC, Canada.

If I were to die today, most of my recent stuff would die with me, but my older offline backups are still unencrypted. And goodness knows what Google and Facebook would do with the stuff they have.

But supposing I live a normal lifespan, who has a clue? My data storage and privacy habits have changed unrecognizably in the last decade, just as they changed unrecognizably in the decade before that and the decade before that. Who knows what the next decade will bring, let alone the next 50-70 years, assuming that no medical breakthroughs in that time extend my life even further?

For example, just this morning I replaced Debian on my computer with the Twitter API. It works great, boot times are much faster. Now I'm going to uninstall Firefox and just access the web via the Facebook API.

But wouldn't variables declared in the middle of the function still have function scope anyway?

Not in the sense you appear to have in mind. This is C, not Javascript or Python. A variable declared halfway through the function has a scope half the size of one declared at the start, and cannot be accidentally read before it has been initialized.

And safer, too, since it means you can always see at a glance that every variable is being initialized properly before it's used.

(Also it is not always possible, or even desirable, to break code into functions of a few lines. Anyone who claims otherwise is a puritan fanatic whose assertions should be taken with a very large pinch of salt; it is unlikely they have experience with a broad range of complex real-world programming situations.)

OK, let's refine the statement, then: you should not use MSVC if you can avoid it because it is non-free and perfectly usable free alternatives are readily available.

Seems quite reasonable and consistent now. The alternatives are also better, since they implement C language features standardized less than 20 years ago!

"For a decades-old version of the standard that was made obsolete before the end of the last millenium, ..."

I don't even know what you're trying to argue. Mixed declarations and code is standard C and has been for over a decade. It is not a GCC extension. It is a basic part of the standard C programming language that any modern compiler should implement.

Age has nothing to do with that. I cut my teeth on 8-bit BASIC, but Microsoft had nothing to do with the implementation. And while I did use Windows for a while in my teens before I matured into a *nix user, those were the days before Microsoft's monopoly abuse had quite destroyed all competition in the markets they chose to enter, so I was able to choose from a range of development tool providers (and chose Borland).

No, it's not. Do Slashdotters really believe this? Clang/LLVM is the driving free-as-in-speech compiler suite these days.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Clang is the up-and-coming challenger, and it looks pretty inevitable that it's going to win eventually. But the world moves slower than you might like. Right now, clang is so far from taking over from GCC that it's not even funny.

Just because Apple uses something doesn't mean it dominates everything else in the world. Everywhere I look that isn't Apple, I see either GCC or ICC. In much of industry, people are only just starting to migrate from old vendor compilers to GCC as part of the slow ongoing UNIX-to-Linux shift.

I gave up on KDE when I discovered it is practically impossible to copy my settings from one computer to another.

Having a highly-customizable experience is great until you buy a new box and discover you're either going to waste hours reproducing your customizations manually, or try to copy things, have it break, and experience the hell of grepping for hardcoded paths in undocumented XML soup.

That's when I realized I wasn't even using much more than the window manager and the panel anyway, so I switched to FVWM2, whose configuration is stored in a single human-readable text file, and had a setup that was even more to my tastes, cloned across all my computers, in minutes.

KDE is undoubtedly awesome, but simplicity is also a feature, and it's one that the monolithic environments cannot provide -- by design.