I also write free software. And I have a software patent. I could not possibly care in the slightest if software is free. If it does the job, that's all that matters.

Removing non-free software from the USC is removing user's choices, and thinking for users by imposing your moral/political code on them. That's presumptuous and wrong.

Let the users choose what they want to use. The free stuff is there. If they care, they can use it. If not, they have more choices.

-B

If it suits my needs, I honestly don't care even a little if software is non-free. All I care about is if it lets me get done what I need to get done. That's it, end of story. So yes, I think the USC should have free and non-free software in it. It gives users more choices, and that's a good thing. Which is why crusading against removing non-free software is a bad thing: It removes choices for users.

Let users decide what they want to use and why. Let them care if they want to. Let others not care if they don't. It's presumptuous in the extreme to try and think for others and make choices for them.

-B

I've had a fark account since 2002, but I rarely go there any more. Too much blatant censorship under the guise of "moderation". Also, lots of pandering for money. It's OK to have sponsored links, just say so. The lack of threaded comments is also headache-inducing.

-B

Untrue. We're going to hire two entry-level people this summer.

-B

I've been here a while myself. Dice wrecked this site years ago. You might like reddit.

-B

I hang about on reddit mostly. Slashdot is corporate mouthparts these days.

-B

That's what you call malware? Because slipping adware into a package is fucking malware. NOBODY wants it, and SourceForge are being whores by including it.

SF are preying on the unsuspecting and they should fucking stop, any Slashdot spin notwithstanding.

-B

"high capacity mag"

If you're referring to a 30 round magzine, that would be a "normal capacity" magazine for an AR-15. Something that doesn't ship standard from the factory (50 round drum, etc) would be a "high capacity" magazine.

-B

One of "yours"? Meaning some politician has your interests at heart? That some particular politcal party cares about you (and not your money) in any way whatsoever?

Naiveté at its finest.

-B

You fucking suckhole, at least have the balls to own up to your mistakes. You assholes not only put a shitty MITM attack in the OS, you fucking used the same goddam key so that anyone else could MITM us too?! And not a single person with half a clue ever stood up in that design meeting and asked what a monumental fuck-up that was? Right. Trying to make the "user experience" better by inserting your ads into my TLS-based google searches or my secure bank session? It "wasn't useful"?! Just stop. Stop that nonsense and own your mistakes like a real actual person.

I've been buying and recommending Thinkpads since the late 90's. I'm using one now in fact (thankfully re-imaged, no thanks to the twatwaffles at Lenovo). I'm never going to do either of those things again. I might have if they had said, "You got us, our bad, we're sorry and it won't happen again". But not anymore. Not with the wishy-washy corporate-speak bullshit.

Do not fuck with people's stuff for ad revenue. And if you do and get caught, at least fucking own up to it.

And so now I'm wondering what my next laptop will be. Because it sure as shit isn't going to be a Lenovo...

-B

In our case, the regexes we needed to use were between 5 and 7 times faster with Perl than Python. We had some existing Perl code that could also be used, and so there it is.

I think it's about the right tool for the job. But I also think you can write bad code in nearly any language. Perl just gives you more ways to express yourself badly.

-B

Get the average Perl programmer, point a .357 magnum at their heads, and ask them to modify something they wrote six months ago, and watch the bloody hilarity ensue.

Funny you mention it. Not an hour ago, I added some stuff to a perl script I wrote in 2009. It's not a large script (barely 1,000 lines), but my 150-line addition didn't seem to cause any great mirth or merriment.

If you write shit code, you're writing shit code. The choice of language doesn't matter, aside from the insignificant notion that perl might give you more ways to write that shit code differently than some languages.

-B

The 14th Amendment was used to grant corporations personhood rights, which happened in the 1800s.

Here is a brief explanation:

http://money.howstuffworks.com...

The film The Corporation goes into a lot more detail:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It looks like GNOME has long outlived its usefulness of working around Qt being under an unsuitable license way back when KDE was the de facto standard DE. With its current contributions of pouring fuel onto the fire of the init system debate and now wanting to fund a pissing match over trademarks, it looks like the project is doing more harm than good.

I set up a lab VM with SLES 12 with / on btrfs last week and enabled snapper. After several hours of downloading and installing various projects from github to try out (including lots of dependencies), it was a quick and easy cleanup to restore to the snapshot it had taken an hour before I started.

Having worked with Solaris and LiveUpgrade for a number of years, I really like the prospect of having similar functionality in Linux to enable backing out a distro upgrade.