I live in a country with full healthcare. One thing I'd like to see is a (somewhat) obligation to give results on your treatment. Each time you go to the doctor to get some treatment, some time later you'd receive a mail with a link to a webform with a few _simple_ questions such as: did the treatment help ? Did you feel any adverse effect ? For how long were you sick ? For how long did you take your treatment ? Did you take any extra drugs, etc. And if you fail to respond to too many emails, your 'free' health care starts being dinged in you pocket. Of course, with exemption for some people and/or disease.

It wouldn't cost much to implement, and would be a trove of info. Have a public structure derived from the national healthcare in charge of it which enforces strong anonymity, and provide anonymity data to big data analysts. It wouldn't take long to figure out scandals such as the Mediator. I mean, if you can't take ONE minute to answer some questions that WILL help others, why should you get free health care ?

I love sex. Doesn't mean I want to work as a whore.

And not only that, maybe you consider most of the info you collect benign and want to go after bigger the bigger fish. But in a democracy, what if there's a regime change that _you_ don't like. That you truly don't like. Do you hand them all the data collected over the years, just like that ? One example, the number 2 (or 3) of the French National party (far right) recently (may) said that he'd like to beat journalists to death and other pleasant things. A few weeks later his party was the 1st one at the European elections. With the various (well deserved) trouble of the other mainstream parties in France, what if that extremist party got in power ?!? It's not so far fetched. Do you give them the key to the cookie jar knowing what Hitler did with only data from a few Hollerith tabulating machine ? I find this a horrifying thought and by far the best reason against wholesale data collection and storage.

Absolutely. I wrote in Perl for a year. I gave up when I figured out I couldn't understand pieces of code I'd written a month prior.

And another issue for me was this whole There's More Than One Way To Do It philosophy which I find extremely frustrating. Write a piece of code in 20 lines and show it on usenet. Somebody writes it in 10. Then another one pipes up in 3. Then the true Guru comes up with a one-liner that nobody can grok. And they all run faster. Maybe.

It also mean that when you read somebody else's code, you have to pattern that you can recognize. In C if I have to go through an array, you can bet there's gonna be a loop. In Perl, mystery, it could be any of multiple and rarely used constructs. The thing that made Perl popular at once was the integration of regular expressions, but we now have this in Bash =~, so why bother ?!?

I used to work in climate science and we had a saying: "If you give a thermometer to a meteorologist, he knows what temperature it is. If you give him two, he's confused."

I've always loathed advertisement. I consider it some form of mind rape that some company wants the 'right' to use some of my brain to store their shit. In a store, if I remember advertisement for a product, I consciously choose the competing product; how's that for 'doesn't affect them' ? Does that show in your stats ?

Yes, I do data acquisition, and we only use board with FPGAs, such as Xilinx' offerings. This way we don't have to deal with the horrors of real-time OSes. Just do the acquisition in VHDL and send the buffer to the OS via a simple to write driver. Those would blow Xilinx out of the water (not that it's necessary for most low-power low-speed applications)

Who would know that you search for said patent ? Does the patent office apache website reports its logs directly to the patent holder ?!?

Rexx has been around forever and yet nobody uses it. Honestly, why do you this is the reason ?

I've been trying to get on the Qt bandwagon on and off for a year, but I still can't remember how to do a hello world if I don't have an example in front of me. Talk about unintuitive...

I had a home server / workstation with ECC, but had to convert to a laptop: no ECC anywhere except maybe a few milspec models that cost the price of a car and have the specs of a watch...

I've never understood why, when you save a file, a checksum isn't computed at the same time and stored among the metadata. Then you can have a command that operates on a file, a directory or the entire filesystem (in that case when there's low disk activity) to verify that checksum. It would be easy and useful, no ?

Well, I have family in the US and I've seen pictures the kids took of their cafeteria 'meal'. I first thought it was some joke: every day a burger with fries, some packaged peanut butter cake and milk. Every day. Never a fruit or a vegetable. No wonder they have record high obesity in the US.

There's someone else posting about this in another thread. The reason it doesn't happen twice is that often the first specie to do a major step 'takes all'. The 2nd one on land finds the 1st one already there and more adapted, so it's clear cut who wins. Still in this case it _did_ happen: the plants and the animals moved to the land separately. As for the animals, the arthropods did, becoming insects, then the fish did, becoming amphibians and then reptiles. So it was a bad example.

Well, 'convergent evolution' begs to differ. Plenty of things in life have been invented many times over.

As for basic lifeforms themselves, look up those weird and very ancient fossils found in Africa a couple years ago that seem to indicate multicellular organisms way before and way different than what came next. Dead-end or ancestors ?