The Taliban are based more circa-1700s, whereas the "golden age" for the Middle East was closer to 700-1200 AD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_Golden_Age) Whenever a group looks backward and tries to be old-fashioned, they never pick a particularly advanced, progressive period. None of the right-wing "return America to how it used to be" folks want the 1960s with hippies, civil rights, and space exploration, even though 1960 is definitely old-fashioned as it was a half-century ago. They rather have the 1980s wall street 'greed is good' or the 1940s 'white man in charge' eras. In essence, the folks who look back always pick a very rigid, uncreative era. The creative don't look back, they just create and build anew.

Microsoft never prevents you from running software you purchased outside Microsoft's store.

Most cars go 45mph in the 15mph zone nearby.

Most people hit the "up" or "down" buttons for surfing. I don't know why devices don't just prefetch the adjacent channels' streams.

You're forgetting switching latency. A single high-end switch adds 600ns latency, and a single low-end switch adds 200us latency. If you have 20 hops, that's 12us vs. 4ms. And crappy wifi-routers can add 20ms of latency each. So, no, their average speed is not k*c where k is slightly less than one. One crappy wifi-router's latency is equal to light traveling 4,000 miles (more than the distance from NYC to London).

All of evolution is luck. Consistent luck is just another term for skill.

Hey you, my foot is 12 inches long, and I measured my front yard, and it's 3 feet to the curb. And "mile" is latin for 1,000 (same root as millilitre and millennium), and the English mile comes from the Roman "mille passuum" (1,000 paces of a soldier), thanks to the Romans dutifully conquering England.

Um, people do kernel programming in virtual machines. And there's plenty of debugging tools around VMs. I know, I write kernel modules.

Also, kernels can mask interrupts and ensure a function is run "single threaded" (no context-switching out), which dramatically reduces the complexity. Not every function is set up like that, many are thread-safe, but drivers are usually written to be uninterrupted and access private memory, so they don't worry about interaction with other cpus/cores/kthreads.

Both are hard, kernel programming is hard, and the massive multi-threading in window managers is hard.

In the U.S., if you are deemed to be hiding vital information and it's encrypted, you are required to give your decryption key or face jail time for contempt of court. There's an XKCD comic about beating the key out of someone as by far the most efficient way to decrypt.

They wouldn't say that anymore if Chicago tried to apply city-tax to their income.

static initialization occurs before main(). I'm not talking about function-scoped "static", but real static initialization. Also, any function with __attribute__((constructor)) also gets called before main().

freedom != anarchy

If I am free to live, that implies there is a restriction against murder.

Don't confuse freedom with anarchy. Anarchy sucks. Slavery was abolished, and as a result, you _cannot_ sell yourself into slavery. Yes, that is a restriction, to preserve your freedom.

You realize Assange isn't an EU citizen? Hint: He's Australian.

What he did isn't considered a crime in either Australia nor the UK.

People get BCCs all the time. Everytime you get an email where your address doesn't show up in the To: or Cc: field, guess what? That's right, Bcc! That means all the distribution lists you belong to use bcc.

All distribution lists are BCCs, so everyone receiving a distribution list email would say that.