Your suggested fix to disable bounce messages with the side affect that the sender then has no way to know that the mail never arrived? Not going to happen. If I ever did something that stupid, my clients would drop me.

In the meantime I've switched to Postfix which manages to do things correctly by refusing the message in the initial connection if the user doesn't exist so the sending mail server gets to generate the bounce message instead. And yes I know there are now patches and Qmail forks that cause Qmail to do things correctly but there really weren't at the time and my point remains that DJB never cared that his software could be misused this way.

It "worked" only as long as you don't care about the problems DJB had no interest in solving. It is true that you can't use Qmail to break into the host system, but unfortunately you can use it as a reflector and annoy the crap out of pretty much everyone else.

I was a Qmail fan and installed it everywhere I worked right up until the day several of my servers got blacklisted.

The problem is that when we give them money for begging, they go use that money for a little bit of food and a whole lot of whatever it is they are self medicating with. Change is uncomfortable and doubly so for someone who is a substance abuser. There are charities who help people who want to get off the street and your money is much better spent there since they can help more effectively by providing food, clean clothing, a place to stay and help for whatever emotional problems or mental illness that made them end up on the streets to begin with.

Actually it's worse than that, by giving them money you are making them comfortable in their current state and that keeps them from getting the actual help they need.

Here is the flaw with that thought: Vaccinations are down in some areas but there have been no reductions in the Autism diagnosis rates so the anti vaccination crowd have inadvertently disproved their own theory.

That attitude is everything wrong with your country right now. Just because he disagrees with you about what is best does not mean he is less worthy to be American.

As a Canadian, I can tell you that most provinces have a few months wait between the time you take up residence and the time you can get health insurance.

I'm not American, and as someone who knows a few Cubans, I can tell you most of the country isn't like the tourist zones.

Depends what part of the US you are from. The Americans I talk to from red states seem to have more problems with that then the rest.

If you've ever met anyone from Cuba they will tell you that the outside world is nothing like what they are told on the news. How is that not propaganda?

By errors I meant where paths and files don't exist, the user or external software sends bad info or someone runs or the machine runs out of resources. Case in point: someone edited one of our databases in a place I used to work and some software crashed hard when it grabbed a NULL value from the database leaving me to check the core dump to discover the problem.

I can see wanting to learn.. I can't see duplicating system libraries in a project. Some libraries (Libc in particular) have whole groups of programmers who are rather good at squeezing every last drop of speed out of the implementation, there are also things such as leap year handling that look simple but end up being harder than they look.

Library bugs would equate to a "measurable benefit" to reinventing the wheel. I am not saying you should never replace a library function only that it shouldn't be your first reflex. I would only suggest that you document why you created your alternative routine in your code somewhere so someone (or possibly you years down the road) can easily spot why it was used instead of the existing library function so there is not time wasted later rediscovering the bug.

I strongly disagree with this. While I admit that elegant code can have ugly portions refactoring will often be an improvement but the trick is to learn when refactoring will help and when it will be a waste of time. The worst programmers I know are the ones who say that "I don't have time to go back through my code". I have cleaned projects where the original coder did the same thing three different times or reinvented the wheel when there were better libraries. In fact, I have been also guilty of this and even in my own projects I have come across places where the requirements changed out from under me mid project or I simply see better ways of doing things as I gain experience.

Elegant code:
1 Handles errors gracefully
2. Only reinvents the wheel when there is a measurable benefit in doing so.
3. Has consistent naming conventions.
4. Has comments around ugly code explaining why it is ugly.
5. Compiles (or runs if interpreted) without warnings.

Groupe Telecom used to be like that since they considered themselves too big to fail (or rather too big to be taken down). I had a decent job until the final months of the job where my boss (Leo Kuvayev before his infamous spammer days) decided to team up with Alan Ralsky and Spam the crap out of some porn sites. Before they started they were assured by their account manager that all complaints would be ignored. After trying to talk them out of it I quit and moved on to another job.

A few months later I ran into my replacement in an elevator while he was searching for new hosting. It seems Group "Were a billion dollar company" Telecom were forced to change their policy thanks to multiple blacklists that did a lot of damage to their business.

Non smart Samsung phones. I actually just got burned by this a few months ago when I grabbed something cheap to last me the month between when my old phone was stolen and when my new one arrived.