You heard it here first:

Once this standard becomes popular, advertising resellers will stop paying for views/click for hits from browsers with DNT set. Unlike traditional ad blocking, the DNT header signals to the primary site that you are being uncooperative, making it trivial to redirect visitors who set that header to a "fix your browser" page.

Assuming DNT is actually respected by the server, DNT establishes a second pipeline WRT logging, analytics, error-reporting, and other server-side functions. Not only are DNT visitors of little or no value to site owners, but they also create additional cost for the provider to maintain that separate logging pipeline.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP:DNT} 1
RewriteRule .* /disable-dnt.html

For your disable-dnt.html page, nothing fancy, nothing explanatory, just simple instructions:
ALERT!
Your browser cannot display this page.
Please select the menu Tools -- Options and uncheck Do Not Track. Then refresh this page to continue.

Problem solved. And all you have to say is that the cost of compliance with the "do not track" standard make supporting that option unfeasible. Or something like that.

In my past two jobs and over the past 20 years, we've worked with dozens of independent an unrelated vendors with locations around the country, including Virginia. Of all the locations where these companies have operations, the ones in Virginia have been dramatically, almost comically, more disaster-prone than the rest of the country and even the rest of the world. The running joke in the office is that whenever any vendor or service provider drops offline, we first check the weather in Virginia before checking to see if any of our own systems are offline. Every time, we see a post-mortem a few days later disclosing some failed system or backup or contingency, and every time, they say this problem that will never happen again.

You'd think that all the failing locations would share a operations center or service provider or even a single city, but it turns out that the only thing these disaster-prone operations have in common is that they're in Virginia. I have no idea why this is the case. But our company has a policy singling out Virginia saying that no mission-critical components are allowed to be based there.

If only this were an isolated incident.

Turns out that every major foiled terrorist plot on US soil since 9/11 was dreamed up, planned, funded, coordinated, and ultimately foiled by FBI agents. And there have been quite a few of them. This is such a persistent theme that the biggest surprise in this story is that the newspaper actually called them on it instead of using the fear-inducing headline to bolster readership.

Knock knock!
Who's there?
HIPAA.
HIPAA who?
Sorry, I'm not allowed to say.

Academic purist discovers that one of the most prolific and successful database users in the world is using a system he doesn't approve of. He decides, with no insider knowledge at all, and despite all evidence to the contrary, that they should throw everything away and start over from scratch using a system that he thinks would allow them to see the performance and scalability that they've already achieved.

Presumably he's tired of Facebook being used as a counter-example to everything he's been preaching.

Do you really think they make nothing but weapons? I mean, really?

That's essentially the same question as asking how people could have the moral dysfunction necessary to work for boeing (they make the apache helicopter, you know).

Raytheon makes a pretty large percentage of the aircraft used by general aviation and some commuter airlines, for example.

Come on now. These are adults.

It's worth pointing out that NAU has more of an "at home" feel to it than most colleges you've heard of. It's less of a university, and more of a local school. Call it 13th grade.

In fact, Northern Arizona University has about half the number of students as Mesa Community College.

Are you seriously going to sit there and argue that open source is a sheer meritocracy with a straight face? Okay. Here are 4 examples:

These aren't examples of discrimination, these are examples of people making comments you find offensive. I don't think anyone argues that OSS is a "sheer meritocracy" -- there's far too much politics and ego-stroking for that to be the case. However, one consideration that is never actually considered is gender.

Have you ever been denied SVN commit access because you're a girl? Has your memory management patch been rejected because you weren't a man? Has anyone refused to explain to you the difference between covariance and contravariance because it's a "boys only" secret?

Be prepared to be offended. OSS has a "hobby" feel to it for most people, and as such there's an informality that makes people feel that they can let go of the business-like social inhibitions that are so often in place to prevent offending the sensibilities of the separate cultures that make up an audience. You get it unfiltered, and you might not like what makes it through.

Yours isn't the only culture that gets lampooned; it's just the only one you care about. If you were a deeply religious person, for example, you may be severely offended by the irreverent treatment of what you hold so dear by the proselyting atheists who make up a disproportionate amount of the community. And there are many other examples.

But if you have real examples of actual discrimination, of opportunities denied because of your gender, then there is a real problem that needs examination. However, if you're just offended, well then hello and welcome to the Internet.

So your world is divided into "people who agree with me" and "mindless zombies".

I think that's a bit of a stretch, don't you?

Miguel's argument: RMS attacked me, but he's also famously attacked many of the most important players in bringing parts of his ultimate dream to reality. Conclusion: RMS's has an unproductive penchant for attacking people in his speaking and writing, including his own allies, if they don't subscribe to all of his philosophies.

Your interpretation: People who don't agree with me are mindless zombies.

A bit of a stretch, you must admit.

> I think .Net is a platform with technical merit
I have yet to see it. Really.

Might I suggest that you have yet to look?

C# and the CIL bring to the table:

• Language independance: Build a class in Python, call it from Ruby. This is available today, not in the theoretical future.
• Functional programming: lambda expressions, etc., conspicuously missing from java
• Declarative programming: Linq -- seems like a silly idea until you've used it a few times, and you see how it can drastically improve performance on the back end, and code quality on the front end.
• Your choice of strongly typed and dynamically typed mechanisms: Build a class using strongly typed semantics in the interest of verifiability, but make use of it in a dynamically typed application in the interest of development speed.
• Speed: C# apps run nearly as fast as complied C; indistinguishable in many important cases.

If mono hadn't been an implementation of a standard proposed by Microsoft, it would have been hailed as god's gift to programmers.